For years the story of Asheville’s housing shortage has been told as history: the homes that urban renewal bulldozed, the land the city never got back. That part is settled. What is not settled is the part the city is voting on right now.

This summer the council takes up two decisions that shape how much housing gets built and where. One is a promise to protect the neighborhoods most at risk of being priced out. The other rewrites the zoning rules that have quietly kept most of the city off-limits to anything but a single house on a single lot. The fight is not really over whether to do them. It is over how they fit together.

Two votes, four weeks apart

Here is what is actually on the table. On July 28 the council is scheduled to vote on an anti-displacement resolution, a formal pledge that the city will protect existing residents as it grows. It is not a law by itself. The city attorney called it marching orders: pass it, and staff is expected to bring back real policy to match.

On August 25 comes the one with teeth. The council votes on a package of zoning changes drawn from a study the city commissioned back in 2023. If it passes, duplexes and townhomes would be allowed across the city, accessory dwelling units could be larger, and the rule forcing new housing to come with off-street parking would go away. These are small buildings, the kind that used to be normal on an ordinary street. The industry calls them the missing middle, the housing that sits between a single house and a large apartment block, and that most American cities stopped allowing decades ago.

• July 28: scheduled council vote on the anti-displacement resolution.

• August 25: scheduled council vote on the missing-middle zoning changes.

• 2023: year the city’s own missing-middle study was finished.

The shortage the city wrote itself

Start with a number the city does not dispute, because it is from the city’s own study: about two-thirds of Asheville’s neighborhoods allow only single-family homes. In most of the city, a duplex is illegal to build. So is a townhome, a triplex, a small courtyard of cottages. Not too expensive, not unpopular. Illegal, by the zoning code.

That is the quiet half of the shortage. The homes urban renewal tore down are gone, and we tell that story in the shortage was made here. But even now, on empty and underused land the city still has, the rules mostly permit the most land-hungry, and often most expensive, form of housing there is: one detached house per lot. Supply stays scarce by design, and scarce housing is expensive housing.

The city has known this for years. The missing-middle study landed in 2023 and said plainly what to change. In March 2025 the council took a first step, allowing cottage-court and flag-lot housing, easing some rules along transit and commercial corridors, and starting to pull back parking requirements in a few districts. It was real, but it was a fraction of what the study called for. The August vote is the city deciding whether to do a much larger share of the rest.

How much housing is missing is not a mystery. The regional assessment says Asheville alone needs about 6,441 more rental homes and 5,217 more to buy over five years, part of roughly 34,358 the four-county region needs over five years. The widest gap is at the bottom, for families earning under half the area’s median income. Meanwhile the typical Buncombe County home sold for about $500,000 this spring, while a family at the edge of the middle class, up to 120 percent of the area’s median income, could afford about $372,000.

• 1.2% of Asheville buildings are duplexes; single-family homes are 60.5 percent.

• 6,441 more rental homes Asheville needs over five years, plus 5,217 for sale.

• ~$500K Buncombe median home sale price this spring, against the roughly $372K a family up to 120 percent of area median income can afford.

What the rewrite would add is harder to pin down. The city never projected a unit count, and the record from places that have done this counsels patience, not a flood. Minneapolis, the first big city to end single-family-only zoning, saw only about 255 of these middle homes built in its first two and a half years. Legalizing the housing is a floor, not a faucet. It is a necessary step that works slowly, and only if the rest of the market cooperates.

Nobody’s against it. They’re against the order.

If almost everyone agrees the city needs more housing, why is this hard? Because of who paid the price the last time Asheville rebuilt itself, and who is afraid of paying it again.

The neighborhoods most worried are the ones the city calls its legacy communities: historically Black neighborhoods like Shiloh, Burton Street, Southside, the East End. These are the places urban renewal and redlining hit hardest, and the places where residents and city officials say rising rents and property taxes are pushing longtime residents out right now. Their fear is direct. Change the zoning to invite building, and the building comes to the blocks where land is still cheap, which is their blocks, and the people already there get priced out first.

That fear is not abstract. In May the council voted down a 100-unit affordable housing project in Shiloh, with one member saying she felt hyperprotective of the neighborhood. So the coalition that speaks for those neighborhoods, led by coordinator Sekou Coleman, wants the order reversed: build the anti-displacement protections first, prove they work, and only then loosen the zoning.

The pro-housing side, organized as Asheville for All, reads the same history and draws the opposite lesson. Their organizer, Andy Paul, argues that the way you protect a neighborhood from a single giant development is to let modest housing be built everywhere, so no one block absorbs all the pressure. Allow a little more housing broadly, the argument goes, and you are less likely to get a tower dropped into Shiloh. Spread the growth, and you spread the protection.

The city, for its part, is trying to walk between them. It is building a Displacement Risk Assessment Tool, a map that scores neighborhoods on how exposed they are, using renter cost burden, rising home values, and income. But the city is careful to say the tool only informs decisions. It does not veto a project on its own. That reassures no one completely: to the legacy neighborhoods it sounds like a study standing in for a guarantee, and to the builders it sounds like one more reason a project can stall.

Both sides are describing a real risk

It would be easy to pick a villain here. There isn’t one. Both sides are pointing at something true.

The evidence on supply is not really in doubt. A large body of research finds that cities that allow more housing ease their cost pressure over time better than cities that don’t. Loosening the rules is no instant fix, and by itself it tends to add housing at the higher end first, so it works slowly and works best paired with subsidy. But the direction is clear, and it is the case for the August vote.

And the displacement risk is also real. New building on cheap land near the center of a hot market can push longtime residents out, even though more housing tends to ease rents across a city as a whole, and Asheville has done exactly that to these specific neighborhoods before. A promise to protect them, with no tool and no funding behind it, is the kind of promise this city has broken in living memory. Asking for the protection to be real and funded, adopted alongside the zoning rather than promised after it, is not obstruction. It is memory.

One more limit: zoning is not the whole story. The city’s own study blames Asheville’s prices partly on tourism and second-home buyers, and short-term rentals pull roughly 5,400 homes off the long-term market before a single zoning rule applies. We follow that money separately in the tax no one can count. Fixing the zoning will not touch any of that. It is the part the council actually controls, not the only thing that decides what a home here costs.

So the honest verdict is uncomfortable. The zoning rewrite is the right thing to do, and doing it without real anti-displacement protection moving in step with it would repeat an old harm on the same people. The city’s own evidence points the same way: because the rewrite adds housing slowly, the protection does not have to be proven before the rules change, only funded and in force when they do. Which is to say the fight over how these two votes fit together is not a distraction from the real question. It is the real question.

What to watch this summer

Two dates, and one thing to watch on each.

July 28, the resolution. A resolution is only words until something backs it. Watch whether it comes with a funded anti-displacement program and a finished risk tool, or whether it is a pledge with nothing behind it yet. The difference decides whether the August zoning vote arrives with protection already standing or still on the drawing board.

August 25, the zoning. Watch how much of the 2023 study actually makes it in, and whether the parking-requirement repeal survives, since that single rule often decides whether a small building pencils out. And watch which neighborhoods are exempted or phased in, because that is where the whole fight gets settled in the fine print.

The shortage was made by choices like these, one ordinance at a time. It can be unmade the same way. This summer is one of the times the city actually gets to choose.

Do them together, or repeat the old mistake

Rewriting the rules behind an empty promise would repeat the city’s oldest mistake on the same neighborhoods.

Asheville built its housing shortage partly with a zoning code that made modest, affordable homes illegal across most of the city. This summer it can start to undo that. The fight is not whether to, but how the two moves fit together: rewrite the rules to let housing get built, and protect the neighborhoods that have been bulldozed for progress before. Both are right, and the honest answer is to do them together, with the protection funded and standing rather than merely promised. Two votes, four weeks apart, are where that gets decided.

The two votes and the anti-displacement project: Blue Ridge Public Radio, “Through anti-displacement project, Asheville hopes to prevent existing residents from being priced out” (July 7, 2026), reporting the July 28 anti-displacement resolution and August 25 zoning vote, the Displacement Risk Assessment Tool (renter cost burden, home-value appreciation, median income; advisory only per Assistant City Manager Ben Woody), the named legacy neighborhoods, and quotes from Sekou Coleman (Legacy Neighborhoods Coalition), Andy Paul (Asheville for All), and Communications Director Dawa Hitch; syndicated by WUNC and WHQR. The city attorney’s “marching orders” characterization: City Attorney Brad Branham, June 23, 2026 work session (via BPR). The May 12, 2026 Shiloh 100-unit affordable-housing denial and Council Member Sage Turner’s “hyperprotective” remark: BPR.

Zoning: the Missing Middle Housing Study (Opticos Design), released November 17, 2023, and the March 11, 2025 Unified Development Ordinance amendments (cottage-court and flag-lot housing, transit- and commercial-corridor changes, and a partial rollback of off-street parking requirements in some districts) (City of Asheville, Middle Housing Initiative project page and “Information on newly adopted UDO text amendments”). The finding that about two-thirds of Asheville neighborhoods allow only single-family homes, and the housing composition (65% of city land zoned primarily single-family; single-family homes 60.5% of dwelling structures, apartments of five or more units 26.4%, duplexes 1.2%): City of Asheville Missing Middle Housing Study (Opticos Design and Cascadia Partners, 2023), reported by Asheville Watchdog, “Missing middle plan shows the path to more affordable housing. Why isn’t Asheville following it?” (January 7, 2026).

Home price: the Buncombe County median home sale price was about $500,000 in spring 2026 (the May 2026 single-month median; the Q1 2026 quarterly median was about $446,000), from Canopy MLS via The Ruiz Report and Mosaic Realty, the same source Step Up AVL uses for home prices across its housing coverage. It is a volatile figure that we re-check before reuse. Housing need (Asheville about 6,441 rental and 5,217 for-sale units over five years; the four-county Buncombe / Madison / Henderson / Transylvania region about 34,358 units over five years; widest rental gap for families under 50% of area median income; about $372,400 affordable at up to 120% of area median income): 2025 Bowen National Research assessment commissioned by the Land of Sky Regional Council, via Asheville Watchdog. The Bowen assessment is the source for housing-need and affordability figures only; the home sale price comes from Canopy MLS.

There is no official projection of how many units the August package would produce; the study modeled barriers and recommendations, not buildout. The Minneapolis comparison (about 255 missing-middle units, 72 duplexes and 37 triplexes, in the first two and a half years after the 2019 end of single-family-only zoning) is offered as a scale reference, not a forecast for Asheville (city of Minneapolis permit data, as mapped by Streets.mn). Tourism and second-home purchases as price drivers: City of Asheville Missing Middle Housing Study. The roughly 5,400 short-term rentals (a 2024 AirDNA-based estimate; no legal STR registry exists) is the figure carried in our companion piece “The Tax No One Can Count.” The local history of urban renewal is covered in our companion piece, “The shortage was made here.” This is a developing local story; the vote dates and outcomes may change. Figures current as of July 2026.

Adapted from the full article at stepupavl.org/files/build-it-or-protect-it. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it. The framing and conclusions here are our own.

Part 3 of a five-part series, The SNAP Rewrite. Start with Part 1: What SNAP Actually Is, and Part 2: Who Loses SNAP Now. Still to come: Who We Call Homeless, and What Would Actually Fix SNAP.

For as long as SNAP has existed, the deal was simple. Washington paid for the food, and the state and federal governments split the cost of running the program. The 2025 budget law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, rewrote that deal.

North Carolina is hit harder than most states, because it is one of only ten where the counties, not the state, run SNAP. So when Washington pays less, the extra cost does not stop with the state. It gets passed down to the counties, and to the people who pay county taxes. If you live here and never expect to need SNAP, this is still your bill now.

