From Staff Reports

HENDERSONVILLE — An unidentified city resident said during a “Council Conversations” forum on Oct. 9 that he had heard that neighboring rival Asheville is responsible for the jump in the homeless population in Hendersonville .

Specifically, the citizen said, “I have (it) from a very reliable source that Asheville police are bringing (homeless) people here and dropping them off,” according to a report in the Oct 11 edition of the Hendersonville Lightning.

In response, Hendersonville City Manager John  Connet said the citizen’s assertion “is a common (mis)perception, but that there is a lack of hard evidence to support it.

“I don’t know that we have any definitive proof that that’s happening,” Connet was quoted as saying by the Lightning. “We (Hendersonville city officials) hear the same thing. We hear they’re being bused in. We hear they’re getting bus tickets. But we don’t have any definitive proof that that’s happening.”

Later in its story, the Lightning stated, “Lack of affordable housing, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol addiction and mental health issues are all commonly cited as causes of homelessness, Connet said. 

“And as the numbers have increased here, the city is fielding more and more complaints about panhandling, camping on public and private property, people ‘generally feeling unsafe; and homeless men and women, ruining the downtown atmosphere,” the Lightning story reported, in paraphrasing Connet’s comments.

Further, the newspaper noted that Hendersonville’s city manager has said in regard to the ongoing debate nationally focusing on “low-barrier” versus high-barrier” shelters, that the 75-bed Hendersonville Rescue Mission “is considered a high-barrier shelter and the high-barrier means you have to enter into their drug rehab programs, you have to attempt to get a job — several criteria — before they allow you to stay there. 

“The low-barrier approach — sometimes known as ‘housing first’ — is ‘based on the belief that you have to get the folks housed before they’ll accept treatment. There’s a huge debate in the country about low-barrier and high-barrier shelters.”

Further, the Lightning reported Connet as telling council:

“One consequence is that, ‘if you do build these types of low-barrier shelters, they (the homeless) will come. You’re not only taking care of homeless in our community, but maybe homeless from other communities. It is a very transient population.’

“Mayor pro tem Lindsey Simpson supported the idea of low-barrier shelter.

“‘Whether or not not they’re choosing to be homeless, they have some sort of unmet need,’ she said. ‘And when you have a lot of unmet needs and you are living in a constant state of stress and trauma, you are not necessarily capable of making the best decisions for yourself. So, for us to say people are choosing that, yes, they may be in the moment, but that doesn’t mean that they are in the right headspace to be making those decisions.”

Later in the Oct. 9 discussion, officials revealed that a partnership (of the city and others) is close to getting Henderson County’s approval to acquire the vacant Opportunity House for the Connections Center, a one-stop clearinghouse for services for homeless people.

The future of the Opportunity House property, which has been in receivership since July 2022 remains in the hands of Henderson County Civil Superior Court.

While one official projected an 18-month time frame to get the building ready for use, Connet was quoted by the Lightning as saying, “It depends obviously on the condition of the building. They would like to at least do themiinor renovations, so they can create an office as soon as possible.”

The Lightning report concluded: “Unsurprisingly, given the intracability of the homeless challenge in cities, big, medium and small, Connet told the council: ‘There’s no silver bullet. There is no answer at the end of this presentation, There’s just more work to be done on behalf of our communityu because the city cannot solve this problem by ourselves. We should be conveners — of a partnership of nonprofits, other jurisdictions and the community in general.’”

Meanwhile, the Daily Planet contacted local FOP President Rondell Lance regarding a citizen’s contention at a recent Hendersonville City Council meeting that the APD is transporting homeless people from Asheville — one-way — to Hendersonville. 

(Asheville’s Harold C. Enloe Lodge 1, over which Lance is president, claims more than 250 members. “The members comprise law enforcement officers and civilians from the Asheville Police Department, the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office, HCSHP, N.C. Probation and Parole, and many others,” the lodge’s website stated.)

In a late-night Oct. 22 telephone interview with the newspaper, Lance said flatly — based on his long-time knowledge of the local law enforcement community and personal experience as a police officer — that neither the APD nor any other such law enforcement agency is “shipping” homeless people one-way to Hendersonville, or to other cities.

“No, if it (the APD) did, they would get in trouble, if it was found out,” Lance asserted. “We never did that” while he worked for the APD from 1988 until 2014 — and “it never happened... We never ever even talked about it.”

Then, referencing today’s technology placed on each patrol car, he noted that, “if they (the APD officers) did it, it would be monitored and tracked. Every (APD car has a GPS tracker on it, so they (the police chief and his administration) would know about it...

“Now, in ‘the day,’” Lance said he had heard that “they’d take them (vagrants or those who were intoxicated) to the top of Town Mountain and let them out” — and they would have to walk down the steep and curving road to downtown, sobering them up in the process — and discouraging them from sticking around Asheville.

So exactly when was the period of back in “the day” to which Lance was referring? the Daily Planet queried. 

“In the ‘60s — that was ‘back in the day,’” the local FOP president replied with a chuckle.

As for the very idea of shipping homeless people from Asheville to Hendersonville, Lance asked, rhetorically, “Could one or two (APD officers) have slid in and done it? Maybe. But they’re not doing it in numbers. I know they’d lose their jobs — if the chief and administration found out about it.”

After a pause, Lance firmly asserted, “They’d lose their job over it.” Even if it did happen that officers were shipping the homeless to Hendersonville, he reckoned that “they (the homeless) are going to come back if they do” – because Asheville has so much more to offer homeless people.

“The rumor going around when I was around at the APD (from 1988 til 2014) was homeless residents telling officers that ‘I’m from up North. They sent me a one-way voucher to ride a Greyhouse bus to Asheville’... A lot of the younger people would ‘hobo’ the trains to Asheville. They said they had food stamps. They’d play a little music and beg for money.”

Now, he pointed out, “A lot of people are furloughed or sent to several ‘rehab’ places around here. They’d end up downtown. I’d tell them that Asheville is a terrible place to ‘rehab’ because there so much ‘dope...’ They weren’t sent here by anybody, but sent by ‘rehab places’...

However, Lance acknowledged, “We have seen on the national (television) news where they (the homeless) are being bused all over the United States. Buses are being sent all over the country. I’m sure sometimes they are sent to Asheville — so they probably go to Hendersonville, too...

'When they get out of prison, they give them a bus ticket for wherever they want to go. Asheville’s got a reputation across the nation as a very ‘liberal’ city — meaning a lack of law and order and a lack of holding people accountable — and that if you’re here, they’ll feed you every day, give you a place to sleep and shower” and even give you free syringes for injecting illegal drugs. That ‘reputation’ is already around the country...” 

What’s more,“if you ride a Greyhound (bus), probably a large percentage of people on that Greyhouse just got out of prison because that (via bus) is how they send (the powers that be) you... somewhere.” Lance said, as his interview with the Daily Planet concluded.