Asheville city government declares war on the houseless and attacks protests, the press, mutual aid groups and anyone who dares to speak up

Above: Asheville police move to block off a table with food and supplies during the Dec. 25 raid. Photo by Veronica Coit

Blade reporter Matilda Bliss contributed to this piece

The Blade is currently raising funds to support our journalists arrested for covering the Dec. 25 police crackdown. Make a one-time donation here. Or subscribe here. Any amount helps.

Last April 16 Southside residents witnessed an ominous sight: a wave of cops marching down South French Broad Avenue. There were a lot of them: nearly the entire on-duty police force. They moved to Aston Park, where local houseless people and their supporters had held a camp against threats from the APD.

The police then attacked, hauling away four people in handcuffs. Absurdly, they charged one person with assaulting an officer simply for being there.

“Perfect! Yippee!” city manager Debra Campbell exclaimed over text message when police chief David Zack informed her of the arrests. Meanwhile Mayor Esther Manheimer passed on the thanks of the head of a conservative, openly anti-houseless “neighborhood association” to top city officials.

While the neighborhood is mostly Black and working class, documents later obtained by the Blade and Sunshine Request reveal that city hall was trying to please a handful of well-off white transplants who openly hated the unhoused.

The Aston Park crackdown would prove a sign of things to come: massive police presence, false charges used to punish protest and the deployment of “outside agitators” propaganda to discredit solidarity between housed and unhoused locals. All of it done at the behest of gentrifiers whose discomfort is considered reason enough for an eviction.

It got worse. This winter city government drug its feet on cold weather declarations, known as Code Purple, that would require opening additional shelter space. They refused to fund enough beds for Code Purple to be effective, even though they had tens of millions in reserve. The only available winter shelters were run by conservative religious groups, including the openly anti-trans Salvation Army.

By November, in council’s secretive “check-in” sessions, members were directing staff to draw up “plans on how we can enforce against downtown violations/homelessness situations.” Just over a month later, in an effort to please far-right business groups, they suddenly scrapped plans for a low-barrier shelter at the former Ramada Inn in East Asheville. That means 75 families will be kicked out of the site this spring.

On Christmas night Asheville police launched a brutal raid on another Aston Park camp, following days of threats to those gathering there to protest the recent wave of camp sweeps. They arrested six, targeting two Blade journalists first before dragging people out of tents.

Last year saw a major escalation in city hall’s war against the houseless. During 2021 they inflicted at least 26 camp evictions. While harassing houseless people has always been one of the main activities of Asheville police, this was a far more widespread viciousness.

Nor was it just cops acting on their own. The direction for these crackdowns came from the highest levels of city government. In everything that follows it is worth remembering that the officials ordering police violence bear as much responsibility for the ensuing abuse as the cops themselves.

At the same time movements against the sweeps have grown, with increasing solidarity between housed and unhoused locals. Along with an action against the refusal to provide Code Purple resources, Aston Park had again been the site of a growing protest — dubbed the Aston Park Build — in the days leading up to the Christmas raid. Locals shared food, made art and linked the dangers facing the unhoused with the rapid gentrification of the town.

The Christmas arrests drew public backlash. Those of the Blade journalists even drew condemnation from an international organization. Longtime houseless service organizations condemned the attacks on the camps.

Faced with all this Asheville city government looked deep inside themselves and decided they had to get way, way more evil.

The first weeks of 2022 would see open classism, an ugly police pr effort to paint houseless people as dangerous predators, a wave of retaliatory anti-protest arrests on blatantly false charges, intimidation efforts against dissident city board members, a declaration that city hall decides who’s actually a journalist and — last but not least — a draft ordinance that would ban the very act of giving food and supplies to those in need.

It’s likely that’s not a complete list. The repressive actions from city hall have been so frequent that I’ve had to significantly revise this piece multiple times over the past weeks.

City council’s own policies — tourism and gentrification at all costs — have played a major role in why Asheville’s become, by many measures, the least affordable city in the country. Officials are now willing to go to nearly any lengths to disappear the inevitable results.