Four changes, four different payers

The Congressional Budget Office puts the law’s SNAP cuts at about $186 billion through 2034. That is not one year’s spending. It means the program is set to spend roughly a fifth less than projected over ten years. But that one number hides how the cuts work. The law makes four separate changes, each starting at a different time and paid by someone different.

• Since December 2025: the work rules widened, reaching adults up to age 64 and parents of teenagers, and dropping the exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and former foster youth.

• October 2026: Washington’s share of running SNAP drops from half to a quarter. In North Carolina that lands on the 100 counties, about $69 million a year statewide.

• October 2027: for the first time, states pay part of the benefits themselves, and how much depends on their paperwork error rate.

• Already visible: the rolls are shrinking, faster in North Carolina than almost anywhere.

A bill set by a score

Start with the strangest part. A number that once just tracked how accurately a state paid benefits is now a bill it has to pay.

Every year, the USDA measures each state’s payment error rate: how often it paid a household the wrong amount, too much or too little. This is not fraud. It is bookkeeping, a wrong figure keyed in, an income update that came late, a typo, and it piles up fastest in the hardest cases, like families whose income changes every month. Even the USDA does not call it fraud.

Fraud is a separate, smaller problem. The government’s own studies measure it at about a penny or two on the dollar, roughly $1 billion a year. Either way, fraud is not what the error rate counts. The bill is pegged to the bookkeeping.

And the rate is an estimate, not an exact count. The state checks only a sample, about 1,150 North Carolina cases a year, so the USDA publishes the rate inside a margin of roughly two points either way. The new penalty ignores that margin and treats the number as exact, and the brackets sit so close together, at 6, 8, and 10 percent, that sampling luck alone can tip a state from owing nothing to owing tens of millions.

Starting in October 2027, a state with an error rate under 6 percent pays nothing toward benefits. From 6 to 8 percent, it pays 5 percent of its food bill. From 8 to 10, it pays 10 percent. At 10 or above, 15 percent.

North Carolina hands out about $2.8 billion in SNAP benefits a year. On June 24, 2026, the USDA released the 2025 scores: North Carolina’s was 7.36 percent, down from 10.21 percent a year earlier. At last year’s rate, the state would have owed 15 percent of its food bill, as much as $420 million a year. At 7.36 percent, the bill drops to the 5 percent tier, about $140 million. One year of cleaner paperwork cut the worst case by about $280 million.

• Under 6%: the state owes nothing.

• 7.36%, North Carolina’s 2025 error rate, the 5 percent tier: about $140 million a year.

• 10.21%, the 2024 rate, the top tier: as much as $420 million a year.

And the bill is not final. For the first year, a state can use whichever is lower, its 2025 or its 2026 error rate. If North Carolina gets under 6 percent this year, its share for 2028 is zero, and 2029 with it. So the real question is simple: between now and next June, the accuracy of North Carolina’s paperwork will decide whether the state owes $140 million a year for food, or nothing.

There is a cheaper way to lower the score than paying more carefully. The rate counts only money paid to people who got the wrong amount. It does not count the eligible people a state wrongly turns away. So the surest way to bring the number down is to make SNAP harder to get and keep. No state has said out loud that it is dropping people to lower its bill. It does not have to. The incentive does that on its own.

Counties get a bill too, and sooner

The error-rate bill is the big one, so it gets the attention. But a second bill comes a year earlier, in October 2026, and it lands closer to home.

Running SNAP costs money: the caseworkers, the computer systems, the phone lines, the fraud checks. Washington used to pay half. Under the new law it pays a quarter. North Carolina is one of the ten states where counties run the program, so that extra 25 percent lands on county taxpayers. State health officials told a legislative committee in January 2026 that this will cost North Carolina’s counties about $69 million more a year, with Mecklenburg’s share alone estimated at over $8.1 million, the most in the state.

Buncombe’s share, worked out by the state county by county, comes to about $2.8 million a year in new money the county must find once the change is fully in effect. And Buncombe is not alone in the mountains: the same shift adds about $760,000 a year in Henderson County, about $410,000 in Haywood, and about $280,000 in Jackson, all of it money Washington used to split. The state’s 2026 budget did not make the counties whole, leaving them to absorb close to $52 million of it in the first year.

What it means for Buncombe

All of this adds up to a clear hit at home.

If you pay taxes in Buncombe County: you are about to pay more. County taxpayers now cover a bigger share of running SNAP, about $2.8 million a year, work Washington used to split down the middle. And as a North Carolina taxpayer, you are also on the hook for the state’s share of the food bill, from nothing up to $420 million a year, about $140 million today. It is not only a tax question. Those Buncombe benefits, about $60 million a year, are spent at local grocers and tailgate markets, so as the rolls shrink that money leaves local tills too.

That is who pays. But a law that moves this much money also decides who eats, and the rolls are already shrinking. That is the other half of this story, in Who Loses SNAP Now.

For sixty years, one thing about SNAP never changed: the federal government paid for the food. That is over. Now the cost is split, and part of it lands here. A number that used to be a management score is now a bill, and the law rewards the state for helping fewer people, because fewer people is the cheapest way to bring that number down.

The takeaway

The people who need the help did not change this year. The bill did, and part of it now has Buncombe’s name on it. Who pays for SNAP changed this year, and the only question now is who loses it.

The SNAP Rewrite, a five-part series. 1. What SNAP Actually Is (live). 2. Who Loses SNAP Now (live). 3. Who Pays for SNAP Now (you are here). 4. Who We Call Homeless (coming soon). 5. What Would Actually Fix SNAP (coming soon).

Sources. The law: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, P.L. 119-21 (H.R. 1, signed July 4, 2025), SNAP provisions summarized by the Congressional Research Service (R48552); the CBO estimate of roughly $186 billion in SNAP reductions through 2034. Error rates: USDA, “USDA Announces FY 2025 State Payment Error Rates in SNAP” (June 24, 2026); national rate 10.62 percent, North Carolina 7.36 percent for FY2025 against 10.21 percent in FY2024; USDA notes error rates measure payment accuracy, not fraud. The rate is drawn from a statistical sample (about 1,150 North Carolina active cases reviewed a year) and carries a margin of error the penalty ignores (USDA FNS Quality Control; 7 CFR 275.11; FRAC, “A Backgrounder on SNAP Quality Control”). Fraud is measured separately and is smaller, roughly $1 billion a year, about 1 to 2 percent of benefits (USDA FNS, “The Extent of Trafficking in SNAP”). Cost-share tiers and the FY2025-or-FY2026 first-year election: National Association of Counties, “H.R. 1 and SNAP: What Counties Should Know”; NC Budget & Tax Center. State benefit base of about $2.8 billion a year: NC Budget & Tax Center and NC Health News; the $140 million (5 percent) and $420 million (15 percent) figures are derived from that base and are illustrative. The incentive concern, that scaling the bill to the error rate pressures states to thin their rolls since wrongful denials are not counted as errors, is raised by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Food Research and Action Center. Administrative cost shift (federal share 50 to 25 percent, effective October 2026) and county impact: NCDHHS presentation to the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Health and Human Services (January 13, 2026), estimating about $69 million in added annual county costs and over $8.1 million for Mecklenburg, as reported by NC Health News (March 17, 2026). Per-county figures from the NCDHHS “H.R. 1 FNS County Admin Impact Table” (December 19, 2025): Buncombe about $2.84 million a year, Henderson about $758,000, Haywood about $411,000, Jackson about $281,000. The state’s 2026 budget left counties to absorb roughly $52 million in the first year (NC Justice Center; NC Budget & Tax Center). North Carolina as one of ten county-administered SNAP states per the National Association of Counties. Local: about 29,000 Buncombe County SNAP participants with an average benefit of about $171 per person per month (NCDHHS April 2025 county table); the roughly $60 million a year in local spending is derived from those figures. This is a fast-moving policy area; figures are current as of July 2026.

Adapted from Who Pays for SNAP Now at Step Up AVL. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it. The framing and conclusions here are our own.

One month, two big moves

North Carolina’s legislature had a busy July. In a single week it advanced three bills that change how the state treats people who are homeless or in mental-health crisis. In the same stretch it passed a roughly $34 billion budget, the state’s first full spending plan since 2023. One set of decisions rewrites the rules. The other decides where the money goes. Both land hard in the mountains.

Here are the highlights of each, and where they meet.

The three bills

Governor Stein signed two of them into law on July 6. The third was still on his desk as this went out.

• Longer court-ordered treatment (HB 1104, signed). The maximum length of court-ordered outpatient treatment doubles from 90 days to 180. Law enforcement gets access to a live registry of open psychiatric beds, called BH SCAN, starting August 1, and mental-health evaluations of people who have been arrested move to telehealth inside the jail. It carries no new treatment money.

• A statewide camping ban (HB 437, passed, awaiting the governor). It would make unauthorized camping on public property a crime across the state, and lets local governments set up designated camping areas. The House passed it 73 to 40 on June 30; the Senate had passed it 26 to 16 the week before. Asheville and Buncombe leaders warn it hands the enforcement bill to counties without the money to carry it out.

• Parking minimums repealed (HB 162, signed). The quietest bill may do the most for housing. It ends local rules that force new housing to include a set number of parking spaces, rules that raise building costs and can kill small, affordable projects. It builds nothing by itself, but it clears an obstacle that stood for years.

A state can order treatment and ban a tent. Neither one builds a bed.

What the budget spends, and what it cuts

The budget mostly points the same way, with real money attached. Four decisions inside it reach straight into the region’s housing, food, and courts. Two put money in. Two take it away.

• Housing: little cash, a bet on deregulation. By the NC Justice Center’s read of the enacted bill, only about $10 million in new money goes to affordable housing statewide, plus a one-time $35 million transfer to the Housing Finance Agency, and nothing recurring for rent help or eviction prevention. An earlier bipartisan House proposal of a $50 million fund did not survive. The parking repeal was the state’s main housing move instead of a check.

• Food and health: a door reopens. The Healthy Opportunities Pilot, which lets Medicaid pay for non-medical needs like food and stable housing, restarts at about $25 million (roughly $9 million state, $16 million federal). A UNC evaluation found it cut Medicaid costs by about $164 a month per enrollee, more than the help cost to deliver. In the mountains it is expected to reach around 14,000 residents.

• A quiet cut to legal aid. The budget redirects the interest on lawyers’ trust accounts (IOLTA) away from civil legal aid and toward indigent criminal defense. Legal Aid of North Carolina loses about $6.5 million a year; Asheville’s Pisgah Legal Services loses about $1.9 million, roughly 15 percent of its budget. These are the lawyers who most often stand between a family and an eviction order.

• Helene: a down payment. About $700 million is set aside for Helene recovery, including roughly $40 million for temporary relocation. Real money, but not close to the full repair bill.

One more number sits behind all of it. A 2025 federal law shifts part of SNAP’s cost onto the states for the first time, and North Carolina’s share could eventually run to about $420 million a year. Nothing in this budget makes that go away.

What it means for Asheville and Buncombe

Buncombe County sits under every one of these lines. On a single night the county counted 824 people homeless, and 334 of them had no shelter at all; statewide the 2025 count was 15,512. Those 334 are the people the camping ban would reach first, in a county where the shelter to send them to is usually full. The longer treatment order runs into the same wall from the other side: a court can now order up to 180 days of care, but the beds, outpatient slots, and case managers to deliver it are thin here in a way they are not in the Triangle or Charlotte. About 29,000 county residents, roughly one in nine of us, buy groceries with SNAP, and because North Carolina runs SNAP through its counties, part of the new cost lands on the county’s own budget too.

