Use my research

When I write something here, I ask you to not take just my word for it. Make me prove it. This is that proof. Behind the articles on this site is a stack of sources: government data, university research, reports from the groups doing the work, and numbers from right here in Asheville and Buncombe County.

As the site grew, that stack grew with it. So I pulled it all into one place: an open, searchable library of the authoritative sources on housing and food insecurity, from international and national data down to the local Asheville picture. It is the starting point I work from, and now you can work from it too.

The library collects the kinds of sources I lean on: federal data from agencies like HUD, the Census Bureau, and the USDA; research from universities and long-running institutes; the national groups that track housing and hunger; international benchmarks from bodies like the OECD, the World Bank, and the UN; and the local layer, from county data to the Asheville nonprofits on the front line. Each entry says who published it, what kind of source it is, where it applies, and what numbers it can answer.

You can search the whole thing by keyword, or filter it down by topic, by the type of source, by place (international, national, North Carolina, or Asheville and Western North Carolina), and by how authoritative the source is. Every link opens the original. Nothing here asks you for money or an email.

A web search hands you whatever ranks highest today: ads first, then the pages that won the SEO game, then a million results you will never scroll through. It rewards what is popular, not what is true, and it starts you over from scratch every time. This is the opposite. Every source here was picked on purpose, independently verified, and labeled by how much weight it carries, from federal data and peer-reviewed studies down to the local numbers out of Buncombe County. No ads, no filler, no AI summary standing in for the real document, no dead links. It is finite and organized instead of endless and ranked: over 2,000 vetted sources you can actually read through, grouped by topic and by place, each one tagged with the specific figures it can answer. It is the same bench I work from, opened up so you can check the work yourself instead of trusting a search engine to have floated the right page to the top.

I did not want a list of the same ten links everyone cites. So the library was built wide first, across every corner of the subject, and then deep: starting from the most trusted sources, following the references they cite outward, again and again, until the trail stopped turning up anything new. Then every link was checked, and the broken ones were repaired or replaced.

It is kept current on a schedule, because data goes stale. New reports come out every year, agencies move their pages, and the local numbers change. The library is meant to keep up.

A caution that did not used to belong here: a lot of these sources are federal, and since early 2025 federal data has gotten less stable. After a run of executive orders, agencies pulled or rewrote thousands of government web pages and hundreds of datasets, including tools I lean on for this kind of work, like the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index and its Environmental Justice Index. The CDC alone pulled more than 150 datasets in a single week. A federal court ordered many of them restored in February 2025, and a good number came back, but some returned quietly changed, with words swapped or figures missing, and others are still gone. This is not the ordinary case of a page moving to a new address. It means a source that was live when I cited it can change or disappear, and the change is not always announced. So I do a few things about it: I link to the original agency source whenever I can, I keep an archived copy when a page looks at risk, and I try to flag when a number comes from a dataset that has since been pulled or rewritten. If you follow a government link here and find it gone, that is usually why, and the disappearing itself is worth knowing about.

Sources: KFF, federal health data taken offline · STAT, Feb 2025 court order to restore pages · CNN, datasets taken down · EDGI environmental web tracker.

This is a place to begin, not the only place to look. It is broad and it is vetted, but no library is complete, and a source being listed here is not a blanket endorsement of everything it says. Use it the way I do: as the first stop, then go read the source yourself and judge it. If you know of something good that is missing, or you find a link that has gone bad, tell me and I will fix it.