This is the story of city hall declaring open war on the poor.

Orders from the top

Treating unhoused locals like shit has long been a major point of city government. Along with enforcing de facto segregation it’s one of the main reasons for the APD’s existence. Indeed, given that Asheville’s houseless population is disproportionately Black, those are heavily interconnected. It’s a common sight to see multiple cops clustered around a single houseless person.

The cruelty has escalated recently. In 2016 and 2018, when the Housing Not Handcuffs effort drew attention to the staggering number of times cops use minor trespassing charges to arrest houseless people, the APD falsely claimed that was rarely the sole charge they pressed. Now they don’t even bother, and will openly brag about just hauling people off to jail for trying to find shelter.

Council members are also no strangers to classism. These are, after all, well-off or wealthy landowners. Manheimer was calling Occupy Asheville protesters “beggars” over a decade ago.

But on Jan. 11 they got far worse. In 16 years of covering Asheville city hall it was the most open display of hatred for those struggling to survive that I’ve ever seen.

While police and public works staff are often the ones carrying out the evictions, they act on the wishes of the city manager, mayor and most of council. City manager Debra Campbell, for example, personally ordered and reveled in the April evictions, with the approval of the mayor and a clique of some conservative council members.

This has been part of a sharply right-wing turn in the current council. Even the CDC, hardly a bastion of radical care, warns against governments evicting campers. But city hall didn’t just continue sweeps, they ramped them up considerably from pre-pandemic levels.

The Christmas raid was not popular, attracting outrage both locally and elsewhere. The Committee to Protect Journalists, the international organization that defends press freedom, condemned the arrest of our reporters. In the weeks after, new images from Blade journalist Veronica Coit emerged showing the scale of the police crackdown. The Asheville Free Press revealed police had lied about their own policies, which still required them to give campers seven days notice. Even establishment media acknowledged that the city’s own Human Relations Commission (HRCA) had proposed ending sweeps and providing services all the way back in May. Council had ignored them.

The public was, bluntly, pissed.

One notable example of this anger came when council member Kim Roney proposed temporarily halting the sweeps and drew a backlash on social media. Yet this wasn’t anti-houseless hatred of the occasional right-winger, but locals fed-up with what they saw as a politician dithering while people were in danger.

“We all know you’re only taking a (weak) stand after feeling the pressure,” one wrote.

“‘Who can make changes?’ the people on the ground already are,” another said in response to Roney passing the buck by claiming she needed more support on council to do anything. “Stand beside them when the cops come.”

“We’re allowed to expect more from someone who claims to be an abolitionist, someone who ran on a platform claiming this and that but not showing out in the streets with us.”

Tents and mansions

“Camps are, we feel, the data will show, unsafe and not a solution to homelessness,” Campbell began her presentation at the Jan. 11 council meeting, though at no point would she clarify how repeatedly kicking people out in the cold made anything safer.

Campbell makes about $250,000 a year and has spent much of the pandemic working from the spacious 3-bedroom house she owns in one of the wealthier parts of South Asheville. That night she at least managed to restrain herself from shouting “yippee!” like she exclaimed about the April evictions.

Staffer Emily Ball then said that city government’s goals were to house the houseless (mostly with projects that are, at best, years off). Some of the efforts she touted were those at the soon to be closed Ramada site.

She claimed that officials knew that “homeless people are not the problem, homelessness is the problem.”

This was immediately thrown out the window by everything else in the presentation, as police Capt. Mike Lamb smeared houseless people as dangerous, drug-addicted predators who were a threat to everyone around them.

“We are working to proactively address illegal behaviors, especially to ensure a good quality of life for all our neighbors,” Lamb said, cop-speak for demolishing camps and dragging people out of tents to make tourists feel more comfortable.

In the middle of this ream of excuses for camp sweeps Lamb broached a ban on food distribution as a “necessary change to current ordinances.” He claimed tents were blocking sidewalks and access to businesses but gave no examples (camps are overwhelmingly set back from thoroughfares).