The bottom line

Read together, the session leaned one way: more court-ordered treatment, tougher rules on sleeping outside, a lighter hand on zoning, and only a modest nod to the housing supply underneath it all. Some money went in, for a Medicaid food-and-housing pilot and for Helene. Some came out, from affordable housing and from the legal aid that stops evictions. The hardest question, where the beds and the money come from, the session mostly left for later.

Want to see your own share of the local side? The state budget is only half the picture. For what an Asheville-area household actually pays in city, county, and school property tax, our FY2027 breakdown lets you estimate the total by home value: What an Asheville-area homeowner actually pays.

Sources. The three bills: NC Governor’s Office signing release and WCTI (2026-07-06); CBS17 and NC Health News (2026-06-30) on HB 1104; Port City Daily (2026-06-30), NC Newsline (2026-06-24 and 2026-07-01), and WFAE on HB 437’s votes and status; HB 162 per WCTI. Homeless counts: Buncombe 2026 single-night count (824 total, 334 unsheltered) via Step Up AVL’s figure ledger; statewide 2025 point-in-time count (15,512) via NC Health News (2026-06-26). Budget lines: NC Justice Center analysis of the enacted bill (housing), NC Health News and WLOS (Healthy Opportunities and the up-to-$420M SNAP cost-share), WRAL and WLOS/WFAE (the IOLTA cut and the Pisgah Legal figure, per executive director Jackie Kiger), Blue Ridge Public Radio (Helene set-aside), and NCDHHS / UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center (the $164/month Healthy Opportunities evaluation). Prior-cycle mental-health investment (>$800M) per NC Health News. Independent summary; not affiliated with the State of North Carolina.

Adapted from two briefs on The WNC Desk: What the 2026 legislature did on homelessness and What the new state budget does for Western North Carolina.

Part 2 of a five-part series, The SNAP Rewrite. New to SNAP? Start with Part 1: What SNAP Actually Is. Still to come: Who Pays for SNAP Now, Who We Call Homeless, and What Would Actually Fix SNAP.

Picture a server in West Asheville whose winter hours slipped under the line for two slow months. The renewal notice went to an old address. The proof-of-hours form came due the Friday she worked a double. The case closed the week after. She is a composite, not one person, but every step of that is how the new rules work.

A law that moves this much money decides who eats. That part is not a prediction, and it is not years away. It is already in the numbers.

The money half of the story, who now pays for what the program costs, comes next in this series, in Who Pays for SNAP Now. This piece follows the people.

The rolls are already shrinking

Nationwide, SNAP enrollment fell to about 37.8 million people by February 2026, roughly 4.3 million fewer than a year before, a drop of about 10 percent. The Food Research & Action Center counts more than 5.5 million gone between January 2025 and March 2026. North Carolina’s drop is among the steepest anywhere, from about 1.5 million people in January 2025 to under 1.2 million by March 2026, down about 22 percent. The state health department expects the new work rules alone to cost about 90,000 more North Carolina adults their benefits. The drop is not from any single change. It comes from the wider work rules, from renewals that now come more often and trip people up on the paperwork, and from new limits on which noncitizens can get help, all landing at once.

• -22% North Carolina SNAP enrollment, January 2025 to March 2026 (among the steepest state drops).

• ~90,000 North Carolina adults expected to lose benefits under the new work rules (NCDHHS).

• ~776,000 fewer children on SNAP across the 12 age-reporting states (ProPublica).

One honest caution on the timing. Much of that year-long decline came before the new work rules even took effect on December 1, 2025, so it is not all the doing of the 2025 law. The swollen pandemic-era rolls had been unwinding for a while on their own. What the law does is take that drift and make it policy: the roughly 90,000 the state expects to lose their benefits under the work rules are coming off now, through the recertifications that run into the summer of 2026, after the window these early numbers cover. So the sharpest part of the law’s own effect is still ahead of the count, not behind it.

Supporters of the law read that drop differently, as the program shedding people who never should have been on it. Some of it is exactly that. Ineligible cases and paperwork errors get cleared out, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture says its removals include fraud, like benefits drawn on dead people’s Social Security numbers. But the department has not shown how many of the people who left were actually ineligible, and researchers who went looking for a happier explanation did not find one: there is little sign the economy improved enough to explain a drop this size. The likelier story is the one the numbers keep pointing back to. Eligible people are losing benefits because the rules got harder to satisfy, not because they stopped needing food.

Supporters make one promise about the work rules that can be checked against evidence: that they move people from aid into jobs. Economists have studied earlier versions of the same rule. The most careful of that work, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, found the requirement cut SNAP enrollment by about half among the adults it covered while producing no measurable rise in employment. A fresh 2026 study reached the same place: tougher requirements thinned the rolls and left employment flat. Even the studies most favorable to the rules find at most a small bump in work, and a shaky one. People left the rolls. On the whole, they did not end up in jobs. That is the gap between what the rule is sold as and what the record shows it does.

The rule falls heaviest on people with no address

The work rules do not fall evenly. They fall hardest on one group in particular: people without a stable home. Many of them already work, in day-labor and gig jobs that pay in cash and leave no clean record for a caseworker to see, so the paperwork can drop them even when the work is real. They are also the people the old law had tried to shield: Congress added an exemption for homeless adults in 2023, and the 2025 law repealed it before it had fully taken hold.

That is a large enough story to stand on its own, and we tell it separately, later in this series, in Who We Call Homeless, which follows what happens when a work rule is aimed at people whose work was never the problem.

Children are leaving fastest of all

Children are leaving in outsized numbers. ProPublica looked at the twelve states that report enrollment by age and found about 776,000 fewer children on SNAP, about 46 percent of those states’ total drop. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put the figure for those same twelve states at more than 700,000, and noted the real national number is higher because most states do not report by age. Children are not subject to any work rule. They lose SNAP when their whole household’s case closes, and more households are closing, mostly under the weight of the new paperwork rather than because their incomes rose.

And the country stopped measuring

The main way the government measured hunger is also gone. In September 2025, the USDA ended the survey behind its annual food security report, the food questions the Census Bureau had asked households every December since the 1990s. The department called it redundant. The edition covering 2024 was the last one. It is the measurement that stopped, not just one report, and the other hunger estimates people might point to are built on that same survey. Whatever the reason, there is no plan to count hunger for the years these changes take effect. Anyone waiting for the official numbers to show what happened will be waiting for a report that is not coming.

Here is a simple test of whether the law’s new error-rate penalty is really about accuracy. It scores a state the same for underpaying a hungry family as for overpaying one, and the eligible people a state wrongly turns away are not counted at all. The bill lands on the state’s books, but the cheapest way to shrink it is to have fewer families on the rolls. The full mechanics are in Who Pays for SNAP Now.

What it means for Buncombe

Here is what all of this means for people at home.

If you get SNAP in Buncombe County: your monthly benefit is set by a federal formula, and none of these changes cut that dollar amount. What they change is who qualifies. The new work rules reach more people, adults up to age 64 and parents of teenagers, so some people who get help today will lose it. The state expects about 90,000 North Carolina adults to fall off. Buncombe’s slice of that is not public yet, but the county is not exempt. If your case is still open, expect renewals to come around more often, and keep your proof of income and rent current, because a missing form is now one of the most common ways a case closes.

If you do not get SNAP: this still reaches you. About 29,000 of your Buncombe neighbors are on it, roughly one in ten people in the county, and the roughly $60 million a year they spend with it runs through the same checkout lines you stand in, from Ingles, the grocer headquartered up the road in Black Mountain, to the tailgate markets. When the rolls shrink, that spending shrinks with them. And you help pay for the changes: the county and state cost of all this is the next piece in this series, Who Pays for SNAP Now.

The people who need the help did not change this year. What changed is how many of them the law is willing to feed.

Enrollment is falling faster in North Carolina than almost anywhere, with the steepest losses among children who never had a work rule to fail. The people who need help did not change this year. What changed is how many of them get fed, and whether anyone will be left counting.

The takeaway

For thirty years, the government at least counted the hunger it was preventing. Now it has stopped even measuring, in the same season it made food aid harder to get and keep. That is where an honest look at who loses SNAP now has to start.

The SNAP Rewrite, a five-part series. 1. What SNAP Actually Is (live). 2. Who Loses SNAP Now (you are here). 3. Who Pays for SNAP Now (coming soon). 4. Who We Call Homeless (coming soon). 5. What Would Actually Fix SNAP (coming soon).

The server in the opening is a composite, not one person: every step in her story is drawn from how the new work-hour and renewal rules operate, documented in the sources below. We never present a composite as a real individual.

Sources. The law: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, P.L. 119-21 (H.R. 1, signed July 4, 2025), SNAP provisions summarized by the Congressional Research Service (R48552). Work rules (time limit through age 64; parents of children 14 and older; exemptions removed for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth, protections Congress had added in 2023): USDA Food and Nutrition Service guidance and CRS R48552; effective December 1, 2025 in North Carolina. On whether the work rules move recipients into jobs, the peer-reviewed evidence finds they sharply reduce participation without measurably raising employment (National Bureau of Economic Research working papers 28877 and 32441); a 2026 Brookings/Hamilton Project analysis by Lauren Bauer and colleagues reached the same conclusion (reported by Stateline, April 10, 2026, and Boise State Public Radio). Enrollment: about 37.8 million nationally in February 2026, down about 4.3 million year over year (ProPublica, from USDA FNS data); more than 5.5 million from January 2025 through March 2026 (FRAC); North Carolina about 1.5 million in January 2025 to under 1.2 million, down about 22 percent through March 2026 (NC Newsline, from NCDHHS; FRAC); about 90,000 NC adults expected to lose benefits under the work rules (NCDHHS). Children: about 776,000 fewer children across the 12 age-reporting states, about 46 percent of those states’ decline (ProPublica, June 2026); CBPP independently estimated more than 700,000 across those same states, the true national figure higher. Discontinued measure: in September 2025 the USDA terminated the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement behind its roughly 30-year Household Food Security report, calling it redundant; the edition covering 2024 was the last (USDA; NPR; FRAC). Local: about 29,000 Buncombe County SNAP participants (NCDHHS April 2025 county table, Buncombe 29,123) with an average benefit of about $171 per person per month; the roughly $60 million a year in local spending is derived from those figures; about one in ten county residents, against a resident population of 274,360 (U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2024); Ingles Markets is headquartered in Black Mountain, North Carolina. This is a fast-moving policy area; figures are current as of July 2026.

Adapted from Who Loses SNAP Now at Step Up AVL. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it. The framing and conclusions here are our own.

Part 1 of a five-part series, The SNAP Rewrite. Part 2 is live now: Who Loses SNAP Now. Still to come: Who Pays for SNAP Now, Who We Call Homeless, and What Would Actually Fix SNAP.

Almost everyone has heard of food stamps. Far fewer could say what they actually are, who gets them, or how much they are worth. The name shows up in the news, usually attached to a fight in Washington, and most of us fill in the rest from a guess.

So start from scratch. SNAP is smaller than most people think, it makes a bigger difference than most people expect, and it did not begin anywhere near where it is now. This is the plain version.

What it is

SNAP stands for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It used to be called Food Stamps, and a lot of people still call it that. It is a federal program, paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, that helps people with low incomes buy food.

It works through a card. Once a month, money loads onto an EBT card, short for Electronic Benefits Transfer, and it works like a debit card at the grocery store checkout. There are no paper coupons anymore. The money buys food and only food: groceries, bread, milk, meat, produce, seeds for a garden. It cannot buy hot prepared meals, alcohol, cigarettes, soap, diapers, or anything that is not food. It can buy soda and candy, which it treats as food like anything else on the shelf. Whether it should is a live fight: several states are now moving to bar those purchases, while defenders note SNAP families buy about what everyone else at their income buys.

Read the name again, because the first word is the important one. It is supplemental. SNAP was never meant to cover a family’s whole grocery bill. It is designed to stretch a tight budget, to fill the gap between what a household can spend on food and what it actually needs. That single word explains most of what surprises people about it.

The money is federal, but the program is run locally. A state agency, and in North Carolina the county, takes the applications, checks who qualifies, and manages the cases.

Who qualifies comes down mostly to income. North Carolina sets a generous line, about twice the federal poverty level, or roughly $5,400 a month for a family of four, with lower limits for smaller households and a few other rules. That is less of a cushion than it sounds, once you weigh it against what housing costs here: it takes an income of about $29 an hour just to afford a modest two-bedroom. You apply online through the state’s ePASS portal (epass.nc.gov) or in person at your county Department of Social Services.

Who actually gets it

There is a picture a lot of people carry of who is on food aid, and it is worth checking against the numbers. In a typical year, about four in five SNAP households include a child, someone over 60, or someone with a disability. About 39 percent of everyone on SNAP is a child. Most of the rest are working-age adults, and most of them work. SNAP fills the gap when the pay is low or the hours come and go. So no, SNAP is not full of people who could work and will not. That is not what the record shows.

• ~4 in 5 SNAP households include a child, someone over 60, or someone with a disability.

• 39% of everyone on SNAP is a child.

• Most working-age adults on SNAP work, often in unstable jobs.

How little it is

Here is the part almost no one guesses right. The average SNAP benefit works out to about six dollars per person per day. That is roughly a dollar ninety a meal. In North Carolina the average is about $171 per person per month.

There is a ceiling, and even the ceiling is low. The most a single person can get is $298 a month. For a family of four it is $994. Those are the maximums, the amounts for a household with almost no income at all. Most people get less, because SNAP counts what you already have coming in and fills in only part of the rest. The rule behind it is simple: the less you earn, the more you get, up to the max. The program figures a household can put about a third of its own income toward food, and SNAP covers the gap.

Six dollars a day does not go far. A gallon of milk and a dozen eggs together can cost more than a whole day’s benefit. It often does not last the month, either. Plenty of families run out in the third week and finish it at a food pantry or skipping meals. Anyone who has tried to feed a household on it will tell you the same thing: it helps, and it is not enough on its own.

But look at what even that little bit frees up. For a household choosing between the grocery bill and the rent, the power bill, or a prescription, SNAP is the one benefit it can lean on. Every dollar that goes on the food card is a dollar that can go to keeping the lights on or making rent. That is why a small food benefit matters far past the grocery aisle.

• ~$6 average benefit per person, per day (about $1.90 a meal).

• $171 North Carolina average per person, per month.

• $298 / $994 the monthly maximum for a single person / a family of four.

The difference it makes

So if it is that small, does it even matter? Yes. More than almost anything else out there.

Small as it is, SNAP is the largest thing standing between millions of people and an empty refrigerator. Research finds it cuts food insecurity by as much as 30 percent, and by more than that for children. No food drive comes close to that reach. Charity and SNAP are not the same size: for every meal provided by all of the food banks in the nation, SNAP provides about nine. We lay that out in why food banks cannot fix hunger.

It does more than feed people in the moment. The USDA finds that in a weak economy, every dollar in SNAP benefits turns into about $1.50 of business for local stores, because the money gets spent right away. And children who get enough to eat grow up healthier and do better later in life. Feeding a kid now is cheaper than treating what hunger does to them later.

The pattern holds in both directions. When food aid goes up, hunger goes down. When it gets cut, hunger climbs. That is not a theory, it is what the record shows every time it has been tried.

Where it came from

SNAP did not arrive fully formed. It grew and shrank and got renamed over eighty years, and knowing the shape of that helps make sense of the fights over it now.

The first food stamp program started in 1939, during the Depression, as a way to move surplus farm food to people who could not afford to eat. It ran a few years and closed. The idea came back as a pilot in 1961, and in 1964 Congress made it permanent with the Food Stamp Act. By 1974 it was available in every county in the country. A 1977 law dropped the old rule that people had to buy their stamps, which had kept out the poorest households, and that opened the door to far more people.

Work rules are not new either. Since the 1970s, most adults have had to register for work to get help. In 1996, a welfare-reform law went further. It said adults without children had to work or volunteer at least 20 hours a week or lose their benefits after three months. That is the same rule the 2025 law just stretched to cover many more people. It raised the top age from 54 to 64, and for the first time started the same clock on parents whose youngest child is 14 or older. It also removed the exemptions for veterans, people who are homeless, and young adults who had aged out of foster care, protections Congress had added only in 2023 that had barely taken effect.

In 2008 the program got the name it has now, SNAP, and the paper coupons gave way to the card. After that, enrollment rose and fell with the economy. It climbed during the Great Recession (December 2007 to June 2009) as millions lost work, peaked around 2013, and drifted back down as the recovery took hold. During the pandemic, emergency payments pushed both enrollment and benefits higher, until those extra payments ended in early 2023.

One part of that story is worth spelling out, because it explains why the benefit stays so low. The amount is based upon the Thrifty Food Plan, the government’s estimate of the minimum amount it costs to buy a healthy diet. For more than forty years, the rules let that estimate do nothing but keep pace with inflation. It could be repriced for what groceries cost, but never raised to actually buy more food, even as study after study found it wasn’t enough to feed a family for a full week. A 2018 farm law finally ordered a reevaluation, to be repeated every five years. In 2021 the benefit rose about 21 percent, roughly $36 more per person per month, the first true increase in the program’s history. It is also the raise critics attack hardest: the Government Accountability Office found the USDA ran the 2021 review without its usual outside vetting, though not that the old food budget had kept pace with what groceries cost. The 2025 law reversed it, ordering future updates back to inflation only. It does not expire on its own, so that single raise is the last one the law allows, unless and until Congress changes it.

And then 2025 changed the deal

In 2025 a new budget law made the largest cut to SNAP in its history, close to a fifth of the program. For the first time, it put states on the hook to help pay for the food itself, and it tightened who has to work to keep benefits and narrowed who qualifies.

That is a whole story of its own, and the rest of this series tells it. It starts with the people, in Who Loses SNAP Now, which follows the rolls already shrinking, faster in North Carolina than almost anywhere. Then Who Pays for SNAP Now lays out how the new law works and what it costs North Carolina, Who We Call Homeless looks at the people the new rules reach first, and What Would Actually Fix SNAP closes the series.

SNAP is about six dollars a day, a supplement and not a paycheck, and it can be spent on food and nothing else. It is small, and it still does more to hold back hunger than anything else we have.

The takeaway

SNAP is not what most people picture. It started as a way to move surplus food in the Depression and grew into the country’s main defense against an empty table. Knowing that is where an honest look at the changes has to start.

The SNAP Rewrite, a five-part series. 1. What SNAP Actually Is (you are here). 2. Who Loses SNAP Now (live). 3. Who Pays for SNAP Now (coming soon). 4. Who We Call Homeless (coming soon). 5. What Would Actually Fix SNAP (coming soon).

Sources & notes. What SNAP is and how it is delivered, and eligible items (soda and candy included; not hot prepared foods, alcohol, tobacco, or nonfood goods): USDA Food and Nutrition Service; USDA’s 2016 study found SNAP households’ purchases broadly resemble those of comparable non-SNAP households, with sweetened beverages among the top spending categories (”Foods Typically Purchased by SNAP Households”); in 2025 at least a dozen states received USDA waivers to bar SNAP soda and candy purchases, six by June and about twelve by that August. Benefit amounts: average benefit about $6.16 per person per day in FY2024, North Carolina about $171 per person per month (NCDHHS, 2025), maximums of $298 for one person and $994 for a household of four (FY2026). Who receives SNAP: FY2023, about 39 percent children, four in five households with a child, older adult, or person with a disability (USDA FNS); most working-age recipients work (CBPP). Impact: SNAP reduces food insecurity by as much as 30 percent, more among children, and every $1 in new benefits generates about $1.50 in local activity in a weak economy (CBPP; USDA); roughly 9 SNAP meals per 1 food-bank meal (Feeding America). Thrifty Food Plan history: the 2018 Farm Bill ordered a reevaluation; the 2021 reevaluation raised benefits about 21 percent, the GAO found it lacked a full project plan or independent peer review (GAO-23-105450); the 2025 law (P.L. 119-21) requires future reevaluations to be cost-neutral again. History and the 2025 law’s roughly $186 billion ten-year reduction: USDA FNS “A Short History of SNAP”; Congressional Budget Office; CRS R48552.

Adapted from What SNAP Actually Is at Step Up AVL. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it. The framing and conclusions here are our own.

Here is a question that should have an easy answer, and does not. How many short-term rentals are there in Buncombe County? Nobody can tell you. Back in 2023, Asheville Watchdog went looking and found the county does not audit them, cannot count them, and cannot even pull the tax they pay apart from what the hotels pay. Nobody has publicly checked since.

This is not a small corner of the economy. Short-term rentals are a $232 million-a-year business here, more than a third of all the lodging sold, and at the county’s 6 percent room tax that is something like $14 million a year in public money. Most of it arrives in a lump sum from Airbnb, filed under a single San Francisco address, with no way to tie a dollar to a house.

That should feel wrong, and the honest answer is that no one can promise you it isn’t. Book through Airbnb or Vrbo and the tax is collected automatically, so most of the money almost certainly comes in. But no one audits it, no one can match a payment to a house, and anything booked off-platform runs on the honor system. Whether every dollar owed actually gets paid is not a question anyone in Buncombe County can answer. The town cannot fully see this money, and it cannot spend it on housing. Both of those were decided in Raleigh.

The hotel tax is real, and it is large, and by law almost none of it can go to housing.

What no one can count

The only real government count of short-term rentals here is the City of Asheville’s permit roll, and it reaches only the owner-occupied homestays inside the city, under a thousand of them. Everything else, the whole-house rentals and every listing out in the county, goes uncounted. Not by sloppiness. A 2022 court decision, Schroeder versus Wilmington, held that North Carolina forbids a local government from making rentals register at all. The best full-county number, around 5,400, is an estimate a private company builds by scraping Airbnb and Vrbo from the outside.

So how does the county tax rentals it cannot count? It does not. The websites do. Under state law, Airbnb and Vrbo add the 6 percent at checkout and remit it for their hosts, and Buncombe has taken Airbnb’s money that way since 2015. But the payment arrives blind. Asheville Watchdog reported the mechanics in 2023: under a confidential 2015 agreement, Airbnb pays in a lump sum that does not name the properties, filed under one address, 888 Brannan Street, its San Francisco headquarters. There is no public list of the county’s five thousand-plus rentals, and the tax collector said plainly that the county does not typically audit the people who remit. Book a room off-platform and the whole duty falls to the owner, on the honor system.

So why does a nine-figure business run on the honor system? Not because anyone forgot to build the checks. The checks are illegal or bargained away. The registry that would let the county see who is renting is barred by the same state law that stops any North Carolina town from making rentals sign up. And Airbnb collects the tax only under that confidential 2015 deal, the one that lets it pay in a lump the county is not allowed to open. The state kept the money and gave up the receipts. Asheville Watchdog has reported that the travel industry itself largely shapes North Carolina’s room-tax law, which is part of why the rules leave so little for anyone to check.

So who is responsible for the tax on a Buncombe short-term rental? No one you can point to. The platform collects it but names nothing. The owner owes it but appears on no list. The county banks it but cannot audit it. The tourism authority spends it but never sees where it came from. The dollars are real. Whether all of them show up, no one can say, and the system was built so no one has to.

