Who, and How Many

The first question is about a person. Why did this man, this woman, end up on the street? Here the real answer is a life story, and it's rarely simple: a job that ended, an eviction, a relationship that fell apart, a diagnosis, an addiction, a kid who aged out of foster care with no one to call, a partner whose fists made home more dangerous than the street. Any of these can tip one person over an edge the rest of us are also standing near.

The second question is about a place. Why does Buncombe County have hundreds of people without homes, while some other county the same size has far less? The life stories cannot answer that, because you find roughly the same ones everywhere. Addiction lives in every county in America. So does mental illness, and bad luck, and heartbreak. They all show up in places with almost no homelessness.

If addiction and mental illness were what set the number, the places with the most addiction and mental illness would have the most homelessness. They do not. Something else is setting the number, and the life stories only tell you who.

Imagine the game: ten players, nine chairs, the music playing. When it stops, someone is left standing. It will probably be the slowest player, or the one on crutches, or the one who got distracted. Watch only that round, and if it's the one on crutches, you'd blame the crutches.

But the crutches did not take the chair away. Take a chair away and someone is left standing every single time, no matter how fit and fast and sober every player is. Add a chair back and everyone sits down, including the player on crutches.

The game does two things at once. It tells you that the gap between players and chairs determines the number of people left standing. And it tells you that people's own troubles, like the crutches, decide only which players are left out, never how many.

The players are the households with the lowest incomes. The chairs are the homes priced within their reach. When there are more players than chairs, some pay more than they can afford and others double up with friends or family. Anyone still without a place after that is left out when the music stops. Addiction and illness and bad luck determine who. The shortage of chairs determines how many.

In a 2022 book, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern set out to explain why homelessness is so much worse in some American cities than in others. They tested the usual suspects one by one: rates of mental illness and drug use, poverty, the weather, how generous a city's public assistance is, even whether low-income people were moving in. None of them explained the difference.

What did explain it was the housing market: how high the rents were, and how few empty homes were left. Expensive cities where a place to rent was hard to find had higher rates of homelessness. Cheaper cities where one was easier to find did not, whatever their rates of addiction or illness.

Colburn and Aldern also found that homelessness tends to be lower where poverty is higher. The poorest places are often the cheapest, and a poor person in a cheap place usually still has a roof over their head. It's the expensive cities, not the troubled ones, that manufacture homelessness.

Most of the people counted without shelter did not come here already homeless. They're our own neighbors who lost a place to live in this county. The chairs are scarce here, just as they are across North Carolina, where there are 38 affordable, available homes for every 100 of the lowest-income renter households. The work that keeps this town running, in kitchens, at front desks and in care homes, doesn't pay enough for a modest apartment.

Some of the people counted are struggling with addiction or mental illness. In the 2026 count, 91 adults reported a mental health condition and 62 reported a substance use disorder. Those numbers are self-reported, cover a single winter night, and are almost certainly too low. They describe people who deserve every bit of care and treatment we can fund.

And those struggles are still not the reason the count is 824 rather than, say, 200. Treat every illness and addiction perfectly, keep the same number of chairs, and the same number of people are left standing. Only the faces change.