Lamb blamed APD breaking the seven days notice policy on on “activists, anarchists who refuse to leave” claiming that houseless people were all “cooperative” and “most of the time we don’t issue citations.”

This is contradicted by Blade reporters, who’ve witnessed both unhoused and housed locals at camps making decisions together on multiple occasions. Years of research on local criminal records has repeatedly shown Asheville police spend a shocking amount of their time arresting houseless people on frivolous charges.

Indeed, from Dec. 26 to Feb. 20 the APD carried out 29 arrests for second degree trespassing, the vast majority on houseless people. In one case they arrested one houseless person four times for trespassing just during that period.

Lamb touted a scare graphic asserting that crime increased dramatically 500-1,000 ft. near houseless camps, that in the past two years 25 percent of violent crime and 22 percent of overall crime in the entire city happened nearby.

This is contradicted by sociological studies showing little to no correlation between camps and crime rates.

At some points the APD’s propaganda started falling apart on the spot. Council member Gwen Wisler, a millionaire ex-CEO who moved here after retirement, asked Lamb ominously if “people come from outside our region to Asheville because we offer services, because we are a bit more friendly.”

“Based on my trained experience, yes, definitely,” Lamb agreed. “Especially over this past year we’ve seen people who’ve come in from other towns, other states to seek services in Asheville.”

Ball immediately contradicted him.

“Based on the data we have, the majority of people who are homeless in our community are from this area, primarily Buncombe County and Western North Carolina,” she said. “These are folks who had housing here, lost their housing and became homeless in our community, based on the data that we have.”

“Every community says other communities are bussing homeless folks in to get services,” she continued. “It’s a bit of a common myth across the country.”

There was more, and the police department’s claims would crumble further in the ensuing days. One of the main “crimes” mentioned on the slide, overdoses, isn’t a crime. It also lumps violence done to houseless people in camps in with incidents they’re accused of.

Its radius of 1,000 feet within a houseless camp includes some of Asheville’s busiest areas. Drawing a 1,000 feet radius from the Lexington Avenue camp, for example, would take in a decent swath of downtown. This applies even more if the 1,000 feet starts not at the boundary of a houseless camp, but of a large park or plot they’re camped on. That means that incidents like drunk tourists getting in fistfights were used by the APD to blame houseless people camping in the area.

The only council member to dissent from this was Roney. Perhaps feeling more pressure from the public she was notably more strident than previous meetings, though she stopped short of condemning the recent arrests.

“When I look at how our ordinances are being carried out we land in this place where we’re not compliant with the CDC’s guidelines,” Roney said. “That’s not to move people from camping, it disconnects them from services. Instead we could provide sanitation services, water, 24-hour bathrooms. Are we causing a public health problem while we get from where we are to where we need to be?”

“We market Asheville as a place to come that’s welcoming and inclusive,” Roney continued. “If you have $700,000 to buy a house, you’re a neighbor, if you have $700 to rent a hotel room you’re a visitor. But if you can’t afford those things, if you have $7 and a tent, then you’re not welcome and you need to go away.”

But the rest of council ran with it. Their remarks at the meeting were indistinguishable from those of far-right figures like Tucker Carlson.

“My husband and I visited Wilmington,” Wisler, attending the remote meeting from her spacious 3-bedroom on the wealthy side of North Asheville, said. “I didn’t see any people that I would have identified as homeless in the downtown area. That’s an urban place that has nice weather but they seem to be managing their problem and I’m just curious what they’re doing.”

Council member Sandra Kilgore, a well-off realtor, went even farther than the police’s propaganda, asserting out of nowhere that houseless camps represented a danger to children and schools, especially due to “tons of needles.”

“How many of these homeless people are substance abusers or [have] mental illness issues?”

Campbell blamed the camps for rapes, before declaring “we just shouldn’t have camps.”

Her basic assumptions are of course contradicted by years of research — including from survivor advocates — showing that destroying camps puts houseless people in more danger by breaking up their communities and making them harder to contact.

“I want to applaud city staff and APD for what they have been doing,” Council member Sage Turner said, also blaming houseless people for domestic abuse and repeating the myth that they were drawn to Asheville for services. “I think we have to have a hard conversation about what our capacity for services for people in our community is.”

Turner owns a giant 5-bedroom in a rapidly gentrifying part of West Asheville. She purchased it with money she made from, among other things, exploiting workers from her high-level management job. Her life has no choices that are, in any meaningful way, hard.

“It is unsurprising that the neighborhoods with the most resources are the safest,” Roney said. “The absence of a community shelter is a decision we made. We spent $3.5 million and yet lack a community asset to show for it. We’re now going to chase these folks around town.”

“This isn’t going to go away by displacing people.”

‘You can’t just wait until everybody dies’

The latest propaganda wasn’t accepted so readily by the public. About half the speakers during the Jan. 11 open public comment period blasted council.

“It is unethical and un-progressive to let people freeze to death on the streets,” Kay Hudson said. “Where are people supposed to go if they can’t stay where they are and shelter in place and if shelters are not adequate solutions to their problems.”

“Camps are not a public health risk, the criminalization of poor people’s existence is,” Greenleaf Clarke said. “The most powerful solution to homelessness is simple: stop un-housing people. This includes stopping all camp sweeps.”

“The community is trying to do the humanitarian work that the city not only fails to do but in fact criminalizes,” ey said. “I guarantee you the people of Asheville could house everyone next week if the APD just got out of the way.”

“As journalists in Asheville who are not deferential to city hall, we are all too familiar with the petty cruelty that defines your organization,” Blade reporter Matilda Bliss, reading a statement from our co-op, said. “Let us remind you that whether council, or the city manager, or anyone else in city government likes our coverage is irrelevant. In fact, if you don’t it’s a good sign we’re doing our jobs.”

“We are sick of hearing city officials whine about the law as a cover for their cruelty.”

Casey Campfield said that if city hall was so concerned with rape and abuse “I would like to know why Deputy chief James Baumstark is still on active duty with the APD after a federal lawsuit naming him as covering up a sex trafficking ring.”

“We should establish sanctuary camping in one of our many parks, including sanitation services, in keeping with the CDC guidance and the HRCA recommendation, which you’ve chosen to ignore,” Grace Martinez said. “Why are we doing this when it’s clear it isn’t working. Where do you want them to go?”

“Daily we get calls that more and more people in our community are falling into homelessness,” Amy Cantrell, of BeLoved Asheville said. “People are camping because they don’t have enough shelter.”

“There’s nowhere for people to go. People are asked to leave one camp site only to be swept from the next.”

Hauled away in handcuffs

Notably no council member — including Roney — at the Jan. 11 meeting condemned the recent arrests. Apparently APD took that as carte blanche, because in the following days they began a wave of retaliatory raids, arresting seven people.

Most were charged with “felony littering” for having art supplies in a public park. This was so plainly absurd that when Capt. Lamb first threatened people with those charges on Dec. 22, Blade reporter Matilda Bliss reported on it as a lie intended to scare protesters into leaving.

According to a statement from those arrested some of them were targeted at home or dragged away from their workplaces in handcuffs. This is backed up by public records.

Felony littering charges, which the APD hasn’t used in about a decade, require someone to have dumped over 500 lbs. of trash. In their press releases about the arrests police would claim, rather ludicrously, that the protests had left “between 1,000 and 2,200 pounds of litter.”

“There was a lot of trash, give or take 1,200 pounds” is already laughable on its face. The only photos the department could muster showed some pallets, a few pieces of art and some tires they claimed protesters had left there. Much of this art also served the practical purpose of protecting campers from winter winds.

It wasn’t the first time Asheville police used such tactics. They’re a go-to whenever the APD is publicly embarrassed. In 2016, after protesters occupied the lobby of the police station, the department launched a wave of after-the-fact arrests on similarly vague charges. In June 2020 the mayor declared a curfew on protests after her law office windows were smashed, leading to a wave of arrests of anyone they APD decided might be part of anti-racist demonstrations.

