The 92 Percent Who Stayed

Homeward Bound has worked on homelessness in Western North Carolina since 1987, and it adopted the Housing First approach long before the current national argument over it. Its premise is the one the research validates: move people into permanent housing as quickly as possible, without requiring sobriety or treatment first, then surround that housing with ongoing support.

The cumulative number is the part that is easy to miss in any single year. Since 2006, Homeward Bound has placed more than 2,760 unique individuals into permanent homes. In 2025 alone, 102 people exited homelessness through its programs. These are not shelter beds or nights off the street. They are leases.

Permanent supportive housing, or PSH, is the high-intensity end of Housing First, built for people who have experienced chronic homelessness alongside a disabling condition such as serious mental illness or addiction, or both. It is the population the staircase model failed most completely, the one a quick rental subsidy alone cannot stabilize.

PSH pairs a permanent home with services that do not end on a clock: case management, connections to health care and treatment, and help holding onto the housing despite setbacks that used to end it. Sobriety and treatment are not preconditions to initially receive housing. Working with a case manager is part of the program, not a pass-or-fail rule. The staff weigh each resident's situation and shape the support to what that person actually needs. This is exactly the funded, full-fidelity version of the model that the national evidence rewards, and the version that produces the retention numbers below.

In 2025, 92 percent of the people in Homeward Bound's permanent supportive housing stayed housed, by the organization's own impact reporting. Put the other way: fewer than one in ten returned to homelessness in a year, among a group that had cycled through the street, the hospital, and the jail for years before.

That figure sits right where the research says a well-run program should. Provide the services the model calls for, and that is the kind of number the research predicts. The number is not a miracle. It is funded services, done consistently, for people the old model wrote off.

For most of Homeward Bound's history the federal money behind permanent supportive housing was bipartisan and steady. That changed in 2025. A federal turn against Housing First began redirecting the Continuum of Care program, the main homelessness grant, away from permanent housing and toward shorter-term, treatment-conditioned options.

Locally the stakes are concrete. Of the area's roughly $2 million in Continuum of Care money, about $1.8 million funds permanent housing, and Homeward Bound's permanent supportive housing draws the biggest single share, about $1.4 million. At roughly $14,000 a household for a year of rent, case management, and counseling, that money is what the 92 percent is made of. Under the proposed cap, the permanent-housing programs could be cut to as little as $568,000. We tell that policy story in full in Strings Attached; the point here is narrower. The 92 percent did not come from a program that withholds housing until people earn it. It came from the opposite. Defunding that does not make the model work better, it breaks it.

Not all of the organization's footing is exposed, and the answer is to not panic. Its veterans' work, funded through the Department of Veterans Affairs, sits outside this fight. One option is to fold in county and opioid-settlement dollars, which in North Carolina can pay for recovery-oriented housing and the services beside it, as long as the home itself is not made conditional. That is the same home-and-help model, funded from more than one direction so the 92 percent does not fall when the federal share does.

The most visible piece of this work is Compass Point Village, the 17.5 million dollar conversion of a former Tunnel Road motel into 85 permanent supportive apartments, opened in September 2023 and now full. It is also where the local version of the national disorder debate played out. In its first year, neighbors documented a large volume of police responses that were mostly trespassing, open drug use, and littering. These conditions were worsened by an adjacent recovery drop-in center that is not sponsored by Homeward Bound.

The honest reading concedes those conditions and still holds two things at once. The surrounding systems, behavioral health and policing among them, were underfunded and overwhelmed, which is where most of the visible strain came from. And inside the building, the case management worked: people who had been unsheltered for years stayed housed, and the first graduations are on the books. A hard first year for a building is not the same as a failed model, and the retention number is the part that does not make the news.

That local fight has a national echo. The conditions neighbors organized against, the encampments, the open drug use, the strain on the police, are the same ones, scaled up, that the 2025 executive order was named for: "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets." Asheville lived the small version of the argument now driving federal policy, and Compass Point's retention number is the part that argument leaves out.

Permanent supportive housing is the deep end, but it is only part of the story. The research is clear that the model is built for the high-need minority, and that most homelessness needs lighter, faster help. Homeward Bound covers that range too, which is what a working local system looks like.