ASHEVILLE - The floodwaters receded, but Western North Carolina’s affordable housing crisis has not.
"It’s hard. It's super hard," Maryjo Tucker told the Citizen Times Sept. 9. "I have car problems, and it’s hard to save up for a deposit or even a down payment to buy a home. I have co-workers whose rent is more than they make a month, so they have to get a second job. I don’t know what it was like to live in Asheville before Helene, but I think it must be way harder now.”
More than 7,000 households entered the state's repair program, fewer than 100 projects were complete by early summer and hundreds of storm-damaged properties are being considered for permanent removal from the housing market. Those losses are piling onto a regional shortage estimated
to be more than 30,000 homes.
Can't find my way home
Tucker was sleeping in her car when her dog woke her before dawn Sept. 27, 2024. She heard a splash when he jumped out. Water was already at the car door. Tucker had just arrived in Asheville — EMT license in hand — and was preparing to move into a place near Swannanoa. With floodwater rising fast, she began driving and at one point chose to turn right toward the Asheville Mall parking lot, rather than left toward Swannanoa. The rental she was moving into was destroyed.
In Swannanoa, Lenora Wells awoke around 5:20 a.m. in her rented mobile home on Opal Lane.
Water was about to come through the door. She called 911, and rescuers came by boat, eventually taking her and her service animal to Swannanoa First Baptist Church, then the WNC Agricultural Center, where she stayed for two weeks.
Tucker and Wells survived the flood. Finding a permanent home would prove harder.
Two years after Tropical Storm Helene, the region's affordable housing crisis has changed shape. Emergency housing programs have largely wound down, but that does not mean everyone has yet made it home. Thousands of households have spent the recovery waiting on repairs, appeals, buyouts or replacement housing, shifting the crisis from finding temporary shelter to the harder question of where they can live permanently.
That problem extends beyond the families whose houses were damaged. Helene struck a region that already lacked enough housing, then permanently removed some homes and residential land from the market. Every property that cannot be rebuilt leaves the region with one more home to replace before it can begin closing the shortage that existed before the storm.
Gimme shelter
The last comprehensive statewide count identified 7,676 households still displaced by Helene as of Sept. 18, 2025, according to the North Carolina Housing Coalition, citing State Auditor Dave Boliek’s Helene recovery dashboard. The coalition said another 596 households were still seeking assistance.
By April 23, 2026, the Federal Emergency Management Agency reported only two families remained in agency-provided temporary housing, down from 234 households that had participated in the program. That FEMA figure measures only families still living in agency-provided units, not every household whose original home remained unresolved.
The North Carolina Division of Community Revitalization continues to offer temporary relocation assistance through Renew NC to applicants who have exhausted other housing options while damaged homes are repaired or rebuilt.
For many households, the remaining obstacle is no longer finding a temporary place to stay. It is getting through the repair and recovery system that stands between them and a permanent home.
The waiting is the hardest part
That longer-term bottleneck is clearest in Renew NC’s repair pipeline.
The NCDCR reported nearly 8,000 applications to the program through Sept. 17. Of those, 2,829 homeowners were deemed eligible, but only 150 projects had been completed, leaving roughly 2,000 eligible households somewhere in the repair, reconstruction or replacement process. Nonprofit and volunteer partners have separately repaired, rebuilt or weatherized more than 1,100 homes using state funding.
The agency also reported thousands of duplication-of-benefits reviews, damage inspections, environmental reviews and just 141 projects through the pre-construction phase.
Construction is not the only bottleneck. FEMA appeals remain another unresolved part of the recovery, although no statewide count of pending appeals is publicly available.
Pisgah Legal Services, a nonprofit providing free civil legal aid to low-income residents in 18 WNC counties, continues to handle Helene-related FEMA and Renew NC appeals involving home damage, housing assistance and rental assistance.
To date, Pisgah Legal has represented clients in about 300 FEMA denial appeals, with roughly 200 cases closed and all but eight successful, Executive Director Jackie Kiger told the Citizen Times on Aug. 24.
“’Denied’ doesn't mean ‘done,’” Kiger said. “You still have time to appeal this and to potentially secure some of this funding.”
Another 100 appeals remain pending, while more than 500 people have received advice on filing or managing appeals. Between FEMA, Renew NC and homeowners insurance matters, Pisgah Legal has handled about 1,300 Helene-related cases, and 60% of its active clients report being affected by the storm.
Pisgah Legal’s $14 million budget is about 75% grant-funded, with individual donors providing the remaining 25%. In 2025, Pisgah Legal received $1.9 million from the Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts program, including $700,000 dedicated to Helene recovery. However, the North Carolina General Assembly permanently redirected that funding to indigent criminal defense, cutting a source Pisgah Legal had relied upon for decades as demand for disaster-related help continues.
“This is a problem that was created by the state legislature that didn't need to be a problem,” Kiger said. “We are the safety net resource for the civil legal aid needs of our community,”
No quarter
But repairs and appeals can help only when a property can still be rebuilt. For another group of homeowners, Helene changed the land itself, leaving some parcels too damaged or too dangerous for housing to return.
For those properties, recovery can mean giving up the home site altogether.
A North Carolina Emergency Management project table lists 765 properties proposed for Helene-related acquisition across 14 mountain and foothill counties.