The ACLU even warned city hall that their actions were “in blatant violation of state and federal constitutional protections.”

“City officials have time and again chosen to sacrifice the survival of homeless and poor folks of this city in the name of profit and tourism,” a Feb. 5 statement from those arrested in the January raids declared. “Now they’ve chosen to target mutual aid work in Asheville because this work shines a light on the pervasive, immeasurable failures of the government to care for its community.”

“These charges are just one of multiple attempts by city government to repress our movement,” it continued. “We see these actions as an attempt to incapacitate and exhaust those who believe adamantly that ALL members of our community should be housed, nourished, cared for, and have agency over their own lives.”

Notably in their p.r. the police also associated those arrested with the last place they’d lived before Asheville, even when public records showed that they’d lived here for years.

These are “outside agitators” tactics, which have a long racist and classist history. Their goal is to dismiss solidarity by painting anyone organizing or acting against the government’s wishes as a foreign interloper.

The lie they peddle is that everything would be fine here if everyone would just stay quiet and do as they’re told.

‘Rogue members’

As the APD retaliated against protesters, in the weeks following council’s Jan. 11 meeting city officials turned their attention to silencing dissenting board members.

As mentioned earlier the city’s HRCA committee had sent a proposal to council to halt the evictions and provide safe camping. In the aftermath of the December camp sweeps board members Tanya Rodriguez, Susy Chandler and Mel Noyes spoke to the Asheville Citizen-Times criticizing the city’s actions and asking why council had ignored the proposal for months.

On Jan. 20 the committee met again. But instead of tackling pressing human rights issues much of its time was focused on trying to intimidate the committee members who’d spoken up.

After a conservative board member bristled at the others’ comments and wondered if they’d had “permission to speak” to the press, consultant Dionne Greenlee backed him up, warning about “rogue members.” Instead, she said, they should defer to city hall’s “big p.r. arm.”

“We can oftentimes fall victim to divisiveness,” Greenlee said. “You don’t want the wrong representation of the commission out in the media.”

“We don’t want council being made off-balance by anything they weren’t being made privy to,” newly appointed equity officer Brenda Mills warned, before noting that at the next meeting she wanted to bring in the city’s p.r director to lecture the committee.

Campbell appointed Mills, a longtime public relations and business apparatchik, to run the department after a mass exodus spurred by the city manager’s refusal to take bigotry seriously. Now she was telling the committee to stop advocating for its own policies.

“We were directly responding to community concerns,” Rodriguez said in defense of their actions. “It was urgent, and we didn’t have time to reach out to anybody, because it was a matter of minutes, because people were dying.”

She noted that her remarks, and those of the other board members who spoke up, were based on the board’s own recommendations.

“I do think it’s important for our group to reinforce our position on the houseless camp sweeps as the APD continues to disrupt encampments contrary to CDC guidelines,” Noyes said. “A very concrete way we can do this is to condemn the arrests of journalists on Christmas.”

At the same time city officials were concocting a plan that would dismantle HRCA — and 19 other city volunteer committees — entirely and replace them with a group of four vague “advisory boards” even more tightly under staff control.

No food for the hungry

The same day HRCA members were facing warnings for speaking out of turn, officials were plotting to ramp the war up even more at another secret council “check-in.” In addition to camp crackdowns, they now wanted to prohibit locals from even giving out food and supplies in public spaces.

Lamb had mentioned such a push, and at council’s Jan. 20 “check in” the city attorney and staff had already researched multiple ordinances (all of which faced legal challenges). They’d even drawn up sample language requiring organizations to apply and pay for permits, limiting them to only giving out food in a single park twice a year and prohibiting them from distributing any supplies.

On Sunday, Jan. 23, vice mayor Sheneika Smith dropped by a food distribution run by Asheville Survival Program, a local mutual aid group. As reported in the Asheville Free Press, the vice mayor told those at the site that they would need permits in the future.

