The Count Is Rising. The Money Is Already Here.

The Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care's point-in-time count for 2026, taken on February 10, found 824 people experiencing homelessness on a single night: 334 unsheltered and 490 in shelter or transitional housing. That is up about 9 percent from 755 the year before, and it continues a five-year climb from 527 in 2021.

One caveat matters before the trend gets used. The federally reported 2025 figure of 2,303 is not comparable to the rest of the series, because HUD rules required counting roughly 1,548 people in FEMA-paid hotels after Helene. That number should not be laid next to 824 or 755 as if it measured the same thing. The cleaner reading is the underlying series: still rising, with unsheltered counts well above where they sat before the pandemic.

The count also pushes back on a common assumption. Roughly 60 percent of those counted were last housed in Buncombe County and about 74 percent in North Carolina, which does not fit the idea that people arrive here from elsewhere to use services. As for behavioral health, the 2026 count's own detail tables record 91 people self-reporting a mental health condition and 62 a substance use disorder (a single source, self-reported, and almost certainly an undercount). Those figures do not describe a population that is mostly addicted or mostly mentally ill, even as a visible chronic minority clearly struggles with both.

Beneath the count is a supply problem. The 2025 regional housing needs assessment estimates the area needs about 34,358 units over five years, including a rental shortfall of roughly 6,441 units in Asheville alone (these are planning estimates, and worth treating as such). The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's January 2024 national count put homelessness at its highest level since record-keeping began in 2007, and the population-level research has converged on housing cost as the dominant driver. The Government Accountability Office found in 2020 that every $100 increase in median rent is associated with about a 9 percent rise in homelessness, after controlling for wages, poverty, and unemployment.

Locally the arithmetic is stark. By the National Low Income Housing Coalition's 2025 Out of Reach report, a worker needs about $29.08 an hour to afford a two-bedroom at fair-market rent here, the priciest metro in North Carolina, while pay in many of the service jobs the region runs on sits closer to half that. The county's median home price reached roughly $450,000 in the first quarter of 2026.

This is where the homelessness story and the workforce story turn out to be the same story. Surveys of regional employers put housing cost and availability at the top of their hiring problems, even as about $250 million in hospitality investment and 1,200 new hotel rooms arrive, with little housing nearby that the people staffing them can afford. Homelessness here is not separate from the labor shortage. It is the same housing market measured at the bottom rung, and one lever, supply, moves both.

The national fight over how to respond has hardened into two camps, and the honest answer is that each is right about something different.

The case for Housing First is strongest on housing itself. Randomized trials and their meta-analyses find participants roughly 2.5 times more likely to be stably housed; Houston's coordinated, data-driven system has cut regional homelessness by around 57 to 60 percent since 2011. The weakness is just as real: an apartment is not a clinical treatment. High-quality trials show that housing alone does not improve substance-use or psychiatric outcomes compared with usual care, though it does not make them worse either.

The case for Treatment First, built on campus models like San Antonio's Haven for Hope, points to genuine recovery numbers. Its weakness is methodological: those numbers come without a control group and count the people who complete the program, which builds in survivorship bias and leaves out everyone who could not meet the conditions to stay.

The critique of Housing First lands hardest exactly where the model is weakest, the chronically unsheltered minority entangled with active psychosis or addiction. It lands softest as a general theory, because it cannot explain why high-rent regions, not high-addiction regions, have the most homelessness. As the University of Pennsylvania's Dennis Culhane has put it, the most visible homelessness is the least typical.

The defensible synthesis is not a winner. It is a division of labor: Housing First as the structure for the majority, with a genuinely funded and genuinely available treatment track for the minority the housing model does not reach. The trap most places fall into is funding neither at scale.

The cleanest evidence on cost is a randomized controlled trial, so it is worth anchoring there rather than on slogans. In Denver's Social Impact Bond trial (the Urban Institute, 724 people, 2016 to 2020), the control group cost about $25,554 per person per year in public services such as jail, emergency rooms, detox, and shelter. Supportive housing cost about $18,678, roughly $6,876 less, with the housing itself included, and 77 percent of those housed were still stably housed at three years.

Two honest qualifications belong here. The first is that the savings are not guaranteed everywhere: the National Academies reviewed six controlled studies and found three showed net savings, up to about $33,500 per person a year, while three showed a modest net cost. The fair verdict is that supportive housing is usually cheaper than the street for this high-need group, not always. The second is that for the broader population the cost question matters less than the supply question.