Of those, 430 have received FEMA approval, although participation remains voluntary and homeowners can withdraw before closing.
Once an acquisition is completed, the home is demolished and the property must remain public open space permanently, removing that parcel from the residential market.
FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton told the Citizen Times Sept. 2 that the federal government should reconsider which agency handles disaster buyouts. While some restrictions are set by law, Hamilton said the process belongs more naturally with agencies focused on long-term housing and redevelopment, such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“I personally don't foresee buyouts as an emergency management capability,” Hamilton said.
He believes shifting more responsibility to HUD, states and other federal partners could better serve survivors facing years-long waits.
Other losses will not necessarily come through a formal buyout. The NCDCR says some damaged properties may be unsuitable for reconstruction because of land loss, unstable soil or other conditions. In those cases, Renew NC may relocate a replacement home to another, lower-risk property.
The result is the same for the original site. Some land that supported housing before Helene will no longer be available for residential use.
Those permanent losses carry greater weight because the storm did not strike a housing market with homes to spare.
You can’t always get what you want
Long before Helene, the region was already expensive and starved for inventory, according to data presented by Canopy MLS, a subsidiary of the Canopy Realtor Association that tracks residential real estate activity across the region.
A year before the storm, in October 2023, the 13-county western region had just 2.9 months of housing supply — well below the six months considered balanced — while the median sale price had climbed 8.1% from a year earlier to $415,000. In the Asheville metro, the median reached $452,000, up 7.4%.
When Helene struck, it disrupted real estate transactions and damaged or destroyed housing, further tightening an already constrained pool of habitable property and forcing displaced residents into a market where sellers had long held the advantage.
The broader market recovered faster than many individual housing cases. By October 2025, listings and sales had surged against the storm-depressed 2024 baseline, inventory had returned to roughly six months of supply and prices were largely stable.
Dave Noyes, an Asheville-area real estate agent with eXp Realty and a Canopy Realtor Association board member, said Helene’s immediate disruption to home sales largely faded within months, but some losses to the region’s housing supply are permanent.
He pointed to storm-damaged areas where homes and even new construction disappeared entirely, like in Swannanoa.
“There was some new construction going in down there, duplexes, and now those are gone,” Noyes told the Citizen Times Aug. 21. “You can't build there anymore.”
While he believes interest rates now exert more influence on the broader market than Helene, those permanently lost properties compound a housing shortage that existed long before the storm.
By June 2026, Asheville-area buyer demand had rebounded to its highest level since May 2023, with a $460,000 median sale price and 5.5 months of supply. Yet, the recovery was uneven. Inventory growth was concentrated in higher-priced homes while several mid-priced segments lost supply.
The broader market may have regained its footing, but it did so without replacing every home and parcel Helene permanently removed.
Running on empty
A 2025 Asheville Regional Housing Needs Assessment by Bowen National Research found 19,951 housing units damaged in Buncombe, Henderson, Madison and Transylvania counties, including 17,134 owner-occupied homes and 2,817 rentals. More than 1,400 were damaged severely enough that they likely require replacement.
The shortage predated Helene. Bowen found only 1,486 homes available for sale across the four-county region in 2025, an availability rate of 1.1%, compared with the 2% to 3% range the study considers healthy.
Inventory had fallen from 3,669 available homes in 2014, while very little housing remained available below $200,000.
The rental market showed similar pressure. Bowen found a 1.1% vacancy rate among single-family homes, duplexes, mobile homes and other nontraditional rentals. A typical two-bedroom unit rented for $1,900, requiring about $76,000 in annual household income to be considered “affordable.”
Bowen estimated that Buncombe, Henderson, Madison and Transylvania counties need another 13,921 rental units and 20,437 for-sale units from 2024 through 2029, a combined gap of 34,358 homes.
Helene did not create that shortage, but the destruction of existing housing and permanent loss of some residential property make it harder to close. Every home that cannot be rebuilt increases the amount of new construction needed merely to keep the region from falling further behind.
North Carolina’s current Helene recovery plan reflects the scale of that problem, directing about $1.05 billion in federal disaster recovery and mitigation funding toward rental housing, owner-occupied reconstruction and workforce housing, according to the NCDCR.
Closing that gap is not only about recovering from Helene. It is about adding enough housing, and enough resilient housing, so that the region is not starting with a shortage when — not if — the next disaster comes.
Homeward bound
For renters like Tucker and Wells, the recovery contains another gap. Neither owned the property Helene took from them. Tucker lost the place she was about to move into. Wells’ mobile home was swept away, but the land belonged to someone else, leaving her without a home to repair, rebuild or sell through a buyout.
Both cycled through shelters, hotels and temporary arrangements. They have since become roommates — crashing with a generous acquaintance — but their path illustrates how renters can remain displaced even as programs count home repairs, buyouts and families leaving FEMA housing.
“I would be homeless had it not been for a friend,” Tucker said.
For Wells, the choices are even narrower. She said she has received promises of help but little that has led to permanent housing.
“Here I am, 69 years old,” Wells said. “What the heck am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?”
Cory Vaillancourt is the Helene Recovery/Investigations Reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times. Find him on X at @The_CoryV or on Signal, via email at cvaillancourt@citizentimes.com or at 912-508-5640.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: For some Helene survivors, home is still out of reach two years later
