Tropical Storm Helene left Western North Carolina with 100,000 homes severely damaged or destroyed, a skyrocketing unemployment rate and evictions on the rise. Now, the region’s extremely tight housing market is quickly bubbling over into a fully fledged crisis.
Two primary housing-related concerns are driving the problem in the mountains post-Helene: increased homelessness and substantial population loss.
Emergency shelters are closing. Much-needed relief money is stuck in the folds of state and federal bureaucracy. Many affordable housing units were destroyed. Some houses are just now becoming unlivable due to harmful mold growth. Western North Carolinians are increasingly anxious about where they can afford to live.
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Some 4,900 families are still living in hotels through FEMA’s temporary shelter assistance program. Another 59 families are being put up in FEMA’s temporary trailer housing.
Though the agency has extended these options through the holiday season, the key word is temporary. The question of where people will go when assistance runs out remains open.
Asheville already had a significant homeless population before the storm, which is now expected to grow significantly in coming months and years. Already, tents and campers dot riverfronts and roads.
FEMA is not designed to help people who were unhoused prior to the storm.
Evictions after Helene
Though activists were hoping for an eviction moratorium in Western North Carolina after the storm, it never materialized. Landlords and leasing companies have brought forth nearly 500 eviction filings since Helene struck on Sept. 27.
“An eviction moratorium would have prevented a lot of needless displacement,” David Bartholomew, staff attorney at Pisgah Legal Services, told Carolina Public Press.
“But the legislature failed to do so, the North Carolina Supreme Court failed to do so, and the governor’s office failed to do so.”
Southwood Realty Company, which owns buildings in Asheville, Hendersonville and Waynesville, accounts for 78 of those post-Helene eviction suits.
The company argues that it is trying its best.
“Southwood Realty Company only turns to the legal eviction process as a last resort,” a representative from the company’s legal team told CPP in an email.
“As always, an eviction proceeding is a losing proposition for both the tenant and the landlord. Based off the thousands of apartment homes Southwood operates in Western North Carolina, Southwood has only had to initiate this process against roughly 3% of its residents over the last two months. An even smaller percentage of Southwood’s residents have had their eviction proceed all the way to a set out in relation to eviction actions initiated after … Helene for non-payment of rent.”
The Housing Authority of the City of Asheville has filed eight evictions since the storm. Yvette Smith, director of asset management at the Housing Authority, told CPP that they have all been criminal cases relating to drugs or violence. She maintains that the Housing Authority will not evict anyone for rent-related infractions until February.
Call volume at Pisgah Legal Services, which helps people fight eviction cases and related housing issues, was up 150% in October and November, according to Bartholomew. People have questions: What can I do if my landlord has still not repaired the property? How can I avoid eviction if I am behind on rent due to losing my job?
“We are concerned that there is not enough to keep people from deciding that they need to leave the area, or being forced to leave the area,” Bartholomew said.
“I think a lot of elected officials know that we are going to lose population and that is going to pose significant problems for our community. When you lose jobs, you lose people, you lose the tax base, and you lose all the things that make your community unique. The problem self-perpetuates: when you lose people, you lose businesses, and when you lose businesses, you lose people.”
Compounding an existing housing crisis
Asheville was already embroiled in a housing crisis when the storm hit. Thirty percent of Buncombe County residents are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. More than 50% of Buncombe renters reported difficulty affording their homes this year.
“Our rental prices are so high when compared to the wages we are seeing,” Bartholomew said. “When housing prices go up, so does homelessness — it is a direct correlation.”
Barry Bialick was the chair of Asheville’s Affordable Housing Advisory Committee for six years. Now, he owns Compact Cottages, and is working to make tiny “relief cottages” available to those in need. He says 750 people have expressed an interest in his free-standing, backyard homes so far: half are in need of housing and half are volunteering their land.
“Our city has not taken proper action in terms of housing issues,” Bialick said. “We haven’t done any significant zoning changes to make it easier to build housing in the last six or seven years. For the relief efforts, the city has done nothing yet.”
Despite criticisms of the city’s ability to handle the housing crisis post-disaster, efforts are underway to do so. The City of Asheville partnered with Eben Charities and Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church to distribute more than $1 million in rental assistance. Grace Covenant has run out of funds, however, so they are not taking any new applications. The city has also allocated $1,465,000 to the Asheville Regional Coalition for Home Repair to support home repair assistance work.
