Asheville, North Carolina, is looking to cut its unsheltered homeless population and crack down on panhandling amid a decline in tourism.
In a meeting Thursday, the Homeless Initiative Advisory Committee unanimously recommended plans to allocate $1.75 million to expand homeless shelter beds, as unsheltered homelessness has increased in the city.The HIAC is a joint committee of the Asheville City Council and Buncombe County Commission charged with researching, creating, and recommending policies, including how to spend federal resources, to combat the area's homelessness crisis.
According to the Asheville Citizen-Times, the plans come after a January report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness that made recommendations to cut the area's homeless population by half and restructure the joint commission, which is the governing body of the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care — a federal framework to build local commissions aimed at handling homelessness.
Sites being reviewed for the increased beds include church collaboratives, the Salvation Army, and other local shelter models. Beach-Ferrara told the Citizen-Times that the low-barrier shelter model would be the key to lowering homelessness in the area, adding,"If we rushed into creating a shelter as quickly as we could, we would not just miss opportunities for that more impactful model, but we would probably get it wrong."
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