Can They Charge the Shelter?

Start by putting to rest a fear that does not hold. The camping ban's enforcement runs through a lawsuit, and the defendant in that lawsuit is the local government. A resident, a business owner, or the attorney general can sue the City of Asheville or Buncombe County for allowing a camp. They cannot use that provision to sue AHOPE, or Western Carolina Rescue Ministries, or the church basement that opens on a cold night.

If you only read the headlines about "letting people sue," this is the part to get straight. That suit lands on the county, not the charity. The risk for the nonprofits is somewhere else in the bill, and it works in a completely different way.

The risk to providers lives in a piece of the bill called the Drug-Free Homeless Service Zones Act. It draws a zone around a publicly funded shelter: the building, the grounds, and the area within 100 feet, but only if a sign is posted at the door. Sell or deliver drugs inside that zone and your offense jumps to a Class E felony. That part follows the same logic as the drug-free zones we already have around schools and parks.

Then comes the new part. North Carolina already punishes anyone who knowingly keeps a building used for selling drugs; done intentionally, that is a Class I felony. What this bill adds is narrower and sharper. It points that operator liability at a government-funded shelter, triggers on "intentionally allowing" someone else's sale inside a posted zone, and raises it to a Class H felony. The drug-free school-zone law it takes its shape from has never once charged the school. This one reaches the operator of the shelter.

Now the limits, because they are doing real work. The felony attaches to selling and delivering, not to a person using or carrying their own. It applies only to shelters that take government money; a privately funded one is outside it. It needs a posted sign to exist at all. And it turns entirely on the words "intentionally allows," which the bill never defines. There is no line drawn between running a low-barrier shelter for people who use drugs and "allowing" a sale, and no safe harbor for a shelter that calls the police or shows someone the door.

Two more gaps matter. The bill defines the "operator" as the organization, not a person, and never says who actually goes to court, the director or the overnight staffer. And it is written for shelters, which leaves a day center in a gray area and permanent supportive housing, where people have their own apartments, outside it. Serving a meal to someone who later uses drugs down the block is not a crime, however you read the law. But the boundary is undrawn, and an undrawn boundary is its own kind of warning.

One kind of shelter gets a different zone. A domestic-violence shelter, whose address has to stay secret, posts its sign inside, within a few feet of the door, and its zone is the interior of the building only, with no hundred-foot ring on the public sidewalk. A sign out front would give the location away, so the law keeps that one indoors.

The version above is not the version that was filed. The provider law got tougher in one direction and narrower in another as it moved, and both changes tell you something.

It got tougher first. As introduced, the zone was 300 feet and the operator faced only a misdemeanor. A House committee shrank the zone to 100 feet and turned that misdemeanor into a Class H felony. The threat to the people who run shelters was sharpened on purpose.

Then it got narrower, at the very end. As written for most of its life, the law did not stop at shelters. It reached "permanent supportive housing" and, in a catch-all clause, any funded group that "primarily provides treatment, preventive care, or other services to homeless persons." That language would have swept in clinics, day centers, soup kitchens, and harm-reduction programs. On the Senate floor, an amendment stripped the permanent housing and the catch-all back out, leaving the law aimed at funded emergency, temporary, and transitional shelters. The reach the drafters first wanted is the tell. The narrower text is the one that would become law.

Map it onto Asheville and the picture sharpens. The shelters in range are the publicly funded ones: the Salvation Army's Center of Hope downtown, which has drawn federal emergency-shelter money, and ABCCM's veteran and family beds, which run on Veterans Affairs grants and a county contract. The seasonal Code Purple overflow sites belong here too. AHOPE muddies the line, in a way worth noticing: most of the year it is a day center, and its core funding pays for day services and coordinated entry, not shelter, which would leave it outside. But in winter it runs funded overnight Code Purple beds, and that pulls it back in.