Enforcement fares worse on the same ledger. Encampment sweeps run roughly $1,672 to $6,208 per unsheltered person, and HUD and HHS describe their long-term effectiveness as limited. Buncombe's own record shows the ceiling on enforcement directly.

The clearest local win is Compass Point Village, an $17.5 million conversion of a former Tunnel Road motel into 85 permanent supportive housing beds, opened in September 2023 and now full and operational with its first graduations on the books. It also became the sharpest local version of the national disorder debate: in its first year, local reporting documented hundreds of police responses to the site and a neighborhood coalition organized around trespassing, open drug use, and trash, conditions worsened by an adjacent recovery drop-in center. The honest reading concedes those conditions, locates their cause in underfunded surrounding systems, and still notes that the case management inside is working for the residents it houses.

The clearest disappointment is a 2022 plan. The city paid the National Alliance to End Homelessness about $72,974 for a roadmap to halve unsheltered homelessness; its 116 recommendations, chiefly a system overhaul and a single low-barrier shelter, went largely unimplemented, and the count rose. That low-barrier shelter is the piece the city has repeatedly named as missing and repeatedly failed to build, stalled on siting politics rather than on any disagreement about the need.

There is a vivid illustration of the real bottleneck in the opioid-funded Community Paramedics Response Team. In 2023 it logged 986 overdose responses and referred 88 people to housing. It landed 9. The gap was not effort or outreach. It was supply.

One recent change cuts the other way, toward coordination. In 2024 the area's loose advisory committee was replaced by a formally chartered Continuum of Care, now several hundred members strong, and in June 2025 it adopted its first three-year strategic plan, with goals to reduce unsheltered homelessness, increase exits to permanent housing, and expand prevention and rapid rehousing. The coordinating structure that was missing for years is now in place.

Two policy developments, both volatile and worth watching closely, frame what Buncombe can do.

At the federal level, Executive Order 14321 (July 2025) directs HUD and HHS to step back from Housing First and to condition assistance on treatment participation. HUD wrote those principles into a November 2025 funding notice that capped permanent housing at a minority of grant dollars, sending Continuums of Care nationwide scrambling. The leverage is large: roughly $4.4 billion in HUD homeless-assistance grants nationally now favors jurisdictions that reduce street homelessness and clear encampments. On March 31, 2026, a federal appeals court ordered the government to scrap that policy, calling it a slapdash imposition of political whims, and HUD said it remains committed to its approach. A new funding notice was expected around mid-2026, likely to revive similar requirements and likely to draw fresh litigation. The threat to existing supportive-housing funding is real, in other words, but it is contested and currently on hold rather than settled.

At the state level, the camping-ban approach has resurfaced after stalling once already. House Bill 781, the "Unauthorized Public Camping and Sleeping" bill, passed the North Carolina House in 2025 but died in the Senate. On June 10, 2026, its core language was revived as an amendment folded into House Bill 437 (originally a measure to establish drug-free homeless-service zones), which the Senate Judiciary Committee then advanced with a favorable report. The combined bill heads next to additional Senate committees and has not had a floor vote, so it is genuinely in motion rather than settled. It would bar local governments from allowing regular camping or sleeping on public property, with one narrow exception: a local government may, by majority vote, designate its own property as a sanctioned site for up to a year, but only if that site is certified by the state and provides security, sanitation, and coordination of substance-use and mental-health services. Enforcement would run through civil suits that residents or business owners could bring against a government they believe is allowing unauthorized camping.

The detail that matters most for Buncombe is buried in that exception. The compliance path the bill offers, a serviced and certified site, is the very low-barrier infrastructure the city has tried and failed to stand up for five years, and the exception itself requires the behavioral-health linkage the evidence says housing alone cannot provide. If the bill becomes law, the county will have to choose between clearing camps and building that serviced site, with no state funding attached. The provider community's leverage is in shaping which of those paths local government takes.

The unusual feature of this moment is that the money largely exists. The task is matching each kind of dollar to the job it is suited for: one-time money to build, recurring money to sustain treatment, a small prevention pot to stop inflow, and a hard stop on spending more to criminalize than it costs to house.

The logic is to spend the one-time Helene money on durable assets you cannot fund twice, route the recurring opioid stream to the treatment that housing cannot deliver, use the prevention pilot to keep about 1,000 households from entering the system in the first place, and stop paying for enforcement that costs without reducing the count. In ranked order, the actions worth considering: