More than 100 Asheville homeowners — most of whom are low-income and socially vulnerable — will get turned away from a Hurricane Helene recovery program if City Council doesn’t change a funding decision made one year ago.
Now, some Asheville leaders appear to be second-guessing the funding allocation and policy they agreed to.
Council members only set aside $3 million for a home repair program – enough to fix eight homes damaged by Helene, a state recovery official said during a Helene Housing Recovery Board meeting in April.
Some city council members told BPR they unwittingly signed off on the policy and contract that has ultimately restricted otherwise-eligible Asheville homeowners from accessing a larger pool of Helene recovery money set aside by the state.
The funds the city allocated for home repair come from a $225 million federal grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Applications for the program have closed, and at least 115 families in Asheville are in line for help.
HUD disaster recovery grants — known as the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Relief (CDBG-DR) funds — help cities and states address needs related to housing and public infrastructure after a natural disaster.
Last year, North Carolina received $1.4 billion from the grant program, and Asheville received $225 million. The state set aside $800 million of its grant to repair homes damaged in the storm. The city, though, set aside only $3 million, opting to invest the majority of its grant towards infrastructure, economic development and the construction of new, affordable rentals.
BPR News — through interviews and reviewing public records — has learned that some City Council members misunderstood a core facet of how the home repair and rebuilding program would work in coordination with the similar, but much larger, program at the state level.
Some City Council members said they knew $3 million wouldn’t be enough to go around. But they mistakenly thought city homeowners would be eligible for the $800 million that the state program had. In other words, the city thought the state would help pick up some of the tab.
Part of the confusion stems from the city’s attempt to save on administrative program costs by partnering with the state of North Carolina’s home rebuilding program, called Renew NC.
Under the agreement, Renew NC would process applications and determine needs and eligibility. In return, the city’s $3 million would pay for the repairs of any applicants accepted by the state whose home sits inside Asheville city limits.
But this is where the confusion, for some, started.
From public records and interviews with city and state recovery officials, BPR has learned the state never intended to make any of its $800 million available to Asheville homeowners.
Instead, the state agreed to help the city save time and money by vetting applicants and coordinating construction projects — but Asheville’s HUD funds would have to cover all the construction costs for approved households.
Some council members, a year later, say they didn’t understand that and they may have pushed to earmark a higher amount for homeowner recovery if they’d known local residents would be ineligible for state aid.
‘We believe we were clear’
James Shelton, who manages Asheville’s HUD grants, presented the spending plan — known formally as an Action Plan — to the council in April 2025. He said it was clear, even then, that the state’s CDBG-DR funds would not cover home repair costs in Asheville.
“I feel like we made that clear to Council members,” he told BPR. “I think the expectation was set that the city's investment in this program is kind of all that we can really be able to commit.”
Elma King, the program manager for the city’s $225 million Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery funds, agreed.
“We believe we were clear in our presentations regarding these responsibilities: the State would handle administration, while the City would cover hard construction costs and monitor progress within Asheville,” she wrote in a statement to BPR News.
“We believe these distinctions were accurately communicated to Council throughout our updates and how we laid out the roles and responsibilities of the State and the City, reflecting the consistent feedback the City received from the State," she said.
However, Shelton and King never explicitly explained the restriction during the Council meeting on April 8, 2025 when Council cast their final vote on the plan.
While no City Council member sought direct clarification on it, one elected official, Sage Turner, did make a comment revealing she’d misunderstood the eligibility of Asheville homeowners relative to the state program but no one corrected her.
“In the pre-meetings around this, I was expressing some concern … about the single-family homes. So, integrating the state’s funding — like you did in those few slides in the beginning — was very helpful to me understanding the much bigger picture of how our residents are going to get their homes fixed,” Turner said, in a comment directed at Shelton during the April 8, 2025, meeting.
Why only $3 million from the city for home repairs?
Housing was not the biggest need in Asheville after the storm, according to a needs assessment included in the city’s Action Plan. Although thousands of homes were damaged by Helene, the storm impacted Asheville’s infrastructure and business districts far more than its housing stock, according to the assessment.
In Asheville, Helene left $1.1 billion in unmet needs, including $33 million in damage to the housing sector.
The city set aside $31 million for housing recovery but allocated the lion’s share, $28 million, to the construction of new affordable housing units. Shelton defended this decision, explaining that Asheville has needed more affordable housing for years.
“It's a tough place to be in for the city, where we have this really great opportunity with a $225 million program, and the needs are just so far outstretched of what we have available,” Shelton said.
The city could amend its Action Plan to move money from other programs towards housing repairs. This requires a vote and a public hearing period, which can slow down the process of helping homeowners.
That option has not been brought before the City Council in an official meeting and won’t be until at least June. Still, city staff have teased the idea of reallocating money in several committee meetings.
State plan focused on housing
As applications came pouring into the Renew NC home repair program, it became clear that both city and state HUD funds would not be enough to help everyone who was eligible.
As of April 10, 2026, a total of 7,924 people have applied for the program statewide, and 2,574 have been deemed eligible. The state is working to determine the eligibility of almost 800 more.
In Asheville, 285 people applied to the program and, as of March 28, 115 are eligible. The poorest and most socially vulnerable among these applicants — known as Phase One Priority One — number 55. These are people making less than 60% of the area median income and who are elderly, disabled or have children.
The city’s $3 million allocation is only enough money to help eight of them.
