Downtown Asheville, North Carolina on Oct. 8, 2025. (Photo: Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)
ASHEVILLE — In a convention center ballroom full of elected officials, government workers and nonprofit advocates who have spent the past year rebuilding from Hurricane Helene, the exhaustion is palpable.
So is the optimism.
“I hope that 10 years from now … we’ll think about Helene as the rebirth, the new birth, of western North Carolina,” said Sharon Decker, Gov. Josh Stein’s senior advisor for long-term recovery.
Western North Carolina has begun its long road back from the worst storm in state history, one that will involve rebuilding thousands of homes, businesses and farms, as well as key regional infrastructure. Billions in state and federal dollars have flowed, and continue to flow, into the region.
During a one-year anniversary summit meant to highlight the recovery’s “partnerships and successes” — led by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Southwestern Commission and Land of Sky Regional Council — leaders made it clear they don’t want that money to merely return them to the status quo.
“There are all different sources of grants, opportunities, funding that we’re going to be employing over the next several years to build back better,” said Asheville mayor Esther Manheimer.
Key to that equation: housing and transportation. Rising housing costs, even before Helene, have forced lower-income workers out of urban areas and sometimes out of the region altogether. And a lack of transportation choices left many of those same workers with few options to commute and navigate the mountains.
Asheville, North Carolina Mayor Esther Manheimer speaks to western North Carolina leaders about the city’s recovery from Hurricane Helene on Oct. 8, 2025. (Photo: Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)Helene exacerbated both of those issues, said Tristan Winkler, a planner for the French Broad River region with Land of Sky. Now, many are “trading housing costs for transportation costs.” Future investments, he said, could alleviate some costs for locals.
“Putting housing closer to jobs, closer to a lot of our amenities, that’s a way to reduce transportation burdens on our workforce,” Winkler said.
Housing: What Helene has meant for WNC’s population centers
Since Helene, the number of permits to build single-family housing in the Asheville area have decreased. And the cost of housing as a share of income in the city continues to far exceed the national average.
Many service and retail workers, who fuel the city’s tourism economy, struggle to find homes locally.
“They are kind of continually battling growing prices and a really limited amount of housing stock,” said Sara VanLear, a project manager with the UNC School of Government.
One potential solution: more multi-family housing.
Winkler said permitting for multi-family development was increasing primarily in smaller, unincorporated regions. The large population centers in Buncombe County — Asheville and Hendersonville — are both far less dense than other North Carolina urban centers.
Still, ramping up the building is easier said than done in the mountains, particularly with landslides and flooding still fresh in mind.
“The land that is the most developable … is basically already developed,” VanLear said. “It forces a lot of creativity in thinking how to get development done. That’s already really hard to do.”
Significant public dollars will go toward rebuilding housing in the region over the coming years.
About $1.2 billion in federal grant money will pay for repairs and rebuilds of single-family, multi-family and workforce homes damaged by Helene. Asheville is also set to receive $225 million from that same federal pool of money, $31 million of which will go toward housing.
Transit: Could WNC see passenger rail under revamped infrastructure?
For the past two decades, many of the area’s lower-income workers and renters have opted to move not to Asheville but to surrounding towns and counties.
Those communities generally lack robust transportation infrastructure — little to no bicycle amenities and occasional buses.
But one option for mass transit — long thought to be pie-in-the-sky for the region — could see new life in a post-Helene western North Carolina.
Sharon Decker, senior advisor to Gov. Josh Stein on long-term recovery in western North Carolina, speaks in Asheville on Oct. 8, 2025. (Photo: Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)“I do dream of passenger rail service to Asheville,” said Decker, a longtime western business leader and former Secretary of Commerce. “It’s worth pursuit, and I think we need to do it.”
The storm wiped out key chunks of the region’s commercial rail system, forcing rail company Norfolk Southern to begin ground-up rebuilds. That includes the Old Fort Loops, a key 16-mile stretch of rail east of Asheville.
Previously, the infrastructure of the system didn’t allow for passenger rail, said Mary Lesa Pegg, an industrial development manager for Norfolk Southern. But the new plan “does open up the main corridor … in order to get Amtrak.”
Pegg said she’d make no definitive statements or promises, but that the “conversation is alive and well.”
Industry & agriculture: WNC has to ‘get serious’ about resilient infrastructure
As western leaders discussed how the region would rebuild its critical infrastructure, they agreed on a sentiment best summarized by Decker: “We’ve got to think differently.”
“We have got to get serious about focusing on infrastructure to deal with flooding,” said Kaleb Rathbone, an assistant commissioner at the Department of Agriculture. “As a state, and as a society.”
That goes for local drinking water and sewage systems, many of which were knocked offline and are now housed in temporary locations. It goes for key roads and bridges, many of which are privately owned. And it goes for major farms, Rathbone said.
He added that state farming could also benefit from being less reliant on national and regional supply chains. Those supply networks are “part of the miracle of modern agriculture,” he said, but overreliance on them could leave the region without needed goods and materials during and after disasters.
“A focus on having local manufacturers, regional manufacturers … is incredibly important,” Rathbone said.
North Carolina lawmakers have sent money to repair roads and bridges, as well as water systems. And more than half ($125 million) of Asheville’s $225 million in federal grant money will go toward infrastructure repairs, according to the city’s plan.
But Decker said the scale of recovery and preparedness is bigger than just the public or private sectors alone.
“There will never be enough public dollars to do all that needs to be done,” Decker said. “There will never be enough philanthropic dollars. We’ve got to do it collectively.”
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