Buncombe County has also launched housing assistance grants, applications for which close on Dec. 18. So far, the county has received 3,900 applications for both rental and mortgage assistance. FEMA has also awarded 450 families across the region with rental assistance.
Perspectives of Ashevillians
Many of East Asheville’s homeless relied on the Walmart parking lot on Swannanoa River Road as a safe place to sleep in cars and campers. The Swannanoa River engulfed the lot and the store during Helene — the store is still closed and the lot is not open to the public.
“That is an option people no longer have,” Brian Alexander, director of the Rural Homeless Response System at the North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness and longtime Asheville resident, told CPP.
“People were lucky if they were able to get their belongings out of the lot before the storm. Now people are having to look to other places to park and find shelter. We are seeing tent cities.”
Swannanoa, an unincorporated community to the east of Asheville, was one of the hardest-hit population centers in Helene. It was also home to some of the area’s more affordable housing stock. Now, homelessness there is visibly increasing, according to resident Beth Trigg.
“There is the category of people that experienced housing loss as a direct impact of the storm,” Trigg told CPP.
“For a small community like this one that was the epicenter of housing loss, that’s an overwhelming number of people. Then, about a month ago, we started to see a wave of economic displacement due to income loss, childcare loss, and addiction. There’s been a chaotic but intense community response to that.”
As people begin to run out of FEMA vouchers and exhaust their couch surfing options, Trigg says the situation is coming into harsher relief.
“We need the area’s major foundations and city and county governments to step up and fund an emergency housing response and more rental assistance,” she said.
“We need an eviction moratorium. There are specific things that would make this less chaotic and stressful for individuals who are at risk of, or experiencing, homelessness. And also for community leaders who have experienced trauma themselves and are now trying to patch together solutions.”
Other Asheville residents expressed concerns about the local government response as well.
“Many people distrust government assistance due to past experiences of being victimized, and the local government’s aggressive actions against the unhoused population,” Claire Dima, an Ashevillian who works for the public defender’s office, told CPP.
Some are concerned that a lack of information is stymieing the relief response.
“Nobody’s able to put numbers on the problem,” Sara Legatski, owner of the Asheville store Honeypot Vintage told CPP. “If the Housing Authority really wanted to help, they would help with some of that data, which in turn helps us communicate with the public the type of needs we have.”
The North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness has been collecting data on post-storm homeless populations, but only in the region’s more rural counties — which doesn’t include Buncombe. Henderson County was home to the greatest number of people experiencing homelessness between Oct. 27 and Nov. 26 according to their count, with a homeless population of 325.
Housing relief … or lack thereof
Legatski also manages an AirBnB in town that changed its pricing to accommodate those in need of housing after Helene. She has been reaching out to other AirBnB owners encouraging them to convert their spaces to affordable mid- or long-term rentals. Some AirBnB owners have donated nights or weeks to those in need, or in one case even converted their property to Section 8 housing.
Homeward Bound, a homeless agency in Asheville, has seen a growing need for the organization’s Rapid Rehousing services, including short-term rental assistance and case management services, according to Jessie Figueroa, resource development director at Homeward Bound.
She said the major obstacles to getting people into housing are low vacancy rates, destroyed housing stock, and insufficient remaining options.
There is uncertainty about long-term housing recovery thanks to the delay in federal disaster recovery funding, according to Sam Gunter, executive director of NC Housing Coalition.
“We’re waiting on the federal government to act to pass a long-term recovery bill,” Gunter told CPP. “There’s rumors that the desire was to get a disaster recovery package passed before the end of December. As time progresses, it’s really hard to see how that is going to happen. We’re hearing that if anything passes, it’s going to be significantly smaller than what President Biden requested.
“Everyone else is sort of waiting to see what Congress does before they act. I think that’s true of the General Assembly. That’s true of philanthropists, because no one wants to fund something that will end up getting funded by the federal government.
“The state fired the administrator of the Office of Recovery and Resiliency. We’re probably not going to get a disaster allocation of low income housing tax credits in this cycle. There are going to be people who fall through the cracks.”
Gunter is also concerned that FEMA’s direct leasing program — which is just starting now — might negatively impact the local housing market, driving up rents even further.
This is what happened in Maui after last year’s wildfires, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition: FEMA is willing to pay much more than regular tenants, inflating landlords’ future asking prices and leading to eviction of existing tenants.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.