By February 2024, nearly 1,700 new hotel rooms were planned or under construction in Asheville, counted from the end of the city's hotel moratorium in 2021. The workers needed to run them cannot afford to live here. That's not a labor-market quirk. It's the same housing shortage that puts people on the street, seen from the employer's side of the ledger.
In a 2022 survey of nearly 800 employers in 10 Western North Carolina counties, the cost and availability of housing topped the list of the hardest problems in hiring. In January 2023 the head of the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board said candidates were passing on jobs because they couldn't afford Asheville rents.
Your hiring problem and the person sleeping outside are one story: the same housing market, measured at two different income levels.
Follow the wages up and buying a home stays out of reach almost to the top.
A Buncombe County worker needs to earn $35.29 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. That's the 2026 Out of Reach housing wage for metro Asheville. Median housekeeping wages run about $15 an hour, well under half that.
A 2025 National Housing Conference report pictured a typical Asheville-area construction site with 13 kinds of jobs. In 2024, seven of them paid a median wage below the $59,840 a year it took to afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent in the metro area. Those seven ranged from laborers and roofers to carpenters and electricians.
The gap no longer stops at the lowest-wage jobs. In 2019 a civil engineer's median pay in the Asheville area was enough to buy a typical home there. By 2024 that pay had risen to nearly $100,000 but fell more than $45,000 short of what a typical home there required.
The capital came quickly. The workforce to run the new hotel rooms cannot afford to live where the work is.
As of February 2024, nearly 1,700 new hotel rooms were under construction or in the development pipeline, according to city records reported by Asheville Watchdog. That count included rooms that were not yet being built. It starts in February 2021, when the city lifted its hotel moratorium. A July 2026 CoStar report on the western North Carolina hotel market counted two hotels under construction in the Asheville area, with 208 rooms between them.
Every employer in town is bidding for the same pool of people who can actually afford to show up. That pool gets smaller every time rents climb faster than wages.
The harder it is to staff, the more you pay in turnover, overtime, and unfilled shifts. Those costs never appear on the housing ledger, but they come straight out of your pocket.
This isn't a bad year that corrects itself. There's no slack at the bottom, and the people with the least room in their budgets fall out first. That's where the hiring shortfall and homelessness become the same line item.
Leaving someone on the street is not as cheap as it looks. Denver's five-year randomized trial tested supportive housing for homeless people arrested at least eight times in three years. Those who got only the usual services used about $25,500 a year each in public services. The figure covers jail, court, police, shelter, emergency-care and other services the study counted. Part of that is what Medicaid was billed, not what it paid. Offering supportive housing cost more overall, but it won back about half of its per-person cost in savings on those services. For the full cost math, see The Business Case for Housing Has Nothing to Do with Charity.
For Asheville the incentives line up unusually well. The same investment that lets you staff your business, fill those new hotel rooms, and keep your workers in town is the investment that keeps people from falling onto the street to begin with. You're paying either way. The only question is whether you fund the fix or keep paying for the problem.
The hotel boom shows how much depends on a city's own rules. During the moratorium, from September 2019 to February 2021, Asheville revised its zoning code to steer new hotels into chosen parts of town. In the same period it set up a point system for developers. Among other things, the system rewards them for paying into city funds for low-income housing and reparations. Rules that can steer hotels can steer homes.
Every group in our directory is local, vetted, and doing this work right now. Pick one and back it. →