Renters in fast-growing Buncombe County received a rare glimmer of hope late last summer: The housing market was on track to deliver lower rents for many as supply caught up with demand.
For the first time in six years, the fair-market rent in the region was projected to decline for the 2024 fiscal year.
Then Hurricane Helene hit, damaging thousands of properties and grinding some much-anticipated new developments to a halt.
Now, as the region continues its slow recovery from the storm, workers can once again expect their housing costs to increase, experts say.
Stephanie Watkins-Cruz, director of housing policy for the North Carolina Housing Coalition, told BPR in an interview last week that the destruction wrought by the storm means “dire straits” for many residents. Some, she noted, may eventually be pushed out of Buncombe County due to the rising cost of living.
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“Even before Helene, the living wage and the housing wage were increasing,” Watkins-Cruz said. “And so with Helene and the immense damage to the housing stock — both renter and homeowner — that's an additional really sort of generational level of demands on the housing stock in the area and the region. And so, I would say this is probably going to amplify that even more.”
This week, the coalition is expected to release its latest county-by-county profiles showing the percentage of households that are cost-burdened, meaning they spend at least 30% of their income on housing.
In 2024, 30% of Buncombe County households were cost-burdened, including 53% of renters and 19% of homeowners. The statewide average was 28%.
An ‘asymmetrical growth’ in wages and housing costs
“Living wage” refers to the minimum amount that an individual working full-time would have to earn in order to qualify to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Buncombe County. That figure has risen to $23.15 an hour for 2025, up from last year’s rate of $22.10, the nonprofit Just Economics WNC announced last week.
The 2025 living wage for Buncombe County amounts to an annual salary of $48,152, up from last year’s $42,520. The latest figure was calculated based on pre-Helene data.
Many landlords and property management companies require renters to show proof that their income is three times their rent.
Sam Stites, Living Wage Program Coordinator for Just Economics WNC, told BPR that there has long been “kind of an asymmetrical growth” in wages and housing costs.
“Housing is accelerating at a rate that really just can't be caught up with on the labor side, on the workforce side of things,” Stites said. “So certainly, the market is failing to increase wages at an adequate rate. The government is certainly failing to increase the minimum wage or have a positive impact on wages at any sort of rate. But a program like ours, which is a third-party mechanism to increase wages, we know is having an impact, a positive impact, on wages.”
North Carolina’s minimum wage remains the same as the federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. The number has been unchanged since 2009.
Just Economics WNC makes its annual living wage determination based on a rolling four-year average of the fair-market rent, which refers to the cost as calculated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to rent a moderately-priced home.
So while HUD’s fair-market rent estimate for Buncombe decreased last summer — from $1,496 to $1,347 for a one-bedroom apartment — the rolling four-year average continued to rise, leading to a nearly 5% year-on-year increase.
By contrast, the fair-market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Buncombe County in 2018 was $660, according to HUD.
Vicki Meath, executive director of Just Economics WNC, said that while there have been local efforts to bring down housing costs in Buncombe County, Helene throws the future into doubt.
“I personally have concerns about what Helene is going to do to those efforts, given that so much of our housing supply has been gone and lost to the storm,” Meath said. “And again, with the experiences that we've seen from across the country with other disasters and the rise in housing costs, really kind of having the supply meet the demand, we expect that to increase.”
Raising the wage floor
Programs like Just Economics WNC’s Living Wage Certification aim to raise the wage floor by encouraging local employers to commit to paying their employees a living wage each year.
The program currently has 185 employers in Buncombe County certified at the “leading” level, which means a two-year commitment. About 2,600 people are employed by those employers, Stites said.
The nonprofit also has a “pledged” level of certification, which requires an employer to pay $19 an hour and commit to raising wages 3% plus the annual rate of inflation each year. Currently 37 employers are certified at the “pledged” level, employing a total of 783 workers.
Altogether, employers reported making a total of $1.4 million in annual wage increases in 2024 in order to meet Just Economics WNC’s living wage standard, Stites said. The nonprofit is relaxing some of its recertification requirements for 2025 in light of the hardship caused to local businesses by Hurricane Helene.
“The economic pressure was already so great on the low-wage workforce, and this storm has multiplied that extraordinarily. … So, we really believe in this program and we want to see greater involvement in it, so we can see higher wages in a more sustainable economy,” Stites said.
Watkins-Cruz said that her organization is urging state and local governments to take several steps to aid workers facing hardship in the post-Helene economy, including:
- Increased rental assistance
- Assistance to local businesses
- Expediting state and local government funding to communities
In the past, she said, federal disaster funding sometimes took years to be allocated and ready for use locally.
“We already know that it could take a very long time, even though we know we have money coming,” Watkins-Cruz said.
