One downtown building, affordable housing for low-income seniors, was fully renovated in 2025. A few miles away, the city's public housing is run-down and waiting on repairs. Both sit under the same federal umbrella. So why the gap? It isn't the worth of the buildings or the people in them. It's how each one has been financed over the decades, and that's a policy choice.
The renovated building is Battery Park Apartments, in the heart of downtown. Once a 1920s hotel, it was converted to apartments in the 1980s. The run-down units are a short drive away, in the city's public housing.
Both are "HUD housing." Both serve low-income residents, though not the same households: Battery Park is restricted to seniors, while public housing serves families and individuals of every age. That difference is real, but it does not explain why one building was renovated and the other was left waiting.
The gap you can see with your own eyes is a gap in how two buildings are financed.
“HUD funding” means more than one thing. Asheville's public housing used to run on a different system from Battery Park's Section 8 platform. The public-housing system was built around yearly federal repair grants. By 2016, nearly all of the city's public housing had moved onto the Section 8 platform through RAD, the Rental Assistance Demonstration. But moving is not the same as being repaired.
When you walk into a worn public-housing unit, you're looking at the physical result of a federal repair fund Congress chose not to keep whole.
The most recent nationwide assessment puts the bill to preserve the country's roughly 899,000 public-housing units at $169.1 billion, about $188,090 per unit. By the same assessment, the buildings are aging at roughly $3,597 per unit, per year.
A prior HUD study in 2010 estimated the backlog at $26 billion. That figure covered short-term repairs and replacements. The 2025 figure comes from a report on the cost of modernizing over a decade. Construction costs have also climbed, and the buildings have kept aging.
The federal Public Housing Capital Fund has been funded at about $3.2 billion in every federal budget from 2022 through 2026, against a backlog the newest estimate puts at $169 billion. NAHRO, the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, put the backlog at $90 billion in 2024. By either estimate, Congress has never funded enough to close it. NAHRO has asked Congress for at least $5 billion a year.
HUD has reported that in 2010 roughly 10,000 public-housing units were being lost every year to demolition or sale.
Two per-unit figures, shown together for scale.
Battery Park: loan money set aside to renovate. Public housing: money still needed to catch up.
Battery Park's figure is derived: about $13.4 million of loan money set aside to renovate its 122 units and common areas (about $110,000 a unit). The national figure is the average estimated cost to preserve each public-housing unit ($188,090). They are not a like-for-like comparison: one is money set aside, the other is money needed. Whatever the exact spread, one building got fully funded while the system is still owed its own repairs.
Because public housing was underfunded, HUD built a workaround.
RAD lets a housing authority convert public housing onto the Section 8 platform, so it can borrow and use tax credits, exactly the tools that renovated Battery Park.
HACA's former public-housing units are now RAD Project-Based Voucher units. Nationally, about 87,000 units were converted under RAD from 2020 through 2024. About half of them used tax credits to fund the rehab.
RAD doesn't supply the capital. You still have to recapitalize with tax credits and private debt, building by building, the way Battery Park did. The legal structure is in place. HACA has closed a tax-credit deal before, rebuilding Lee Walker Heights as Maple Crest. What's missing is deals for the rest of the portfolio, and the financial stability to pursue them.
The steps run roughly in order of realism and impact.
Apply the Battery Park playbook to the public-housing portfolio. Stack tax credits (via the NC Housing Finance Agency) with private debt to gut-renovate specific communities, often by partnering with a mission-driven developer-operator. This is the single most proven path.
An agency can't close a tax-credit deal while its finances are in free-fall. Keeping HUD's rent abatements low and filling empty units is the precondition for the deals in step one. At the end of April 2026, HACA had 144 empty units.
The plan HUD approved in May 2025 for Asheville's $225 million federal Helene grant put roughly $31 million into housing, leaning toward multifamily construction. In June 2026 the city council voted 6 to 1 to move $19.2 million into single-family home repair and reconstruction. Of that, $9.2 million came from multifamily construction and $10 million from infrastructure. HUD approved the change on July 13, 2026.
The “right” fix is a federal recapitalization sized to the backlog, $169 billion by the newest estimate. A 2024 Senate bill from Elizabeth Warren proposed $70 billion. The federal fix goes to the root cause and is worth naming in advocacy. But it is not something to rely on in the near term.
The gap comes down to how a building has been financed, and whether anyone has put the repair money in yet.
One building was recapitalized on a platform that could raise capital. The other spent decades as public housing, waiting on the Capital Fund that Congress underfunded. It is still waiting for its own deal.
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