Public outrage quickly grew. Multiple religious groups like Carolina Jews for Justice and Faith4Justice joined those already opposing the camp sweeps and crackdown. A petition against the proposal quickly gained thousands of signatures.

City hall launched damage control. Public relations flack Katie Miller, freshly hired from her former spot as a bureau chief at far-right Fox News, claimed on Jan. 24 that the proposal was “misunderstood” and that any future “permits would be given freely.”

This was immediately contradicted when the actual draft text of the ordinance was revealed.

It would still become a common line in city propaganda, that locals were simply “confused” about the proposal. They weren’t.

It was first publicly broached by a police commander in a presentation defending camp sweeps, framed as part of a wider crackdown. As written it would make the vast majority of food and supply distribution impossible and prohibit much of it outright. Its exceptions (bans usually have them) are so narrowly written as to be essentially meaningless.

That’s a ban. Any journalist with a shred of self-respect has an obligation to say so.

The issue came to dominate the Jan. 25 council meeting. Despite the many intentional barriers to signing up for public comment at the city’s remote meetings, 35 people did. The vast majority opposed council’s actions.

‘A war against houseless people in this city’

By the time council wound its way towards its Jan. 25 meeting, public outrage had grown. A petition against the planned food ban had already gathered almost 3,000 signatures.

But city hall kept doubling down, including on their threats to the press. An official presentation to the public safety committee declared that “once laws are willingly broken, one ceases to be an independent observer or journalist and becomes a participant.”

Roney asked about this, observing that “it doesn’t line up with what I’ve heard stated as our goals but it is where we keep landing.”

Campbell replied that the police would decide who counted as a journalist.

“As your city manager I can’t make a determination about that particular question, in terms of the transition from being a journalist to being a participant, because I’m not a law enforcement officer,” the city manager said. “I have every faith and confidence that the police officer is doing their job in making a distinction.”

This is the same department whose officers told a consultant in 2020 that “no scrutiny from media” was a major priority.

The Christmas raid was the second time a Blade journalist has been targeted and arrested by Asheville police. In August 2020 Coit was dragged out of their car and arrested while covering a protest. The charges were later dismissed.

Campbell turned the question of who’s a journalist over to deputy APD chief Mike Yelton, who turned it over to city attorney Brad Branham. He said that a journalist being in a park after its official closing hours was reason enough to arrest them, even if they were covering the public actions of the police (importantly others observing the raid that night were not detained, just Blade reporters).

Under this rationale journalists can be detained any time police don’t like their presence on public property, simply for refusing to stop their coverage, or if the cops decide they’re trespassing. It’s in line with the same excuses used to crack down on the press in other parts of the country.

Branham was in for a busy day of lying. At the formal meeting that night he began with one of the most self-contradictory statements ever to come from a city attorney.

“This ordinance or any related ordinance is not scheduled for any future city council agenda. Right now, city staff is beginning the process in the very early stages of researching options,” Branham claimed. He then added, incredibly, that “there is absolutely no research being conducted right now to prohibit the sharing of food in public parks or anywhere else in the city.”

It’s funny that despite doing “no research” Branham’s office produced full legal language and an extensively-researched document on the issue, then presented it to secret meetings of city council members where they set future policy. Apparently that’s just something they do for fun.

Manheimer and Kilgore wanted to cut the public off and only allow an hour of public comment (at 3 minutes per speaker this would have left out well over a third or shortened their speaking time), but lost out after Roney publicly objected that “this is one of the few opportunities people have to participate at all.”

“There are a lot of groups that do food sharing, they come from all walks of life and many of them aren’t 501c3 non-profits,” Elsa Enstrom said. “Some of them are just people. To try to limit those people and their ability to offer mutual care to those around them is, frankly, offensive. It shows you have a war against houseless people in this city.”

“Yet again you force people away from where they’re staying, you don’t offer enough safe places for them to live. What do you expect people to do?”

“It is utterly reprehensible to create more barriers for the public to distribute food and aid to our houseless neighbors,” Victoria Estes said. “That is tyranny, that is oppression, that is immoral.”