• $232M in short-term-rental revenue in Buncombe County in 2023-24, more than a third of all lodging sales (AirDNA, via The Assembly, 2025).

• ~$14M a year in occupancy tax that implies at 6 percent, which the county does not break out from hotels (Step Up AVL estimate, derived from the above).

• ~890 active city homestay permits, the only hard count, against roughly 5,400 estimated county-wide (City of Asheville / AirDNA).

Where it cannot go

The occupancy tax runs about $34 million in a normal year by the authority’s own projections, less since Helene knocked it down to $22.8 million, now climbing back. It does not enter the county’s general fund. It goes to the Tourism Development Authority, the board that runs Explore Asheville. And state law fences it to one job: bring in more visitors. That is not a conspiracy against Asheville. It is how visitor taxes work across most tourism states, so the money guests pay is not pulled into the services that property and sales taxes already cover. Housing sits outside the fence by design.

There is one narrow opening. In 2022 the county’s legislators cut the marketing share from three-quarters to two-thirds and set the rest aside for the community, part of it in a new pot called the LIFT fund. Advocates tested it. In 2024 a housing group asked LIFT for $1.5 million to build apartments at a site called Star Point, and more than two thousand people signed on, arguing that housing the workers who staff the hotels is tourism spending. The authority said no. It funded a greenway and cut the housing out, and its president would not even say whether housing could ever qualify, because the lodging industry had warned that paying for it could draw a lawsuit.

Then Raleigh closed even that, and the trigger is worth knowing. In May 2026 the state Supreme Court sided with Currituck County on the coast, ruling a county could stretch room-tax money to cover public safety. The legislature answered within weeks: Senate Bill 484, a statewide law, and the governor signed it in June. It named affordable housing, directly, as something occupancy-tax money may not fund, alongside public safety, water, and schools. One of Asheville’s own senators said it slams the door pretty hard. Vic Isley, who runs the tourism authority, put it flatter: Senate Bill 484 makes it very clear, she said, that you cannot use the occupancy tax for housing. Now the statute says so out loud.

Follow the money. Where a room-tax dollar can go, and the one place it can’t:

• The pot: about $34M a year, a 6 percent tax on every hotel and short-term-rental night, sent to the Buncombe County TDA.

• Two-thirds: marketing and administration (Explore Asheville).

• One-third, the community share: the Tourism Product Fund (ballparks and venues, $12.4M in 2025) and the LIFT fund (the one meant to reach past tourism).

• Affordable housing: blocked. A $1.5M request (Star Point) turned down in 2024, and barred outright by SB 484 in 2026.

The real lever

Be plain about the size of it, too. Even if every dollar could go to housing, and it cannot, thirty-odd million a year is real money but not a cure. The region is short more than 34,000 homes over five years, and the city’s own $8.4 million in 2026 bought its way toward about 205 units. Tourism money turned toward housing would help at the edges. It would not close a gap like that on its own.

So the slogan needs an edit. Tax the tourists is already done. The step that would actually move money is narrower, and it will not fit on a sign. The same law that bars housing leaves one door open: a local act, passed in Raleigh for Buncombe by name, can grant an exception. That is the real lever, and it runs uphill, because the legislature that would have to pass it just voted 109 to 3 the other way. Anyone who tells you the county can fix this on its own is pointing at the wrong building.

The money is real. The permission isn’t.

Asheville already taxes its visitors, and the take runs into the tens of millions. But state law fences almost all of it to a single job, bringing in more visitors, and the one crack that reaches the community pays for buildings, not homes. The hotel tax is not a solution someone is hiding from you. It is a solution the law does not allow, and in 2026 the state wrote that ban down in plain words.

That is worth knowing before the next council meeting, because it aims the anger at the right place. The way to make tourism pay for housing is not to demand the county do what it cannot. It is to win an exception in Raleigh, from the same legislature that just made the rule stricter. That is the harder ask, and it is the only one that ends with a key in someone’s hand.

Sources & notes. This piece builds on Asheville Watchdog’s reporting on Buncombe’s occupancy tax and short-term-rental oversight, and adds the 2026 SB 484 outcome and a derived tax estimate.

The tax: Buncombe County levies a 6 percent occupancy (room) tax on hotel and short-term-rental stays, collected for the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority (Explore Asheville). Fiscal-2025 revenue was projected at about $34.3 million and revised to roughly $22.8 million after Helene, the lowest since 2020; the adopted fiscal-2027 budget is about $34.5 million (Blue Ridge Public Radio, Feb. 2025 and June 25, 2026).

The formula: NC occupancy-tax law restricts room-tax revenue to tourism promotion and tourism-related uses; the limit is contested: Currituck County (Outer Banks) spent room-tax money on public safety, an appeals court said no, and on May 22, 2026 the N.C. Supreme Court reversed it and upheld the spending; SB 484 was the legislature’s response within weeks (WUNC, June 2, 2026). The 2022 change (Session Law 2022-40, enacted as H.B. 1057 from the Edwards-Daniel-Mayfield proposal filed as S.B. 914) cut the promotion/administration share from three-fourths to two-thirds and created the Tourism Product Development Fund and the LIFT fund (UNC School of Government). The 2025 $12.4M across eight projects came from the Tourism Product Development Fund (Explore Asheville). In LIFT’s April 2024 round, the authority awarded nearly $10 million across twelve projects (about 77 percent to city/county government) and declined Mountain Housing Opportunities’ $1.5 million Star Point affordable-housing request; its president declined to say whether housing could qualify, after the N.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association warned funding housing could invite a legal challenge (WHQR, April 24, 2024).

Short-term rentals: AirDNA data presented to the Buncombe County Planning Board counted about 5,428 short-term rentals as of 2024 (Spectrum Local News, Sept. 2025); the City of Asheville homestay-permit roll lists about 890 active permits (owner-occupied, city only). No county-wide registry exists: in Schroeder v. City of Wilmington (2022-NCCOA-210), the N.C. Court of Appeals held that G.S. 160D-1207(c) bars local governments from requiring an owner to register a property as a rental.

Collection: under N.C.’s marketplace-facilitator law (updated 2020), Airbnb and Vrbo collect and remit the occupancy tax for their hosts; Buncombe was one of the first four N.C. counties where Airbnb did so, from 2015. The lack of an audit, the absence of a public list of the county’s 5,000-plus rentals, and the confidential 2015 Airbnb agreement allowing lump-sum payments that do not identify properties were reported by Asheville Watchdog (“Vacation rentals are booming, but oversight is limited,” Sally Kestin, July 20, 2023); collection mechanics also detailed in UNC School of Government, Coates’ Canons, “Occupancy Taxes and Airbnb,” 2022. As of mid-2026 the county says it is shifting its room-occupancy-tax online filing to “a more robust platform” (Buncombe County Tax Department); a filing upgrade, not an audit program or a hotel-versus-rental breakout. The travel industry’s influence over N.C.’s room-tax law is documented in Asheville Watchdog, “Travel industry controls North Carolina’s room tax laws” (via Mountain Xpress).

Scale: STR revenue grew from under $33 million (FY2015-16) to more than $232 million in 2023-24, more than a third of county lodging sales (AirDNA, via The Assembly, 2025); the ~$14 million implied tax is a Step Up AVL estimate (6 percent of $232 million), which the county does not break out. SB 484 (Session Law 2026-15; N.C. House 109 to 3; signed by Gov. Stein) bars occupancy-tax spending on affordable housing and other general-government services statewide, unless authorized by a local act. The Asheville region’s five-year need of 34,358 homes is from the 2025 Asheville Region Housing Needs Assessment (Bowen National Research); the city’s May 2026 commitment of about $8.39 million toward 205 affordable units is from the City of Asheville. All figures are local to Buncombe County / Asheville.

Adapted from the full article at Step Up AVL: The Tax No One Can Count.

For two years the state has been trying to pass a bill that bans cities and counties from letting people camp on public land. It cleared the House in 2025, stalled, and came back in June 2026 with sharper teeth. As we write, it is one vote away from the governor’s desk.

The promise behind it is simple: clear the tents and the problem goes with them. It will not. A camping ban does not build a single place for anyone to sleep. It makes the tent illegal, hands the cost of the shortage to the county, and sends the bill, in fines and in dollars, to the people least able to pay it. The states that went first already show how this plays out.

What House Bill 437 actually does

The bill began as House Bill 781 and now rides in House Bill 437. It forbids any city or county from regularly allowing people to camp or sleep on public property: parks, sidewalks, rights of way, the grounds of public buildings. A local government can set aside its own land as a sanctioned campsite, but only for up to a year, only when shelters are full, and only if a state agency signs off within 45 days. That site has to come with restrooms, running water, security, coordination of mental-health and addiction services, and a ban on drugs and alcohol.

Then comes the part with the real force. Any resident or business owner, or the attorney general, can sue a local government that allows camping, and a winning plaintiff can recover legal fees. The city gets a brief written-notice period to clear the camp before the suit lands. So the law does not just permit enforcement. It lets a single neighbor or storefront compel it, in court, at the county’s expense.

The bill carries no money. There is no state funding for the shelters it assumes, the sanctioned camps it requires, or the policing it invites; reporting on the Senate version notes it adds no funding for local jurisdictions, while a sponsor pointed instead to existing federal grants. It is a mandate without a state check attached.

• $0 in state funding attached to the mandate (NC).

• 1 year the longest a sanctioned camp may operate before re-approval (NC).

• Anyone can sue a non-compliant city: any resident, business, or the attorney general (NC).

Why this is happening everywhere at once

North Carolina did not invent this. In June 2024, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled six to three that a city may punish people for sleeping outside even when there is no shelter bed to send them to. That removed the last legal brake. In the year that followed, more than 320 bills to criminalize homelessness were introduced across the country and roughly 230 became law.

Most of them trace to one template. The Cicero Institute, a think tank that argues Housing First has failed, wrote a model camping-ban bill and carried it state to state. North Carolina’s version is a close cousin. The same push runs through Washington now, where a 2025 executive order is pulling federal money away from permanent housing; we covered that turn, and the roughly $1.4 million of local housing money caught in it, in a separate piece. This one is about the law coming to our own legislature, and what it does on the ground.

The states that went first

Does banning camping reduce homelessness? Where the laws have been in place long enough to judge, the answer is no.

Texas passed the first statewide version in 2021. In Austin, the first year of enforcing the city’s own voter-approved camping ban produced about 325 citations and a single arrest, and homelessness rose about 20 percent; cleanups there have since run as high as $150,000 apiece. The one Texas city that actually drove its numbers down, Houston, did it the other way, by housing people first; its roughly 63 percent drop since 2011 came from apartments, not citations.

Tennessee went further in 2022 and made camping on public land a felony, the first state to do it. Two years in, a public-records review found four felony arrests statewide and zero prosecutions. District attorneys would not pursue them. The penalty changed the threat on the street; it did not change the count. What it did change was the bill, by shifting the cost of cleanups and services onto local governments.

Missouri tried the same playbook and shows the last twist. Its 2022 ban was struck down by the state’s high court at the end of 2023, and as of June 2026 it has not been put back on the books. A bill to revive it cleared a Senate committee but never got a floor vote. The law that was supposed to fix the street is simply gone, and the street is unchanged.

Be fair about the evidence. The one nationwide study to test this, a difference-in-differences look at the hundred largest cities, found no measurable effect on homelessness either way, if anything a small and statistically insignificant rise. And where a sweep comes with real outreach it does move some people inside; Austin’s housing-focused effort relocated more than 900 people from camps over four years. But that is the outreach and the beds doing the work, not the ban. What stays documented on the ban’s own side is the cost and the citations. The drop in homelessness is the part no one has been able to show.

• ~325 Austin citations in year one, against roughly 1 arrest (TX).