The state, in contrast, elected to spend the majority of its HUD grant — $800 million — on repairing owner-occupied housing. The Renew NC program is responsible for repairing and replacing homes throughout 28 counties and one ZIP code, but not in Asheville.
“ What we're finding across the state is that we do not have enough money,” Stephanie McGarrah, who leads the state’s Renew NC program, told BPR News. She said the policy to have Asheville pay for its own home repairs was due to this projected shortfall.
“We have to serve all of those people with our allotment,” she said, referring to the thousands of people who have applied for the state program outside of Asheville.
The state and city continue to have conversations about how to help the most people, but they are dealing with “a scarcity of resources,” according to McGarrah.
“The city of Asheville is struggling with the same thing that the state is struggling with on the CDBG-DR front, which is that we do not have enough money.”
‘It came as a shock’
While the state’s policy may not have been clear to Council members when they voted on the plan last spring, it was made explicit in the official agreement between the city and state signed in January 2026.
It reads “in no event shall NCDOC contribute funds or pay for costs that exceed the City's Three Million ($3,000,000.00) budget, even if a project is, or projects are, left incomplete due to a lack of funding.”
The state’s Action Plan — approved in August 2025 — says that “a framework for coordinated action has been developed.” And that framework is for the state to repair homes in Asheville and be reimbursed by the city from their CDBG-DR funds.
By the time James Shelton presented the Action Plan to Council members on April 8, 2025, he had already had meetings with the state’s Renew NC program regarding the agreement.
“ The agreement that we executed with the state was in a very nascent place at that point,” he said. Though even then, the state had made it clear that they would not pay for any home repairs in Asheville because the city had also received a CDGBG-DR grant from HUD, he said.
Shelton told BPR he believed he had made it clear to City Council that the state would not contribute funds to repair homes in the city. Some Council members say differently.
“It came as a shock,” Sage Turner told BPR in an email. She said she remembers feeling concerned that the city was only setting aside $3 million for single-family housing, compared with $28 million for multi-family housing.
“But, at the time, we believed the state would be administering a hefty home repair program. It was said, I paraphrase, 'there will be so much $ for single-family repairs, we can afford to go big on multi-family,'” she wrote.
BPR requested interviews with all seven Council members; only Council member Kim Roney and Mayor Esther Manheimer made themselves available. Turner and Vice Mayor Antanette Mosely sent written statements.
When asked via email if she knew the state wouldn’t fund any home repairs in Asheville, Mosely did not answer the question directly, writing that “at the time of the HUD Action Plan vote, the expectation was that state and local programs would work in a complementary way to address different aspects of recovery,” adding that "It has become clearer where gaps exist, including in single-family repair within the city.”
Roney said: “It was definitely not clear at the time.”
Maggie Ullman, Bo Hess and Sheneika Smith never replied to BPR, despite multiple follow-ups.
Manheimer refused to directly answer questions from BPR News about whether she knew the state wouldn’t pay for single-family housing repair when she voted on the Action Plan in April 2025.
A few days after talking with Manheimer, BPR received a clarifying email from the mayor which said she would potentially support changes to the funding allocation.
“Housing and especially affordable housing is my highest priority … As applications were due by January 31, 2026, for the program, and the State will complete application review by the end of May, it may become necessary for Asheville to adjust the single-family home repair allocation. As the need becomes clearer, once the State shares the data with Asheville, I stand ready to make those necessary changes,” Manheimer wrote.
‘Did the city shoot itself in the foot?’
Since January, city staff have been pitching ways to add more funding to the single family home repair program. They laid out two of those plans at an April 1 Helene Housing Recovery Board meeting.
The board, which is composed of community housing experts and advocates, makes recommendations to staff to present to the council.
The first recommendation was to move $5 million from the multi-family program to the single family program. This move would not require a 30-day public comment period but would require a city council vote. The new amount would allow the city to repair about 22 homes.
The next option was moving an additional $14 million to the single family home repair program. It would allow the city to repair almost all of the Phase One Priority One applicants. Moving this much money between the programs would require a public comment period, further delaying the repairs.
Initially, city staff planned to bring these spending options and board recommendations before the entire City Council in April. But the City Council has to vote on the multi-family housing awards first, so staff won’t present them until June, further delaying help for homeowners.
“We just agreed to kick a decision two more months down the road for virtue of nothing other than the meeting cadence,” said Andy Barnett, who chairs the board.
The meeting was the first time many board members learned of the funding limits.
”Did the city shoot itself in the foot by offering the $3 million and then lock itself out of the rest of the funds?” asked board member Elyse Marder. “ Was that the understanding when the Action Plan was put together, and the $3 million was offered, that we were locking ourselves out of accessing the rest of this deep pocket?”
Nikki Reid, head of the city’s Community and Economic Development department, responded but did not directly answer the question.
“ We've worked in good faith with the state to try to understand how we could be good partners. And the fact that the state was able to set up and run a single-family repair program was an amazing opportunity where the city would be able to partner to have that type of resource to join forces, basically, with the city.
“I think we continue to hope to work in good faith with the state on how we're going to accomplish this, all recognizing that there's limited resources at play here,” Reid said.
Still, Maggie Battaglin, who runs the single-family home repair program for Renew NC, made it clear to the board that the state won’t give any more money to Asheville.
“At this time, we do not anticipate putting any additional construction funds towards properties within the city of Asheville,” she told the group.