Three places sit outside, for three different reasons, and together they show the funding line doing real work. Homeward Bound's Compass Point is permanent supportive housing, real apartments, which the final bill carved out. The Steady Collective, the area's syringe program, is privately funded and is not a shelter. And Western Carolina Rescue Ministries, a downtown shelter doing the same work as the others, says it has taken no government money in more than forty years, which by its own account would leave it outside a law that reaches only the publicly funded. Same beds, same block, different answer, decided entirely by where the money comes from.

Here is the catch that makes 100 feet matter more than it sounds. Downtown, these buildings front the sidewalk, and a city street is not 100 feet wide. So a posted zone would not just cover a shelter's lot. It would blanket the public sidewalks around it and reach toward Pritchard Park and the library, the blocks where people already gather and already get arrested. Where two funded sites sit close, the zones would overlap. The map of the zones is, more or less, the map of the problem the bill says it is solving.

No. Not here, not anywhere we could find. In the two years since the Supreme Court opened the door to camping bans, the charges, the citations, and the lawsuits have all landed on the people sleeping outside and the cities that let them. No service provider in the country is known to have been convicted, fined, or held liable for "contributing to" camping. The operator felony in this bill would be the first of its kind, and it is not law yet. The closest anyone has come is Fremont, California, which briefly made it a local offense to "aid" an encampment, then walked the language back. California has since barred cities from penalizing groups that hand out food, water, or medical care.

Where shelters and harm-reduction programs have actually ended up in court, they have mostly won. After a Montana city pulled a warming shelter's permit, the shelter won the permit back, an apology, and about $140,000 in legal fees in a settlement. A Washington church that ran a needle exchange beat the county that tried to shut it down, and the county paid roughly $500,000 in fees. The history of going after the helpers is not a history of the helpers losing. It is a history of the helpers being dragged through the process.

One myth is worth killing while we are here. Tennessee did not create "charity liability" for letting people camp. The Tennessee law people point to is about long-term housing for undocumented immigrants, it specifically exempts shelters, and it has never been used against a charity. It is not this, and it is not a preview of this.

So where is the real exposure? It is not the prison cell, and saying otherwise would be the same scare the bill itself runs on. A shelter operator is very unlikely to be charged under this law, and even less likely to be convicted, because a prosecutor would have to prove the shelter meant to let the sale happen. The honest risk is quieter and more certain.

A felony you almost never charge still changes everything the day it goes up on the door. A low-barrier shelter exists to take the person no one else will, including the person who is using. A needle exchange exists to meet that person where they are. Hang a felony over that work, aimed at the organization, defined by a word as loose as "allows," and the safe move becomes to serve fewer people, screen harder, and drop the services that draw scrutiny. When Pueblo, Colorado restricted its syringe program, researchers found signs that access to other harm-reduction services suffered in the months that followed. The charge does not have to be filed to do its work.

That is the cost the providers named themselves. More than 140 local leaders and providers signed a letter against the bill, and the worry was not that their directors would be marched to jail. It was that the law quietly moves the cost and the legal risk of the shortage onto the organizations holding the door open. Even the state's needle-exchange law, which shields a participant for carrying their own used syringe, offers the shelter that hosts the program no protection at all.

And set that certain cost against an unproven benefit. The drug-free zone this bill copies, the kind drawn around schools, has been studied for decades, and the research does not show it reduces drug activity. What it reliably does is widen who gets charged and where, with the heaviest weight falling on dense, poor, and minority blocks. There is little reason to expect a shelter version to deter the dealing it names, and good reason to expect it to do what its model already does.

If the real worry is dealers working the people who come through a shelter door, and that is a fair worry, there are ways to meet it that do not aim a felony at the shelter. Pay for the security and the on-site treatment the bill demands and then refuses to fund. Write a real safe harbor into the law, the one it leaves out, so an operator who reports a dealer or bars him is protected instead of exposed. Keep harm reduction legal and funded, because the program that knows the population is the one that spots the predator first. And build enough housing that a shelter is not the only roof on offer. Each of those makes a shelter safer. A felony the state almost never files does not.