The Issues · How to Think About Homelessness · Asheville, NC
The Shortage Was Made Here
We talk about Asheville's housing shortage as if it arrived like weather. In one neighborhood it did not arrive at all. It was planned, paid for with federal money, and carried out with bulldozers. One pastor counted more than 1,100 homes lost, and some of the people who had owned them were turned into renters for life.
If you've ever had a beer on the South Slope on a warm evening, you've stood more or less on top of it. The breweries and the patios and the string lights sit a few blocks from where Southside used to be, and most of the people laughing down there have no idea what was cleared to make room. I didn't either, for a long time. I live a few miles off in a small, quiet, gated place, and the past that got erased to build the present doesn't tend to reach you there.
Southside was the biggest hub of Black life in Asheville. About half of the city's Black population lived there. Then, over roughly two decades, the city took Southside apart on purpose, under a program with a hopeful name: urban renewal.
What Southside was
Before it was a target, it was a neighborhood, and by most accounts a good one.
When the people who grew up there describe it, they do not describe a slum. They describe homes that were owned rather than rented, businesses where the owner taught the trade to the younger people coming up, a place that held together. Priscilla Ndiaye Robinson, who has spent more than 15 years researching what happened to it, remembers a neighbor's cupcakes and running up the grassy hills. The consultant the city hired to survey the area called it a deteriorating district. But when the consultant actually asked the residents, most of them said it was a pretty good place to live.
When Robinson was a girl, 58 percent of the families in Southside owned their own homes. That's generational wealth, the slow kind, the kind a family hands down. It was the thing the city would take.
How a neighborhood is condemned
It began, the way it usually did, with a map drawn a generation earlier.
In the 1930s, federal agencies graded neighborhoods for lending risk and colored the riskiest ones red. In Asheville, every red zone but one was mostly Black. A red grade meant no mortgages and no credit, and a place starved of credit for 30 years is bound to start showing wear. Then the wear was given a name, blight, and the name became the reason to clear it. The decline was made first and used as the excuse second.
In 1966 the city's Redevelopment Commission approved a slum-clearance plan for Southside, which it renamed East Riverside. The federal dollars followed. Officials sold it as more public housing and a cleaner, more inviting downtown, the kind of place tourists would want to visit. Demolition ran through the 1970s and into the 1980s. In cities across the country, at the program's peak in the mid-1960s, at least 50,000 families a year were being displaced. Black Americans were at least 55 percent of everyone the program displaced. James Baldwin had a blunter name for urban renewal. He called it "Negro removal."
The first two numbers are the size of what was removed. The third is what was left behind.
What was taken
The Rev. Dr. Wesley Grant Sr., a pastor who spent 75 years in Asheville, listed the losses near the end of his life.
His tally, for the East Riverside area alone: more than 1,100 homes, eight apartment houses, seven churches, 14 grocery stores, five funeral homes, six beauty parlors, five barber shops, five filling stations, three laundromats, three shoe shops, two cabinet shops, two auto body shops, a hotel, a hospital, and three doctors' offices. A whole working economy, read out like an inventory. A University of Maryland research team later counted more than 900 properties acquired in that single project. Robinson puts the total losses closer to 1,200 homes and businesses. The exact number depends on who is counting and what they include, but the totals are all in the same ballpark.
Homeowners were promised they could come back and buy one of the lots in the rebuilt neighborhood. The cleared land was redrawn into new lots along rerouted streets and sold at bargain prices, some of it to white developers. The University of Maryland team looked at the first buyers of the lots that the city and the Housing Authority resold and found only 14 people who had lost property in Southside. Some of the families who had owned homes ended up renting in the city's public housing. Robinson's own family had rented in Southside, and the Housing Authority placed them in new public housing. That eased their crowding, she says, but urban renewal destroyed the community.
They were promised a chance to buy back into the neighborhood. The neighborhood itself was the thing that got sold.
How it reaches us
You cannot draw a straight line from a vote in 1966 to a tent in 2026. You can draw a real one, and it runs through ownership.
Owning a home is how most American families build wealth and pass it down. Take a neighborhood of Black owners and turn them into renters, and you've done more than move people around. You've broken the handoff. The children don't inherit the house, because there is no house. So they start over as renters, in a market that keeps climbing away from them.
Reginald Robinson, a local sports official, said it plainly. His grandmother bought a home on the wages of a factory job. He rents, because at today's wages and prices, buying is out of reach. The figures back him up. In 2020, 41.3 percent of Black households in Buncombe County owned their homes, compared with 65.9 percent of white households. That was a gap of 24.6 points, only a little better than where the whole country sat in 1960.
Urban renewal also hit the East End, another Black neighborhood. When it took James Howard Clark's house there, he was paid $11,000 for it. From January through March 2026, the median home in Buncombe County sold for around $450,000.
This is not the whole story of homelessness in Asheville. It is the part we built ourselves.
Most people sleeping outside tonight were not displaced from Southside, and the timelines don't line up that neatly. What urban renewal did to them was less direct than an eviction, and it went deeper. It did two things at once. It pulled hundreds of housing units out of a small market, and it stripped a community of the ownership that lets a family get through a bad year without losing everything.
A city missing both has more people one setback from the street. That's the inheritance. It is not a single cause. It is less to fall back on for everyone who came after.
The shortage had authors.
This history belongs in a series about homelessness, and it's here as proof, not to make anyone feel guilty. Southside shows that the shortage did not arrive like weather. Housing does not only disappear through neglect. Sometimes a government takes federal money and removes homes, deliberately, by the thousand. The shortage was a policy, and it had authors, a budget, and a vote.
And that's the hopeful half, odd as it is to say. In 2020 the city and the county passed reparations resolutions that name Black homeownership as something to rebuild. Whether they come to much is still an open question, and plenty of people who lived through the first broken promise aren't holding their breath. But a city that took the housing can decide to put it back.
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