• 4 Tennessee felony-camping arrests in two years; zero prosecutions (TN).

• 0 states where a camping ban has been shown to lower homelessness.

The other side has a point

Take the case for the ban at its strongest, because it has one. An encampment on a sidewalk is a real problem. It is not safe for the people in it or easy for the people around it, and a downtown that wants to stay open has a fair stake in clearing it. Being tired of tents that never seem to move is not a cruel position. It is a normal one.

But wanting the tent gone is not the same as having somewhere to put the person. That is the gap the ban never closes. Clearing a camp without a bed to move people into just relocates it a few blocks, minus whatever the sweep destroyed, plus a citation that makes the next apartment harder to rent. The honest fix for a sidewalk full of tents is a building full of beds. A ban does not add one.

The frustration behind the ban is real. The answer to a tent is a bed, and the ban builds none.

What it would cost the county that obeys it

Now bring it home. Buncombe County counted 334 people sleeping unsheltered in its 2026 tally, up from 219 two years earlier, against shelters already near capacity and a bed shortage that Helene made worse. Under the bill, a sanctioned camp is allowed only when shelters are full. Here, they routinely are. So the county would face a hard choice: stand up a state-approved camp, or wait to be sued for not clearing the tents.

Stand up the camp and the bill arrives with no state money behind it. A site that genuinely meets the law, with restrooms, running water, around-the-clock security, and real coordination of mental-health and addiction care, runs in line with what other cities spend on managed camps and safe-sleeping sites: realistically $25,000 to $30,000 per person each year. At the scale of our unsheltered count, that is roughly $8 to $10 million a year, every year. A bare-bones version still starts north of $3 million. None of it is funded.

Here is the part that should stop the conversation. That per-person cost is about what it costs to actually house someone, and to do far more than house them. Homeward Bound’s Compass Point is permanent supportive housing, which means the apartment is only the start. It comes with a caseworker, help getting into mental-health and addiction treatment, and the steady day-to-day support that keeps a person stable once they are inside. That combination, the home and the help together, is what keeps people housed: across Homeward Bound’s permanent supportive housing, more than nine in ten stayed housed in 2025. Homeward Bound puts the cost of that program at under $15,000 per resident a year. A sanctioned camp would cost roughly twice that and deliver none of it: no apartment, no caseworker, no treatment, no way out, just a serviced tent. You would pay more to hold someone in a tent than to put them in an apartment with a caseworker.

• 334 people unsheltered in Buncombe, 2026 count, up from 219 in 2024 (local).

• $8 to $10 million a year, the likely cost of a compliant sanctioned camp, unfunded (local estimate).

• Under $15,000 Homeward Bound’s stated yearly cost to house someone, services included (local).

Two honest caveats keep this from being too clean. Supportive housing is not only cheaper per person than the camp; it pays part of itself back, in fewer emergency-room visits and jail nights, which a camp does not. And it is not a fix for everyone. For the hardest cases, serious mental illness or active addiction, an apartment by itself is not enough; it has to come with treatment, which is exactly the help a camp leaves out. Neither caveat saves the ban. Both point the same way the numbers do: put the money into the housing and the care, not into managing the street.

And the lawsuits are not a side risk. The bill’s private right of action invites any resident or business to drag the city into court over a camp, on the county’s dime, at a moment when the City of Asheville and the county are already stretched thin from the storm. Local officials have flagged exactly this exposure.

If the goal is fewer tents

If the point is really to clear the sidewalks, there are things that do it, and a ban is not one of them. Fund the shelter beds the bill only assumes are already there. Let builders put up the smaller, cheaper homes our rules mostly prevent, so people stop falling into homelessness faster than anyone can house them. Put treatment alongside the housing for the people who need both. And if a county is going to stand up a sanctioned camp anyway, fund it for real and build a way out of it, a path into housing, not a year-long lot with a sign on it. Every one of those costs money. So does the ban. The only question is what the money buys.

The takeaway

A ban is not a bed. It can push a tent off a sidewalk, but it cannot make the apartment that empties the tent for good, and the shortage that filled it does not disappear when camping becomes a crime. It just moves: onto a county handed an eight-figure mandate with no money behind it, and onto people who get a fine and a record instead of a door that locks. The states that went first have the receipts: citations, sweeps, lawsuits, and a count that did not budge. The only thing that has ever cleared an encampment and kept it cleared is housing the people in it. North Carolina is about to spend real money to learn that the hard way.

Sources & notes. The bill, North Carolina: House Bill 781 / House Bill 437, “Unauthorized Public Camping & Sleeping” and the Senate committee substitute adding drug-free-zone penalties (N.C. General Assembly; UNC School of Government Legislative Reporting Service); House passage May 2025 and Senate passage June 2026, awaiting House concurrence as of late June 2026 (N.C. General Assembly bill history; NC Newsline; WUNC; Asheville Watchdog); the sponsor’s statement that no state funding is attached (WUNC). The legal trigger, national: City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, U.S. Supreme Court (June 28, 2024); the post-ruling count of more than 320 bills introduced and roughly 230 enacted (ACLU; National Homelessness Law Center); Cicero Institute model “Reducing Street Homelessness Act.” The record in other states: Texas House Bill 1925 (the 2021 statewide ban) and Austin’s separate voter-approved Proposition B, whose first year of enforcement produced roughly 325 citations and one arrest with homelessness up about 20 percent; later per-cleanup costs as high as $150,000 (a 2026 figure, not a first-year one); and Houston’s housing-led decline (Texas Tribune; City of Austin open-data dashboard; the City of Austin’s housing-focused encampment initiative, which reports more than 900 people relocated from camps; Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County); Tennessee’s felony-camping law and the public-records finding of four arrests and no prosecutions in two years (Tennessee General Assembly; WKRN); Missouri House Bill 1606 struck down in Byrd v. State (Mo. Supreme Court, Dec. 19, 2023) and not re-enacted as of June 2026, with the 2024 revival bill (SB 1336) dying in committee (Missouri Revisor of Statutes; Missouri Senate). Local: Buncombe County point-in-time count of 334 people unsheltered in 2026, up from 219 in 2024, with shelters near capacity after Helene (Asheville Watchdog; Blue Ridge Public Radio; Buncombe County Continuum of Care); the estimated $25,000 to $30,000 per-person yearly operating cost of a compliant sanctioned camp, drawn from audited managed-camp and safe-sleeping programs in Los Angeles, Portland, San Diego, and Minneapolis and from North Carolina security and human-service wages (City of Los Angeles Controller; Portland State University / Multnomah County evaluation; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; see our research library); Homeward Bound’s stated cost for its permanent supportive housing of under $15,000 per resident per year (homewardboundwnc.org; corroborated by Asheville Watchdog at roughly $14,000 per household), and its 92 percent housing-retention rate in 2025 (Homeward Bound of WNC); evidence that supportive housing offsets part of its cost through reduced emergency-room, jail, and crisis use (Urban Institute analysis of Denver’s supportive housing program). The one nationwide before-and-after study of these ordinances (Lebovits and Sullivan, “Do Criminalization Policies Impact Local Homelessness?”, Policy Studies Journal, 2025, a difference-in-differences analysis of the 100 largest cities) found no statistically significant effect on homelessness; other outcome figures here are journalistic and city-reported, and no jurisdiction has been shown to reduce homelessness with a ban. National figures are labeled national; cost ranges are estimates and are labeled as such. This is a fast-moving bill; figures are current as of June 2026.

Adapted from A Ban Is Not a Bed at Step Up AVL. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it. The framing and conclusions here are our own.

For most of the last twenty years, federal homelessness money followed a simple rule. You give a person a stable home first, with no demand that they be sober or in treatment, and you build the rest of the help on top of that floor. The approach has a name, Housing First, and a long evidence record behind it.

In the summer of 2025 the federal government decided to stop. An executive order told its housing and health agencies to end support for Housing First and to start tying housing to treatment. There is a real problem behind that decision, and a real risk in the answer. The money that pays for permanent housing in Asheville and everywhere else is now being pulled toward a model that is less tested than the one it replaces, and the change is being fought in court as you read this.

The federal government changed its mind

The instrument is Executive Order 14321, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” signed on July 24, 2025. It directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Health and Human Services to end support for Housing First, and where a person has a serious mental illness or addiction, to require them to be in treatment as a condition of getting help.

The order reaches past housing money, too. It directs the Justice Department to help states widen involuntary commitment, the legal power to hold and treat a person against their will, and to undo court rulings and agreements that have limited it. The stated goal is to move more homeless people who have serious mental illness or addiction off the street and into treatment, including institutional treatment, whether or not they agree to it. Court-ordered outpatient treatment is part of the same push, and federal grant money is steered toward the cities and states that use these tools. For a place like Buncombe County, that runs into a hard limit: court-ordered treatment needs beds and programs to send people to, and Western North Carolina, whose state psychiatric hospital sits an hour east in Morganton, is short on both.

On the money side, HUD rewrote the rules of its Continuum of Care competition, the roughly four billion dollars a year that is the single largest federal source for local homelessness programs, to steer it away from permanent housing. An early version would have capped permanent supportive housing at 30 percent of that spending, down from about 87 percent today. That version was withdrawn under lawsuit and is still contested. On the health side, a new SAMHSA program called STREETS, about $96 million, funds street outreach and treatment and explicitly bars Housing First; cities, counties, and tribes can apply, but the nonprofits that actually house people cannot, except as junior partners.

It did not start in the White House

The claim that Housing First failed did not begin with the administration. The Cicero Institute, founded by the tech investor Joe Lonsdale, wrote much of the model legislation and argued in print that Housing First should be rejected outright. The Manhattan Institute supplied the longer intellectual case and, in early 2025, a plan to convert the federal homelessness grant into a state block grant that drops the Housing First requirement. NPR has traced that plan into HUD’s overhaul. What turned the argument into enforceable policy was a court: in June 2024, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled six to three that a city may punish people for sleeping outside even when there is no shelter bed available. Knowing where an idea came from is not the same as knowing whether it is right, so the rest of this takes the argument on its merits.

Strong for one thing, quiet on the rest

Start by giving Housing First credit exactly where it has earned it, and only there. Whether it keeps people housed is one of the most replicated findings in the field. The Canadian At Home / Chez Soi trial, more than 2,000 people across five cities, found 62 percent of Housing First tenants stably housed against 31 percent in usual care. On that question the evidence is about as strong as social policy gets.

That is also where the strength stops. Housing First does not cure addiction or mental illness, and it never claimed to. When the National Academies reviewed the research in 2018, they found the housing holds, but that gains in health, drug use, and work are hard to find beyond the housing itself. It is a platform for treatment, not a treatment by itself.

It has not brought the national numbers down either, and the reason is built into what it does. Housing First decides who gets out of homelessness. It does little about who keeps falling in, and the inflow is set by the cost of housing, not by any program. When rents outrun wages, more people slide into homelessness than any rehousing system can move back out. So the count climbed for years to record highs, 771,480 people on a single night in January 2024. The January 2025 count finally dipped, to 745,652, the first national decline since 2016, but the drop came mostly from families. The part of the problem this fight is about did not ease: unsheltered homelessness is up 36 percent since 2013 and chronic homelessness up 81 percent, both near record. That is the pressure critics press hardest, and it is real.

The other side has a point

Take the argument for the change at its strongest, because it has one. Encampments and overdoses sit on the same blocks, day after day. In some high-cost cities the spending rose while the street got worse. Being frustrated with a system that houses people one at a time and leaves the illness and the drugs on the sidewalk is not a fringe position.