“The argument for an ordinance such as this rests on the idea that park sanitation and trash removal are so much a burden on the city that we can not possibly seek out solutions to allow for the continued sharing of resources. This is absurd,” Lauren Stickels said.

“I’m sure y’all produce plenty of trash too but you’ve got large, warm homes to shelter in,” Winnie Young said. “None of this has to do with sanitation or safety, it has to do with keeping white, wealthy tourists appeased and the police disappearing poor people. This is the true history of Asheville, isn’t it?”

“Y’all are wasting our time while we’re trying to feed and keep each other alive,” Young continued.

Multiple speakers noted that the $2.5 million a year freed up by APD officers leaving could easily fund housing.

“You’re literally supporting the starvation of people on the street,”Jennifer Brown said. “In a city that prides itself on being a so-called ‘foodtopia’ with tourists flocking here to eat fancy, gentrified farm-to-table food, this is not only deeply inequitable, it shows how little you care about the survival of our houseless community.”

“All to make sure tourists don’t see what it’s really like here, that Asheville has made a list as one of the worst places to live.” “You can’t take your hands out of the pockets of hotels and police-supporting businesses long enough to see what it’s really like to try to survive here.”

“All forms of gender-based violence happens too often on these streets, and some of it becomes visible because of the camps, where they’re significantly more likely to be reported,” survivor advocate Joanna Knowles told council. “In group settings bystanders are much more likely to interrupt the violence and there’s more opportunities for support.”

“Using violence against women as justification to cause more harm is a Jim Crow tactic,” Knowles continued. “Not only has this consistently failed to end the violence or offer justice but has drastically increased harm to Black women.”

“Council may choose to continue endorsing this policy, but you do not get to use rape as an excuse.”

“It’s not going to work, we’re going to do it anyway,” Sagan Thacker said. “No matter how you try to stop us, how you try to shut down people helping others, people are going to find a way to help other people regardless.”

“This shows the true colors of the people that run this city, it’s totally ridiculous. People should not be told how to feed other people,” said Bobby Smith. “How are we supposed to solve reparations when you keep selling the land to out-of-town LLCs that take the money from Asheville and put it into other states.”

When public comment ended, council members were beside themselves with anger. Not at the conditions faced by the houseless, but that the public dared to discuss the issue at all.

“It is because of a person on this council leaking information to the public and allowing the discrepancies within the information that they shared to fester. It made connections with stakeholders around this matter very hard,” Smith said, presumably referring to Roney.

“The reason why we’re here again is that information was shared to the public very prematurely, and a lot of confusion was allowed to ensue,” Smith said. “There are a lot of conversations that could have been had around this conversation that were limited, they were hindered, they were gaslit, they were triggered and electrified just because bad information was released to the public.”

Smith also back-pedaled, praising ASP’s food distribution and claiming she didn’t favor the draft ordinance because it would be too restrictive. However, the public discussing and acting on that fact was apparently forbidden.

Manheimer backed Smith up, intoning that sharing public records “undermines the integrity of this body.”

“The community needs to be able to trust us, they need to know that ultimately all decisions are made with transparency, and they will have an opportunity to weigh in.”

Council, especially Manheimer, have gone out of their way in the past two years to stifle public discussion as much as possible. This has included suddenly changing rules on commenting, illegally ending a major hearing early and adding entire votes to the agenda at the last minute.

It’s difficult to see what Manheimer and Smith’s actual complaints were, beyond the facts being politically inconvenient for them. Secret council sessions considering a clampdown on food aid is going to get attention.

The vice mayor showing up to a major food distribution event and telling the organizers they’ll need permits is going to make news whether she likes it or not. The 90,000 people living in Asheville aren’t obligated to wait for council to finish talking with “stakeholders” to take action on anything they please.

Likewise, the draft ordinance was public record. There is nothing preventing an elected official opposed to it from drawing public attention in an effort to push for its defeat. This might come as news to city hall, but “making the mayor and vice mayor uncomfortable” isn’t illegal.

