As Asheville City Council members consider shifting $19 million of a federal disaster grant to single-family home repairs, local housing nonprofits are urging the city to use the money for new, affordable housing projects instead.
In a public letter, a collection of 10 local housing nonprofits, known as the Buncombe Affordable Housing Network, argued that the city’s $225 million CDBG-DR grant is “uniquely suited to create long-term, income-restricted affordable housing at scale” and would be better used on development rather than home repair.
The letter went on to describe Renew NC, the state-run single-family repair program that Asheville is supporting with federal grant money, as a “costly, short-term intervention.”
“This is not an argument against helping homeowners recover. It is an argument for using the right tools for the job,” the letter said.
Other housing advocates, including Yvette Jives, a member of the city’s Helene Housing Recovery Board, maintain that single-family home repairs should be prioritized, especially for the socially vulnerable households that Renew NC is designed to support.
“I am in favor of putting money back into homes, investing into the homes, building these homes up and not just patchwork,” she told BPR. “Then these families can also maintain the home at that point. And then, as I’ve said over and over and again, build up generational wealth.”
The debate among housing advocates comes after BPR News reported that Asheville only allocated enough money from the $225 million CDBG-DR grant to repair eight homes damaged by Hurricane Helene. In response, Asheville officials proposed moving around $19 million from the HUD grant to repair homes — enough for 65 houses — a move that would require reallocating grant money previously set aside for infrastructure and the construction of multi-family housing.
The city has about a month to decide. The process includes a public hearing, a 30-day public comment period and a vote on June 23.
Nonprofits say they can repair homes faster than Renew NC
Andy Barnett, head of Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity and chair of the Helene Housing Recovery Board, is one of the people who signed the letter from the Buncombe Affordable Housing Network.
He wants to see the homes in Asheville get fixed, but he’d prefer to see nonprofits handle the repairs, he told BPR in a phone interview. It’s his opinion that nonprofits can move with more agility and speed. That is, in part, because HUD housing repairs come with more regulations and requirements.
“Funds that don't have some of the federal restrictions like CDBG-DR really work a lot more efficiently for single-family repair than those larger sources,” he said. “So, not to say that Renew NC is a bad program; it's just got a lot of federal compliance tied to it. It's got a lot of really cumbersome program design around it that's driving up those costs.”
Weeks after Helene, the city gave the local nonprofit Asheville Regional Coalition for Home Repair, or ARCHR, $1.4 million to fix homes in the area. The nonprofit has repaired 60 homes with the money, with an average cost of $30,000 each, according to Barnett. The money came from a 2016 affordable housing bond.
In addition to the city's allocation immediately following the storm, ARCHR raised about $11 million and completed 250 repairs with the funds.
Renew NC, on the other hand, has finished repairs on 60 homes statewide, with thousands more in the pipeline.
Within Asheville’s city limits, Renew NC is using Asheville’s CDBG-DR funds. The city provides funding for repairs, while using Renew NC contractors and administration. The program must follow strict HUD guidelines which can increase the scope and cost for each project.
READ MORE: “Pricey admin, FEMA contributions? BPR reporters answer your biggest questions about our recent HUD investigation”
One bottleneck in the state program is a “total rebuild” clause, which is triggered anytime a home sustains more than $100,000 in damage. The rebuild increases the time and expense of the project, bringing the costs as high as $425,000.
Another factor in the cost of HUD funded repairs is the requirement for the home to be built back to the agency’s standards. In order to pass an environmental review, properties must be free of hazardous materials, contamination, toxic chemicals and gases, and radioactive substances.
Homes repaired by ARCHR have similar requirements, but they are not as limiting, according to Barnett. And he said the quicker timeline offers a crucial advantage.
“Many people would prefer to have their home back to where it was, right, than to sit on a waiting list for a year. And that's not shoddy workmanship, that's just performing the critical work that's required to get someone into a safe and habitable dwelling,” he explained. “Versus jumping through all the different prescriptive performance requirements that some federal funding tack onto a project.”
City considering $3 million for local housing nonprofit
The city is entertaining several options for how it might fix more homes damaged by Helene.