Part of that critique is simply right. A home with no care attached is not the goal, and housing stripped of the services meant to come with it is the exact way Housing First fails when it fails. But the honest answer to housing without treatment is to fund the treatment next to the housing, which Housing First was built to allow. It is not to make the housing conditional on the treatment. Those are different policies, and the difference is the whole argument.

And the replacement is not the safer bet it is sold as. No rigorous trial shows that conditioning housing on treatment does better on housing and health together, and the record on forced treatment runs the wrong way: a Swedish national study found overdose deaths spiked in the weeks after people left compulsory care. The new programs are not all alike. Some are real attempts to braid housing and treatment together; others, like STREETS, bar low-barrier housing outright. The strongest of them end up doing most of what Housing First already asked for. The weakest hold the housing back until the person earns it.

The fair criticism of Housing First is real. The better answer to it is to add the treatment, not to subtract the housing.

About $1.4 million runs through this

In Buncombe County, the program most exposed is Homeward Bound’s permanent supportive housing, which draws the largest single share of local Continuum of Care money, about $1.4 million. That is the line most directly in the path of a rule that pulls dollars out of permanent housing.

It is worth being precise about what that money buys, because it is not the stripped-down housing critics have in mind. Homeward Bound’s model is permanent supportive housing, an apartment paired with the case management and recovery support meant to keep a person stable, not a key handed over and forgotten. Its Compass Point Village holds 85 such apartments, and in 2025, 92 percent of its supportive-housing residents stayed housed. That is the home and the help together, the version the evidence rewards, and it is the kind of program the redirect puts most at risk.

The state is leaning the same way. North Carolina’s House Bill 781 would bar cities from allowing public camping and let them designate a sanctioned site only if it bans alcohol and drug use. It has passed the state House and is waiting in the Senate. The federal picture is not settled either: after lawsuits, HUD withdrew the harshest version of its rules in December 2025, and in March 2026 a court ruled against it. But a softer replacement still redirects money toward transitional housing, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an affordable-housing advocacy group, estimates it could put at least 97,000 people across the country at risk of losing their housing.

The bottom line

Housing First is not a miracle, and the people moving against it are not all acting in bad faith. It reliably keeps people housed, and it does not treat what made them sick. Both of those are true, and an honest policy has to hold them at the same time. The answer the evidence points to is the one neither slogan sells: keep the housing that works, fund the treatment it was always missing, and build enough housing to slow the inflow no program can outrun. The federal turn does something narrower and riskier. It conditions the housing on the treatment, defunds the part with the strongest record to pay for the part with the least, and bets a proven floor on an unproven one. Asheville did not pick that bet, but about $1.4 million of its housing money is riding on it.

Sources & notes. Federal policy, national: Executive Order 14321 (signed July 24, 2025; Federal Register 90 FR 35817), including its civil-commitment and grant-priority directives. HUD Continuum of Care restructuring and the permanent-supportive-housing cap: HUD No. 25-132; the withdrawn FY2025 notice and its 30 percent cap (against roughly 87 percent today); the replacement FY2026 notice and litigation timeline (withdrawn Dec. 8, 2025; court ruling for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, March 3, 2026); the at-risk estimate of at least 97,000 people from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an affordable-housing advocacy group. SAMHSA “STREETS” program (NOFO SM-26-019), $96 million. Origin: Cicero Institute, “Rejecting Housing First” (2024); Manhattan Institute model legislation (Eide and Glock, Feb. 2025), as traced by NPR; Grants Pass v. Johnson (June 2024). Evidence: At Home / Chez Soi randomized trial (Mental Health Commission of Canada); National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2018), Permanent Supportive Housing, on reliable housing gains without consistent health gains; the national homelessness count of 771,480 in January 2024 and the slight decline to 745,652 in January 2025 (first national decrease since 2016, driven mostly by families) with unsheltered up 36 percent and chronic up 81 percent since 2013 (HUD 2024 and 2025 Annual Homeless Assessment Reports, point-in-time counts); reviews finding no clinical advantage for coerced treatment, including a Swedish national-registry study of post-discharge overdose. Local: Homeward Bound permanent supportive housing as the largest single share of Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care funding, about $1.4 million (Asheville Watchdog; Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care); its 85-apartment Compass Point Village and 92 percent of supportive-housing residents staying housed in 2025 (Homeward Bound of WNC impact reporting); North Carolina House Bill 781 status (N.C. General Assembly).

National figures are labeled national; the dollar figure for Homeward Bound is local. This is an actively litigated, fast-moving area; figures are current as of June 2026.

Adapted from Strings Attached at Step Up AVL. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it. The framing and conclusions here are our own

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A housing bill cleared Congress this week with the kind of margin almost nothing gets anymore. The House passed it 358 to 32, a day after the Senate, and it is headed to the President, who backs it and is expected to sign it within days. It is called the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and the people who wrote it are calling it the biggest housing law in a generation.

From here, the right question is not how big it is. It is which parts reach the mountains, and when. Read it from Asheville, with the flood still in the room, and the answer is narrower and more useful than the headlines.

A big law that spends almost nothing

The first thing to understand is what kind of law this is. It bundles dozens of smaller bills into twelve titles, and it is mostly rules, not dollars. It cuts red tape on environmental reviews so small and infill projects move faster. It redefines manufactured housing. It lifts caps on existing programs, funds a handful of pilots, and orders a stack of studies. The very last section is titled, in plain language, No Additional Funds Authorized.

So set the expectation correctly. This is not a check written to Asheville. It is a change to the plumbing: how housing gets approved, financed, and preserved across the whole country. That can matter a great deal over years. It will not move a single rent this month.

Better machinery for the next flood, and this one

The provision that lands hardest here is the one almost no national story led with. The bill rebuilds the federal program that pays for long-term disaster recovery, the one Western North Carolina is living on right now.

After Helene, HUD sent the City of Asheville about 225 million dollars in disaster-recovery money, part of roughly 1.43 billion for North Carolina as a whole. If that sounds like enough to rebuild a region, the last year has been a lesson in why it is not. The dollars arrive under a program that Congress has rewritten from scratch after nearly every disaster, with no standing rules, which is a big reason the money moves so slowly. Asheville’s single-family repair program, after a recent reallocation, is now expected to fix or rebuild on the order of 55 to 65 homes. The need is many times that.

• $225M in HUD disaster-recovery money to the City of Asheville for Helene.

• $1.43B to North Carolina statewide, most of it for the hardest-hit counties.

• 3 years: the new authorization for the disaster program, with a standing HUD office to run it.

Here is what the bill changes. It authorizes that disaster-recovery program for three years instead of inventing it again from nothing, and it builds a standing Office of Disaster Management and Resiliency inside HUD to run it, with a set formula for sending money out and fixed rules for coordinating with FEMA. In plain terms, it turns an improvised scramble into something closer to a system.

Be honest about the limit. None of this is new Helene money. It does not speed up a check that is already stuck in this year’s process so much as it changes the rules for next time, and steadies the rules on what is left of this time. For a region that may face the next storm before it finishes digging out of this one, a faster, less improvised pipeline is worth having. It is just not the same thing as cash.

Four more that fit the mountains

Past the disaster machinery, four smaller provisions match the way people actually live and lose housing out here.

• Rural rentals. It keeps rental aid attached to old USDA rural apartments as their federal mortgages come due, aiming to preserve homes for about 400,000 rural families nationwide. Out here, that is preservation, the cheapest kind of help there is.

• Manufactured homes. It updates the federal definition of manufactured housing and reauthorizes a program to stabilize manufactured-home communities for seven years. In the mountains, factory-built housing is much of what working families can still afford, and much of what the flood took.

• Shelter flexibility. It lets a city waive the cap that limits how much emergency-shelter grant money can go to beds and street outreach. More room to fund a bed. Not much new money to fund it with.

• Investor limits. A section titled Homes Are For People, Not Corporations restricts large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes, a pressure Asheville’s market has felt for years.

The last stretch runs through here

It would be easy to read a law this size as a rescue. It is closer to a set of tools, and the tools only work where someone picks them up.

Most of the supply-side pieces depend on three things the bill cannot deliver on its own: HUD writing the rules, Congress later funding the pilots it only authorized, and local zoning the law does not touch. Buncombe County has already cleared the last of its single-family-only zoning. The City of Asheville has adopted part of its own missing-middle plan and left part of it on the shelf. The new law rewards exactly the towns that finish that work, and it cannot make a town finish it.

The takeaway

A law can rebuild the machine that delivers help. It cannot stand in the kitchen and hand it over.

The new disaster office, the formula, the standing rules: those are the pipes. The water still has to reach a particular house on a particular road in Swannanoa, and that last stretch runs through a county recovery office and a city zoning board, not Washington. The bill makes the next flood’s response faster and less improvised than this one has been. For the families still pulling drywall out of the last one, that is a promise about the future, not a check for the present. Worth having. Worth knowing the difference.

Sources & notes. Bill provisions and section titles: U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act” section-by-section (Chairman Tim Scott), and analyses by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Passage (House 358 to 32, following Senate passage, the week of June 22, 2026) and the expected signing: NBC News and CNN reporting. Asheville’s roughly $225 million HUD disaster-recovery grant and the single-family repair program scale (about 55 to 65 homes after reallocation): Blue Ridge Public Radio and WLOS reporting, 2026, and the City of Asheville CDBG-DR Action Plan. North Carolina’s roughly $1.43 billion statewide allocation: N.C. Department of Commerce / Rebuild NC. Rural rental preservation (about 400,000 families), the manufactured-housing and shelter-grant provisions, and the institutional-investor limit: the bill’s section-by-section and USDA Rural Development program materials.

National figures are labeled as national. Dollar figures are stated as the bill heads to the President’s signature; the statutory specifics, including the three-year authorization and the program rules, should be confirmed against the enrolled text once published.

Adapted from The Housing Law and the Flood at Step Up AVL. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it. The framing and conclusions here are our own.

Ask most people to describe someone going hungry in America and you get the same figure: out of work, out of luck, probably without a home. That picture is real, and it is only part of the story, and the missing part is large. A great many of the people who cannot reliably afford food have jobs, pay rent, and earn just enough to be turned away from the country’s main food benefit.

They sit a little above a line. SNAP, the federal food program, cuts off eligibility at an income threshold, and above it the help simply stops, whether or not a family can actually cover groceries. The line is a number on a federal form. Hunger does not check the form before it arrives. (For how the pieces fit together, start with the companion primer, How to Think About Food Insecurity.)

Earning too much for help and too little for food is not a contradiction. For millions, it is the ordinary shape of the month.

Where the cutoff falls

SNAP eligibility turns on an income cutoff, and the cutoff is lower than most people assume.

To receive SNAP, a household’s gross income generally has to fall at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that came to roughly $41,800 a year in 2025. Some states lift the ceiling toward 200 percent of poverty, about $64,300 for that same family, but across much of the country the 130 percent mark is the wall.

Cross it by a dollar and the benefit ends. The cutoff does not ask what rent costs in your county, or what a week of groceries runs at your store, or whether a medical bill ate the margin last month. It asks one question, about gross income, and answers in a single word. Plenty of households clear that bar and still cannot keep the refrigerator full.

Forty-four percent

Far from a rare edge case, this is built into how the program is drawn.

• 44% of food-insecure Americans likely earn too much to qualify for SNAP (Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap 2025).

• 21 million people: the size of that group nationally, a 2023 estimate (Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap 2025).

• ~12% of those who do qualify are estimated not to be enrolled (USDA FNS, FY2022).

Feeding America’s county-level study estimates that in 2023, about 21 million people, roughly 44 percent of everyone experiencing food insecurity in the United States, may have earned too much to qualify for SNAP. More than two in five hungry Americans, in other words, are likely on the wrong side of the line.

Who the line leaves out (everyone facing hunger in the U.S., 2023):

• ~56% may be income-eligible for SNAP.

