Asheville has new restrictions on panhandling designed to keep solicitors from talking to passersby or drivers in downtown and other areas of the city.
At City Council’s Aug. 26 meeting, members voted to ban verbal panhandling along Patton Avenue, Haywood Road, the South Slope, and part of Merrimon Avenue. In these “high traffic zones,” solicitation with “gestures or spoken words” will now be punishable by a misdemeanor and a fine of up to $50. Such restrictions are already in place across Biltmore Village and most of downtown Asheville.
Panhandling silently with written signs remains permitted everywhere in the city. City ordinances already prohibit asking for money at night, soliciting near bus stations or ATMs, or approaching people in outdoor dining areas, among other restrictions.
As previously reported by BPR, city staff had first pitched the new rules as a way to reduce collisions between pedestrians and vehicles. But in his presentation immediately prior to Council’s vote, Asheville Police Department Deputy Chief Sean Aardema made no mention of crashes, instead focusing on residents’ concerns about panhandling and related behaviors. He noted that police had received 33 calls about panhandling and 63 “suspicious person” calls along the Haywood and Patton corridors over the past year. In a 12-month period from early August 2024 to early August 2025, police received 381 panhandling calls across the entire city, according to APD spokesperson Rick Rice.
“I’ve heard you guys talk throughout the evening about community complaints, specifically in West Asheville, and we’re hearing them, too,” Aardama told council members. “That’s a big part of the reason why we’re here making this proposal.”
The deputy chief acknowledged that APD already had the authority to remove panhandlers from dangerous roadsides and medians under existing city code. For that reason, he said, city staff had removed a proposed high-traffic zone covering Tunnel and South Tunnel Road from an earlier draft of the rules.
The majority of public commenters at the council meeting blasted the new limits as punishing people in need while failing to address deeper issues of poverty and homelessness. Among them was Elliot Gordon, who said he’d worked as a cab driver in Asheville for the last five years while being homeless himself.
“We could be helping people get a leg up; instead, this expansion cuts people off at the knees based on dubious data,” Gordon said. In his experience, he added, pedestrian crashes “had nothing to do with panhandlers and everything to do with entitled NASCAR wannabes, bus stops posted on the wrong side of the intersection, dysfunctional traffic systems, and roads that were laid out on old livestock drovers’ trails.”
Council member Kim Roney, the lone vote against the proposal, echoed Gordon’s concerns. But her colleagues, including Bo Hess, maintained the new rules were nonetheless necessary for public safety.
“This ordinance is about keeping people alive while we continue to do the long, hard work of tackling poverty and affordability,” Hess said. “Setting safety boundaries is not the same as criminalizing poverty.”
Other tidbits
- Asheville approved several multimillion-dollar engineering, construction, and consulting contracts tied to Hurricane Helene recovery. The Miami-based Ardurra Group will receive $9.74 million to design a new transmission main from the North Fork Water Treatment Plant. California-based Tetra Tech will get $8.37 million for consulting on spending federal recovery funds. The N.C. Department of Transportation will be paid up to $6 million for a temporary bridge over the Swannanoa River near Gashes Creek Road. And Boston-based Sasake Associates will receive $4.85 million to design rebuilds of parks along the French Broad River. City officials expect all of these expenses to be reimbursed by state and federal funding.
- The city enacted a new structure for citizen advisory boards, establishing four new bodies focused on Helene recovery while shifting existing boards to meet on an “as-needed basis.” As previously reported by BPR, residents and some council members had criticized the plan as reducing citizen input. Hess was the only vote in opposition.
- Council eliminated language prioritizing diversity among members of the Human Relations Commission of Asheville, an advisory board established in 2018 to promote equity in city government. A staff report on the change said it would “ensure compliance with applicable law” without naming any specific statutes. During the meeting, however, City Attorney Brad Branham said the measure would allow Asheville to resolve an ongoing lawsuit over the commission’s makeup, in which plaintiffs had alleged discrimination against white residents. Hess and Roney both voted against the move.
- Electric scooters will now be legally permitted on Asheville’s streets. Council repealed language forbidding the “self-propelled micromobility devices” that it had passed in 2018, after the California-based company Bird deployed dozens of e-scooters without city permission. Bird and similar “e-scooter share operations” remain outlawed.
- Council members approved a letter, penned by Mayor Esther Manheimer, that asks UNC Asheville Chancellor Kimberly van Noort to “establish a more inclusive, transparent, and robust community engagement process” around the university’s development plans for a 45-acre urban forest property. On Aug. 14, following sustained criticism from local residents, UNCA announced it would pause the project and gather further input.
Asheville City Council regularly meets every second and fourth Tuesday at the Council Chamber on the second floor of City Hall, 70 Court Plaza, beginning at 5 p.m. The next meeting will take place Tuesday, Sept. 9. See the full recording and the agenda of the Aug. 26 meeting.
