Asheville, North Carolina, balances redevelopment and flood risk two years after Helene

Two years after Hurricane Helene inundated Asheville, North Carolina's most important business districts and destroyed hundreds of homes, local leaders are rewriting zoning rules, pursuing affordable housing projects and steering development away from flood-prone areas in hopes of rebuilding a more resilient community.

Asheville and Buncombe County, which surrounds the city, lost roughly 372 houses to the September 2024 storm, according to a county government report. The U.S. Census estimates the average household size there is 2.62, which means nearly 1,000 people may have been displaced across the metropolitan area. Some business centers that were Asheville’s lifeblood, notably the River Arts District and Biltmore Village, saw severe flooding, as did the downtowns of Swannanoa in Buncombe and Marshall, just across the border in Madison County.

Money, while critical to the rebuilding effort, has not been the only challenge. Builders point to government rules and red tape that often stymie construction around the U.S. Asheville also has a problem many other places don’t: its topography. It can be hard to find a flat spot to construct a house or business that isn’t vulnerable to flooding, and building on a steep slope is expensive.

“As geographically beautiful as this area is, it’s also very challenging for residential building because of the mountains and rivers,” Nick Scroggs, co-owner of Scroggs Construction in Asheville, said in an interview.

In part to address these obstacles, Asheville’s City Council approved changes to land use rules in September designed to make it easier to build small houses in existing single-family neighborhoods. Meanwhile, both the city and county governments have pushed to get several new affordable housing developments built. In the River Arts District, nonprofit arts and housing groups are working together to build a “creative campus” located outside the floodplain as insurance against the next big storm.

“Everyone’s become more conscious of the need for more responsible development,” said Chris Zajac, a real estate developer for Mountain Housing Opportunities, a nonprofit organization that builds affordable and mixed-income rental developments around the region and also helps people become homeowners.

In one of its new buildings in Asheville, the group is installing potable water tanks and generators and a solar electric system for backup power, so tenants can weather the next storm better. These elements can also make the building a potential community hub for neighbors who need help.

At a county commission meeting earlier this month, elected leaders for Buncombe County, which surrounds the city of Asheville, expressed anger at state officials for what they said was a lack of support in rebuilding.

The county applied last spring for a combination of state and federal tax credits and disaster aid to help get a 203-unit affordable multifamily building off the ground at a site it owns on Coxe Avenue in downtown Asheville. The mix of one-to-three-unit apartments would be priced for households earning up to 80% of the area median income, but with 46 units set aside for those earning no more than 30%.

The state funded a 60-unit development elsewhere in the area but denied backing for the larger project because of a formula that allowed financial assistance for just one project in each county affected by Helene.

“We were the most impacted county, we lost the most housing and we received the smallest amount of this funding to help us get this housing back,” Terri Wells, a Buncombe County commissioner, said at the meeting.

The state did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Many local leaders and housing advocates around the region, and not only in Buncombe, have the sense that state and federal funding to repair and rebuild has been slow in coming. The storm caused an estimated $60 billion in damage, but as of April, only about $11 billion in public funds had become available, according to a report at the time by Gov. Josh Stein’s Helene recovery office.

The City of Asheville has been somewhat more successful so far than Buncombe in getting public funds for new affordable homes, according to Matthew Cable, a Buncombe County planner. Roughly 330 units are planned in three different buildings in the city.

Private builders are also constructing apartments in Asheville and Buncombe. In fact, a glut of multifamily housing is developing south of the city, where there is more relatively flat land available. The central Asheville area saw the completion of nearly 1,200 units over the past year, compared to the annual average of 840 over the last decade, according to CoStar data. Another 1,400 homes are under construction.

Most of these privately built units will be priced at market rate, meaning they may not be available to many people who lost their homes to Helene. The average rent in central Asheville, per CoStar, is $1,630 per month. Asheville's median household income was just over $71,000 in 2024, according to the U.S. Census, which means half the households earned less. With that amount, a household could pay $1,775 a month for rent without it consuming more than 30% of their gross income.

Asheville’s less stringent land use rules try to create new housing in a different way, one that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be affordable.

The City Council’s Aug. 25 vote allows duplexes in most of the single-family-zoned neighborhoods and duplex lots to be split in two to provide more homeownership options. The council also allows accessory dwelling units to be up to 1,000 square feet, to increase the potential for them to house families. The city would have raised the limit to 1,200 square feet, but the state Legislature had recently passed a bill capping the maximum at 1,000.

Small contractors, many of them building one to two houses per year, make up most of the members of the Builders Association of the Blue Ridge Mountains, according to Scroggs, the group’s past president, and some of them will likely be able to take advantage of Asheville’s recent land use changes. But he said they need the local government to ease up on certain regulations that draw out the length of the permitting process.

Immediately after Helene, local officials were eager to help builders by loosening rules, said Scroggs, but that emergency period lasted only a couple of months. Recently, he’s seen cases of builders applying for a permit to improve a particular aspect of a house, such as the electrical wiring, and they’re told they need to do additional work so the entire house is built to current code.

