News

No ‘definitive proof’ Asheville exports homeless to Hendersonville

City residents attended a forum on city issues Monday, Oct. 9, at the Health Sciences Building on the Pardee campus.

By Bill Moss, Published: October 13, 2023

At a “Council Conversations” forum Monday night, a city resident said he had heard the reason for an increasing homeless population in Hendersonville.

“I have heard from a very reliable source that Asheville police are bringing people here and dropping them off,” he said.

It’s a common perception, City Manager John Connet responded, that lacks hard evidence.

“I don’t know that we have any definitive proof that that’s happening,” he said. “We hear the same thing. We hear they’re being bused in. We hear they’re getting bus tickets. But we don’t have any definitive proof that that’s happening.”

A surge in homelessness can happen anywhere and is happening anywhere — even Mayberry. Mount Airy, the model for the beloved Andy Griffith series set in a small town of innocent character, is seeing the problem, too. Connet knows because he recently heard about it from Mount Airy’s town manager.

“And her quote to me in a text was, ‘our homeless population has grown so much it’s like they’re being bused into our community,’” he said. “So that perception is in a lot of communities.”

When Connet told the same story when he presented a report on homelessness last week to the City Council, he punctuated it with a question: “How many times have you heard that in Hendersonville?”

Lack of affordable housing, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol addiction and mental health issues are all commonly cited as causes of homelessness, Connet said. And as the numbers have increased here, the city is fielding more and more complaints about panhandling, camping on public and private property, people “generally feeling unsafe” and homeless men and women “ruining the downtown atmosphere.”

1,200 interactions with homeless people

From March of 2022 through September of this year, police officers had 1,200 interactions with homeless — 700 of them arising from “suspicious person calls,” Police Chief Blair Myhand told the council. “That could be anything — a person sitting in front of a business, someone just hanging out in a parking lot or over by White Street,” he said. “We are mostly complaint driven. Panhandling — thankfully we do not see a lot of panhandling in the city. It’s not 700 individual people. We’re dealing with some of the same people over and over again.”

Community Development Director Lew Holloway described the city’s code enforcement response.

“If we receive a complaint about a camp and a nuisance violation or an illegal use violation we are first doing a site visit,” he said. “If the site is occupied, we are connecting with PD to provide assistance on site.”

If the homeless camp is on private property, code enforcement tries to make contact with the owner to resolve the problem.

“If the camp is on public property,” he said, “we’re allowing at least 14 days” for the occupants to clean up and leave. “If it’s on private property, we’re asking the private property owner to allow that timeframe but we do not have any way of requiring them to do so.”

Low-barrier versus high-barrier shelters

An ongoing debate nationally focuses on “low-barrier” versus “high barrier” shelters, Connet said.

The 75-bed Hendersonville Rescue Mission “is considered a high barrier shelter and the high barrier means you have to enter into their drug rehab programs, you have to attempt to get a job — several criteria — before they allow you to stay there,” he said. The low barrier approach — sometimes known as “housing first” — is “based on the belief that you have to get the folks housed before they’ll accept treatment. There’s a huge debate in the country about low-barrier and high-barrier shelters.”

One consequence is that “if you do build these types of low-barrier shelters, they will come,” he said. “You’re not only taking care of homeless in our community, but maybe homeless from other communities. It is a very transient population.”

Mayor pro tem Lyndsey Simpson supported the idea of a low-barrier shelter.

“Whether or not they’re choosing to be homeless, they have some sort of unmet need,” she said. “And when you have a lot of unmet needs and you are living in a constant state of stress and trauma, you are not necessarily capable of making the best decisions for yourself. So, for us to say people are choosing that, yes, they may be in the moment, but that doesn’t mean that they are in the right headspace to be making those choices.”

Connections Center expected to go in Opp House

At Monday night’s forum, Smith revealed that a partnership of the city and others is close to getting a court’s OK to acquire the vacant Opportunity House for the Connections Center, a one-stop clearinghouse for services homeless people. The future of the Opp House property, which has been in receivership since July 2022, remains in the hands of Henderson County Civil Superior Court.

“We’re waiting for a judge to sign off on that” transfer of the property, Smith said. “We’ll be a part owner and we’ll lease it. So once we get through that legal hurdle — I do not know why it’s taking so long — then the Connections Center can move in and start renovating the building and begin to provide these services.”

He projected an 18-month time frame to get the building ready.

“It depends obviously on the condition of the building,” Connet said. “They would like to at least do the minor renovations so they can create an office as soon as possible.”

The city received a grant of $1.5 million to support the Connections Center and appropriated $800,000 in American Rescue Plan money for the project.

Jennifer Hensley said addiction recovery programs are a proven answer.

“Community-based diversion programs do work and so I think we have a long way to go in the community,” she said. “But I also agree with Chief Myhand’s statement that people do have the right to be homeless, but when you’re breaking and entering into people’s property, when you’re stealing, and you’re committing crimes” the law has to respond.

Unsurprisingly, given the intractability of the homeless challenge in cities big, medium and small, Connet told the council: “There’s no silver bullet. There is no answer at the end of this presentation. There’s just more work to be done on behalf of our community because the city cannot solve this problem by ourselves. We should be conveners” of a partnership of nonprofits, other jurisdictions and the community in general.