• 44%, about 21 million people, likely earn too much to qualify.

The gap runs in a second direction, too. Among the people who do qualify, not all are enrolled; the USDA estimates that about 12 percent of those eligible do not receive benefits, whether from paperwork, stigma, or simply not knowing they qualify. Put the two groups together and the program, vital as it is, reaches a smaller circle than the hungry population it sits inside.

A national line meets a local price

The cutoff is a national number. The cost of a grocery cart is a local one. In Buncombe, the two pull hard against each other.

A federal income cutoff treats a dollar in Asheville the same as a dollar in a low-cost county three states away. But Buncombe carries one of the highest costs of living in North Carolina. Just Economics of Western North Carolina set a living wage for a single adult here at $24.10 an hour for 2026, well above what much local work pays and far above the SNAP line. A person can earn enough to lose eligibility and nowhere near enough to absorb Asheville rent and Asheville grocery prices.

That is why the line at a local pantry includes people who walked in straight from a shift. They are not gaming anything. They are employed, ineligible, and short on food at the same time, which the math allows and the stereotype does not.

The food bank is the one part of the system with a door for them. Pantries do not run SNAP’s income test, which is exactly why the charitable network matters for this group, and why food banks count the income-ineligible among the people they exist to serve. That is a separate question from whether charity can replace the federal benefit; it cannot, and that is taken up in a companion piece, Why Food Banks Can’t Fix Hunger.

Hunger does not end at the eligibility line

Qualifying for help and needing it are two different things, and the distance between them has a number: about 21 million people, more than two in five of everyone who is food insecure, likely earning just enough to be turned away from SNAP. Most of them are working, and in a high-cost place like Buncombe they are easy to find, one aisle over at the pantry, still in a work shirt.

The line is not a fact of the world; it is a choice about where help stops, drawn with little regard for what food and rent cost in any particular county, and it can be drawn differently. Until it is, the most honest thing we can do is stop picturing hunger as something that happens only to other kinds of people, and start seeing the neighbor who earns a paycheck and still runs out of food before the month is over.

Sources & notes. National figures: the estimate that about 21 million people, roughly 44 percent of those experiencing food insecurity, may have been income-ineligible for SNAP in 2023 is from Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap 2025, which uses modeled estimates and accounts for state-specific gross income limits (not asset tests). The same report notes that SNAP gross income limits range from 130 percent to 200 percent of the federal poverty line (about $41,795 to $64,300 for a family of four). Separately, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service estimates that about 12 percent of people eligible for SNAP do not participate (an 88 percent participation rate, fiscal year 2022). Across the Carolinas, Feeding America estimates more than 45.5 percent of people facing hunger may not qualify for SNAP. Map the Meal Gap county and district figures are modeled and trail current conditions by roughly two years.

SNAP’s federal baseline gross income limit of 130 percent of the federal poverty line, and its translation to roughly $41,800 a year for a family of four in 2025, reflect federal poverty guidelines and USDA SNAP eligibility rules; some states set higher limits through broad-based categorical eligibility.

Local context: a living wage of $24.10 per hour for a single adult in Buncombe County (Just Economics of Western North Carolina, 2026). Buncombe carries one of the higher costs of living in North Carolina.

Adapted from The People Just Above the Line at Step Up AVL. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it.

You have probably done it without noticing. You pass a man asleep in a doorway, a woman with a cart outside the library, and under the sympathy a quieter thought arrives: that wouldn’t be me. Not said out loud. Not cruel. Just a small certainty that whatever happened to that person belongs to a different kind of life than yours.

This page takes the thought seriously, because most of us carry some version of it, and because it is doing more work than it looks. It is not really a judgment about them. It is a belief about the distance between you and the street, and about what that distance is made of.

The line you are drawing is real. It is just not made of character.

A line we draw

Be fair to the thought first, because it is not stupid. It is partly true, and partly the mind protecting itself.

There is a real difference between most people reading this and the people they walk around on the sidewalk, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The line exists. The mistake is in what we assume it is made of.

The quiet story says the line is character. It says the person outside got there through some failure of will or judgment that you do not share, and that your own steadiness is what keeps you indoors. It is a comforting story, because it means the street is a place you earn your way clear of, and therefore a place you cannot accidentally fall into.

The evidence says the line is mostly made of money you are not thinking about. Not income. Cushion. The savings, the open credit, the family who could wire you a few hundred dollars, the parent with a spare room. The buffer between a normal month and a catastrophe. And that buffer is thinner, and handed out far less evenly, than almost anyone who has one believes.

How thin the buffer is

There is a standard way to measure it, and the number has barely moved in a decade.

Every year the Federal Reserve asks a large national sample one plain question: if you had a surprise $400 expense, a car repair, an urgent-care visit, could you cover it right now using cash or its equivalent? In the 2024 survey, released in May 2025, 37% of U.S. adults said they could not. Not that it would sting. That they would have to put it on a card they could not pay off, borrow it, sell something, or simply not cover it at all.

Four hundred dollars. That is the width of the moat for more than a third of the country. One transmission, one bad week, and the buffer is gone.

Now the part the honest version has to include, because it cuts against the easy slogan. The risk is not spread evenly, and “it could happen to anyone” is too glib. The same Fed data show the cushion tracking almost exactly the things a person never earned for themselves:

• 37% of U.S. adults could not cover a surprise $400 expense with cash or its equivalent (Federal Reserve, 2024 survey).

• 29% of adults without a high-school degree could cover it, against 82% of those with a bachelor’s degree or more.

• 43% of Black adults could cover it, against 71% of white adults. The cushion is real, and unevenly handed out.

Read those down the column. A bachelor’s degree, often paid for by someone other than the person who holds it, roughly triples the odds of having the cushion. Being born into a family with something to fall back on does the same quiet work. The buffer is real, and it is distributed by circumstances that have very little to do with how careful or hardworking anyone is.

What builds the cushion:

• Savings, or someone’s. A few months of expenses in the bank, or a parent with a spare room and the means to help.

• A degree, often paid for. It roughly triples the odds of having a buffer, and most people did not fund their own.

• A home bought in time. Equity and a payment that does not climb, in a neighborhood that kept its low-cost homes.

What burns through it:

• A medical event. An injury or a diagnosis that stops the work and starts the bills at the same time.

• A cut in hours. Not a firing, just a thinner schedule the rent does not shrink to match.

• A rent increase. One letter the budget cannot absorb, in a market with nowhere cheaper to go.

Read the two lists honestly. Almost nothing in the first is character. Almost nothing in the second is a moral failing, and any of it could land on a careful person next month.

The math in an expensive town

A thin buffer is one thing. A thin buffer in an expensive town is another, because the expensive town is where it gets tested.

• $29.08 an hour is the full-time wage needed to afford a modest two-bedroom at Asheville fair-market rent ($25.90 for a one-bedroom).

• $24.10 an hour is the 2026 living-wage benchmark for Buncombe County. A great deal of local work pays under even this.

• +9% is the rise in homelessness associated nationally with each $100 increase in a metro’s median rent (GAO, 2020).

By the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2025 figures, a full-time worker has to earn about $29.08 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom here at fair-market rent, and about $25.90 for a one-bedroom. Asheville is one of the least affordable metros in North Carolina relative to what local work actually pays.

Set that against the ground. Just Economics puts a living wage for Buncombe County at $24.10 an hour for 2026, and much of the work that runs this place, the kitchens and the front desks and the home-care visits, pays under even that. For those workers the buffer is not thin. It was gone before the month started. There is no $400 to lose, because every $400 is already spoken for.

This is also why, at the scale of a whole town, the number is not really a story about character. When the GAO compared cities across the country, it found that every $100 increase in a metro’s median rent was associated with roughly a 9% rise in homelessness. Not a 9% rise in addiction, or in bad decisions. Rent went up, and more people lost the chair.

It already happened here

If you want to know whether ordinary, housed people end up on the street through no failing of their own, you do not need a thought experiment. It happens quietly all the time, and once, right here, it happened all at once.

Start with the quiet version, the one that never makes the news. It happens one household at a time, to people who were never anywhere near the street. The largest study of homelessness in a generation found that more than four in ten older homeless adults first lost their housing after the age of fifty, after a lifetime indoors. What tipped them was rarely some failing that finally caught up with them. It was a spouse who died and took half the income out of the house, a body that stopped being able to work, a job that ended a few years before retirement was supposed to start. Most had been getting by on close to nothing, and many said a few hundred dollars more a month would have been enough to keep them housed. The cushion was that thin, and that decisive.

Then there is the version no one could miss. In late September 2024, Helene came up out of the Gulf and made landfall in Florida, and its remnants pushed north into the mountains. On September 27 the water did what water does in steep country. People who had gone to bed in their own homes did not have them by the weekend.

It did not sort by virtue. It took the houses of people with jobs and mortgages and good credit right alongside everyone else. In the 2025 point-in-time count, about a third of the people found unsheltered tied their homelessness directly to the storm. A year before that, they were indistinguishable from the reader drawing the line.

A flood is dramatic, and most people will never lose a home to one. But the storm only did quickly and visibly what a thin buffer does quietly all the time: it took the home of someone whose cushion could not absorb the loss. The mechanism is the same one running under an ordinary eviction. Helene just ran it for thousands of people on a single night, and made it impossible to blame the people it happened to.

The line is real. It is made of cushion, not character.

“That wouldn’t be me” is not a claim about your character. It is a claim about your buffer, and most people who feel sure of it have simply never watched their buffer run out. The people you step around downtown are not a different kind of person. They are, mostly, people whose cushion was thinner than yours, or whose bad month was worse, or who started with less to fall back on, and then a job ended, the rent jumped, a body broke, a storm came.

Here is the part worth keeping. A cushion is not a virtue you are born holding. It is built, and it is built largely by policy: who got the affordable mortgage and who was redlined out of one, what a full day’s work was made to buy, whether a neighborhood kept its cheap homes or had them cleared, whether a subsidy was there when the rent outran the paycheck. We thinned the buffer for a lot of people on purpose, over decades. That is the hard news and the hopeful news at once, because a buffer that policy made thin, policy can make thick again. The distance between most of us and the street is shorter than we like to think. It is also something we get to decide.

Sources & notes. Emergency-expense figures: Federal Reserve Board, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2024 (Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking), released May 2025. The headline figure is that 63% of adults would cover a surprise $400 expense with cash or its equivalent; the 37% here is its complement. The breakdowns by education (82% bachelor’s or more, 29% less than high school) and by race (71% white, 43% Black) are from the same survey’s published data tables. National figures.

Housing wage ($29.08/hour for a modest two-bedroom; $25.90 for a one-bedroom in metro Asheville): NLIHC, Out of Reach (2025 edition). Local living wage ($24.10/hour, 2026): Just Economics of Western North Carolina. Rent-and-homelessness relationship (about a 9% rise per $100 increase in median rent): U.S. Government Accountability Office (2020); this is an observational association across metros, national, not a local causal estimate.

First-time homelessness later in life: University of California, San Francisco (Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative), California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (2023), led by Margot Kushel. Among older participants, about 41 percent reported their first experience of homelessness came after age 50; median monthly household income in the period before homelessness was roughly $960; and many participants said a modest monthly subsidy would have prevented their homelessness. A California study, offered here as a national-pattern illustration.

Helene: the storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend on September 26, 2024; its remnants caused catastrophic flooding across Western North Carolina on September 27. The share of the unsheltered tying their homelessness to the storm (about a third) is from the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care 2025 point-in-time count, reported via local press; it is a single-source figure and a one-night snapshot.

Adapted from That Wouldn’t Be Me, part of the series How to Think About Homelessness at Step Up AVL. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it.