“That’s forcing people to do a lot more work on houses,” he said, and means it takes longer for some people displaced by the storm to return home.

Scroggs’ firm, which specializes in remodeling, created a new division after Helene to help people restore their damaged houses, rather than tear them down and build new ones. The company worked on about 50 homes, but has moved away from that type of work in recent months.

Many homeowners turned to the state’s RenewNC program for assistance in saving their properties, typically single-family homes. The state signed contracts for this work with a group of builders, many of them from outside North Carolina, that specialize in post-disaster construction. Scroggs sought to work collaboratively with some of these larger companies, because his firm had experience they didn’t with the area’s mountainous terrain, but he said the program operated in ways that made little sense to him.

At one home Scroggs did some work on in Black Mountain, just east of Swannanoa, RenewNC said it would tear down the client’s house and rebuild it. The problem, said Scroggs, was that the location was on the side of a mountain, and the contractor presented house plans more appropriate for a flat site in Florida or Texas.

“On day one, they were like, ‘What are we going to do with this mountain here?’” he said. “They had to put [the client] on hold so they could get engineering and foundation plans done. She spent 90 days waiting on them to get those things prepped.”

Building close to rivers like the French Broad or Swannanoa has gotten harder since Helene, in part because the federal government hasn’t redrawn floodplain boundaries yet, creating uncertainty about where the lines are. But even if a location is suitable to build on, it may be so only if a house sits on tall piers that raise the living space above the potential height of floodwaters or keep the house from being swept away in a flood.

It could be “mega-expensive” to make a house flood-proof, said Jeramy Stauffer, who builds tiny houses in and around Marshall, north of Asheville.

If someone’s foundation survived the storm, they can rebuild their house on top of it, he said, but “most people that lost their homes that live on floodplains will probably never be able to afford to rebuild what they had before,” he said. “Like they might have to go smaller or have to move.”

A few months after Helene, the Urban Land Institute issued a report that recommended relocating the entire River Arts District to higher ground. The former industrial area along the French Broad River in central Asheville had become a haven for hundreds of artists in the past three decades, but the hurricane left most of the area at least partially underwater. By that time, the neighborhood had become not just a place for artists to create, but also a tourist destination.

“We had about 750 artists before the storm that showed or had studio space. We lost about 80% of that space,” said Kim Hundertmark, executive director of the River Arts District Artists Foundation. “Now, we are back to over 600 artists showing or working. We have more members now than before the flood, so anybody telling us we had to move out was not received well. But we also are really aware that we have to think differently. Maybe having $250,000 of pottery equipment in the floodplain is not a good idea.”

Hundertmark’s group is working with various other nonprofit organizations in the area. That includes Mountain Housing Opportunities and RiverLink, which promotes the well-being of the French Broad River and its watershed, to make sure the arts district comes back stronger from the storm.

The RADA Foundation's creative campus, consisting of two buildings (36,000 square feet in total) a block uphill from the district’s heart, is planned to include gallery and performance venues and offices for local arts groups. The campus may also include a makerspace with shared equipment for artists to rent. Hundertmark said her group has the property under contract, with plans to close on it next year.

In conjunction with this project, Zajac, the real estate developer with Mountain Housing Opportunities, said he sees chances to build more housing in the district to support artists, as well as families with low incomes and senior citizens. His group currently manages one building in the area, the Residences at the Glen Rock Hotel, which filled with water and mud on the ground level during Helene. The 22 one-bedroom apartments had to be vacated, although many residents survived the storm in the building.

Not far away is another commercial area that suffered greatly during Helene — Biltmore Village. The Swannanoa River rose over the rooftop of the historic railroad station George Vanderbilt had built so that people getting off the train to visit his estate, Biltmore, would have a good view of The Cathedral of All Souls just up the street. The station has been restored and will welcome a new pizza restaurant in the near future, according to Kara Irani, Historic Biltmore Village Association director, and work is continuing to allow worshippers back to the cathedral.

“I’ve just been so impressed with the resilience of the business owners here,” Irani said. “It feels like Biltmore Village is in its comeback era.”

The village is one of Asheville’s most desirable commercial areas, with stores like Williams-Sonoma and Chico’s, and Irani said shop rents returned fairly quickly to what they were before Helene. But even two years later, only about 70% of the storefronts and office spaces are occupied again. One of the challenges, she said, is that some property owners don’t live locally and may not be aware of how difficult it has been for many business tenants to return.

Out in Swannanoa and Marshall, some locals said they are optimistic about their communities’ futures in spite of the dramatic losses they sustained in the hurricane. Several new businesses have opened in Swannanoa, and a community gym is planned in a former school building in Marshall.

“Before the storm, most of downtown Swannanoa was vacant,” said Athena Dygert of Town and Mountain Realty, whose business is focused on this area east of Asheville. “A benefit of the storm is that so many people have come together to advocate for one another and for our community to improve it. I feel like this area is really going through a renaissance.”

This story was originally reported by David Holtzman for Homes.com News.