Set aside compassion for a moment. Assume you feel nothing for the person sleeping outside the bakery on Biltmore Avenue. The case for solving homelessness and the housing shortage still holds — because you are already paying for the problem, and paying more than the solution would cost.
A person cycling through homelessness doesn't cost taxpayers nothing. They cost a fortune. The National Academies of Sciences put the public price of a chronically homeless person at an average of $35,578 a year in emergency rooms, psychiatric crises, detox, and jail. We don't get to decline that bill; it lands on hospitals, the county jail, and EMS regardless of what we choose.
The alternative is cheaper. Permanent supportive housing costs about $12,800 per person, and across the rigorous studies the National Academies reviewed, it produced a net savings of $6,875 to $33,502 per person per year. The cleanest evidence comes from Denver's five-year randomized controlled trial — the gold standard — where housed participants generated $6,876 less in annual costs from reduced emergency-service and jail use, and 77% remained stably housed after three years. This isn't charity. It's swapping a $35,000 line item for a $12,800 one.
Here's the part that should worry every Asheville employer, because it's already costing you in hiring. A Buncombe County worker needs to earn $32.50 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. Median housekeeping wages are $15.18.
And it isn't confined to the lowest-wage jobs. A 2025 National Housing Conference report found half of Asheville's construction workers earn less than the $59,840 needed to rent a one-bedroom — and even civil engineers making nearly $100,000 struggle to afford a home here. In a regional survey, 60% of business owners said the cost and availability of housing were by far the hardest issues to hiring in the mountains.
Watch what that does to real investment. Roughly $250 million in hospitality investment is entering the market across 2025–26, including 1,200 new hotel rooms — but the workforce to operate that expansion cannot afford to live where the work is. You can finance the building. Staffing it is the part that fails.
The squeeze isn't a bad year that corrects itself. The Asheville region needs 34,358 new housing units over five years — with Asheville alone short 6,441 rental units and 5,217 for-sale homes. When a market is that tight, there's no slack at the bottom, and the people with the least margin fall out first.
That's the connection most people miss: homelessness isn't separate from the hiring problem. It's the same market, at the bottom of it. The 2025 count found 755 people experiencing homelessness in Buncombe County — a number Helene pushed higher. Fix the housing supply and you work the workforce shortage and the inflow into homelessness with one lever.
Some costs never reach a tax bill. Unpaid ER visits become hospital bad debt that works its way into prices and the premiums employers fund. To be straight: economists disagree on how large that pass-through is — it runs well below dollar-for-dollar and depends on a hospital's market power, so treat it as real but modest.
The costs you can't dodge are the visible ones: the downtown your customers walk through, the staff hours, the emergency calls. Those are what make “leave it alone” the expensive option, not the safe one.
You're paying either way. The only question is whether you fund the fix — or keep funding, at a premium, the problem.
Modern homelessness was built over roughly fifty years by policy choices: torn-down housing, slashed budgets, emptied hospitals. The hopeful corollary is that what policy built, policy can take apart — and communities that rebuilt their housing drove their numbers down.
For Asheville the incentives line up unusually well. The same investment that lets you staff your business, fill those new hotel rooms, and keep your workers in town is the investment that keeps people from falling onto the street to begin with.