The $19 million shuffle of money to the Renew NC program would involve moving $9 million from the multifamily affordable housing program and $10 million from infrastructure repairs to the single family home repair program. This would bring the total for home repair funds to $22 million.
Another, possibly overlapping idea, is to give more money to ARCHR for more cost-effective repairs.
On June 23, when council members vote on reallocating CDBG-DR funds, members will also hear a home repair policy and funding allocation proposal for the group of nonprofits.
Nikki Reid, who leads Asheville’s Community and Economic Development department, said the city is considering giving ARCHR $3 million in bond money. The money would support all home repair needs in the city, regardless if the damage occurred during Helene or not. It would come from the city’s $20 million Affordable Housing Bond that voters approved in 2024.
There is $10 million in bond funds remaining after the city voted last September to allocate the other half to the WNC Affordable Housing Loan Fund, an organization that provides low-interest loans to developers, she said.
“We're hoping to propose what we're calling a balanced approach which means 'yes' to CDBG-DR single family, 'yes' to CDBG-DR multi family and 'yes' to bond allocation,” Reid said at a May 7 city council agenda briefing meeting.
Barnett said he doesn’t want the city to reduce funding for multi-family housing developments. In his eyes, these public investments in new construction are essential to addressing the city’s longtime affordable housing crisis.
He compared the city’s lack of affordable housing units as a more invisible, but still equally pressing, issue for residents than damage to single family homes.
“You have a lot of people who were struggling to afford rent before the storm whose housing affordability struggle got a lot worse because they lost income as a result of the storm,” he said. “The long-term structural fix there is to get more affordable rental units in the market.”
If Barnett and other nonprofit leaders convince the city to keep the current HUD funding split, more than 100 people will be turned away from the state-run repair program, Renew NC. Still, Barnett thinks that nonprofits can serve those people by using other city and state funds.
“The goal remains to make sure that all of those disaster survivors are back in safe housing,” he said. “ I believe with enough creativity and discipline on how we're using this money, we've got the resources that we need to get people safely housed.”
Meanwhile, council commits $8 million to multi-family projects
While council members debate the merits of reallocating more money to home repairs, they voted unanimously at a May 12 meeting to spend $8 million in CDBG-DR funds on the construction of two new affordable apartment complexes: The 93-unit District East Commons on Tunnel Road and 319-B Biltmore, a 112-unit development near the Southside neighborhood.
Collectively, the projects are expected to help create 205 units, all of which would remain affordable for more than 30 years. The city’s CDBG-DR money isn’t single handedly funding these initiatives — developers are also leaning on Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and private capital.
With two projects moving ahead, that leaves about $24 million in the HUD funding set aside for housing, including $2 million remaining from the initial $10 million funding round the city opened for developers.
Even if the city reallocated all $24 million to the single-family home repair program, it wouldn’t be enough to fix the more than 100 homes in Asheville that Renew NC has approved for the program.
Still, council member Sage Turner has repeatedly said she’d like to prioritize single-family repair with the HUD money.
“If I was being asked to spend $30 million to build a few hundred privately owned affordable apartments versus $30 million to fix every home, even if it's to the HUD standards, the answer's really easy for me,” she said. “To me it is so much more important to repair the homes. If we prepare them to better status and they grow generational wealth, I'm not sure when we as a council will get that opportunity to do that again. It's a big move.”
Other council members, including Maggie Ullman and Kim Roney have been less outspoken. At a May 7 council briefing, Roney said she’s still weighing options. She said the issues the city faces with housing are emblematic of a larger issue: not enough funding to go around.
“I keep coming back to the point that we don't have enough funding because $225 million sounds like a lot but it's not $1.1 billion,” she said, referencing an “Unmet Needs” study conducted by the city last year, which illustrated more than $1 billion in outstanding damage from Helene. “So I'm not surprised that we're in the scarcity moment.”
The council will vote on the reallocation of CDBG-DR funds at its Tuesday, June 23 meeting. Residents can weigh in online or at a public hearing scheduled at Asheville City Hall for Tuesday, June 9.