City hall vs. the people

It was always going to come to this. City hall and the business establishment have spent the past decades doing everything they can to make this city an amusement part for drunk tourists and spoiled gentrifiers.

The hard reality of houselessness has never sat easily with their shiny marketing, putting the lie to Asheville’s liberal veneer. But the policies turning the city into said amusement park create skyrocketing rents, more evictions, more desperation. They push more people onto the street.

The hard fact is that the last decade of the “tourism boom” has been an unmitigated disaster for the vast majority of the people who actually live here. So the choice for city government was to either reverse course on gentrification and put serious resources into housing or to embrace violence and repression to try to shut people up.

They sure as hell weren’t going to spend money on the poor.

The result has shattered the progressive facade further, which is one reason they’re now trying to shift the narrative by hiring yet another a consultant to craft yet another sham plan on homelessness. Even centrist media ain’t buying it.

Recent months have also revealed that at the heart of the whole push, lurking behind every garbled statement, is the fact that those in power plainly do not view the unhoused as human beings.

After all, rape and abuse happen in plenty of wealthy neighborhoods, just like the ones most of city council lives in. In many cases the police — a profession rife with domestic abusers — won’t do anything. Even when someone is arrested, cops don’t proceed to immediately evict everyone in the area, including the survivors, into the cold. They don’t tell them they’ll be arrested again if they refuse to go to a crowded quasi-prison that won’t accept their religion or identity.

Again and again during the past months one question has wrung out, in council meetings and to lines of police readying for a raid: “where do you want people to go? What do you want them to do?”

They want them to die.

More specifically they want them gone. Since human beings don’t just disappear they’re fine with them not existing. They don’t admit that, of course, some may not even admit it to themselves. But that’s the point.

Those who’ve called these crackdowns social cleansing are correct. This is at its core the mentality behind every ethnic cleansing in history.

Let’s tally up their actions. City hall uses propaganda to paint the unhoused as inhuman threats, even hiring those from far-right media to do so. They escalate attacks on camps in winter when conditions are far more dangerous. They deny essential resources, confiscating or destroying them. When those appointed to craft policy on human rights tell them this is wrong, they tell them to shut up. When people support those they target, police smear them as meddling outsiders. Then they use false charges to raid their homes and workplaces and haul them off to jail. When journalists try to cover their crackdowns they arrest them.

They demand the population they’re targeting be herded to cramped, inhumane places where they can be more closely policed while denied basic rights — like freedom of religion, movement and identity — more favored demographics take for granted. When aid groups step up with food and supplies they move to make the very act illegal.

What happens to a population systematically denied food, water, supplies, sanitation and shelter?

If these same actions were wielded against a minority in another country, the press would quickly dub it what it is: a wannabe police state escalating an attempted genocide.

Indeed, the fourth stage of genocide is “one group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases.” One of the United Nations’ criteria for such atrocities is “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The fact it is being done in America, to those who are targeted for their poverty, does not change that.

History reminds us that bullets and direct force often aren’t the deadliest weapons of the state. They wield hunger, cold and illness just as readily.

The above is bleak. As someone who struggles to survive poverty, in a community where houselessness is a constant threat, this entire piece has been gut-wrenching to write. It should not surprise me at this point that those in power hate the rest of us, but such cruelty on open display is still chilling.

But the fact is that they have not succeeded, not yet. So far the resourcefulness of the unhoused, the determination of local mutual aid and no shortage of public defiance have staved off far more deaths. There’s a reason the city’s trying to crush them.

What comes up repeatedly in over a year of covering the war on the poor is how many in Asheville oppose it. How they see houseless people’s struggles not as an object of charity or pity, but closely connected with their own. The banners at demonstrations don’t just target a single issue, but the greed of hoteliers and gentrifiers that pushes people onto the street in the first place.

Most of us in Asheville have far more in common with our unhoused neighbors than we do with well-off realtors or airbnb owners. More, by the day realize that if the city truly falls to the gentry, we all face devastation.

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Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 15 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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