Walk through a city park in Asheville, Raleigh, or Charlotte, and you’re likely to find a sprawling, unregulated homeless encampment with no running water, no security, and no clear path to a better life for residents. The people living in such encampments are often chronically homeless, and many struggle with serious mental illness and substance abuse according to a 2025 report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
This is the predictable result of an approach to homelessness that has long confused permissiveness with compassion. As a result, it has allowed two problems to fester: Dangerous encampments flourish in public spaces, while homeless shelters meant to be places of refuge devolve into hubs for the drug trade.
House Bill 437 is the General Assembly’s answer to both problems. It creates drug-free zones around homeless shelters and service centers, with felony penalties for the dealers who work them. It also sets statewide rules for when and how local governments may allow public camping — rules that require safety, sanitation, and treatment coordination instead of indefinite neglect.
Critics accuse the bill of “criminalizing homelessness,” as though illegal drug use and squalid encampments are inseparable from a lack of housing. But nothing in the bill penalizes homelessness itself. Instead, it focuses on specific behaviors: camping in public spaces and dealing drugs, both of which can and should be addressed through targeted interventions.
The same critics often understate the problem, which keeps getting worse. Chronic substance abuse has fallen among the broader homeless population nationally, but in North Carolina it has risen sharply among the unsheltered (those living in encampments, who are the fastest-growing and most vulnerable segment of the homeless population). The number of unsheltered people who use hard drugs chronically has grown 33% since 2024.
As HB 437 recognizes, unchecked drug use and unsanctioned encampments are good for no one, least of all the homeless themselves. Real compassion requires that North Carolina intervene with safer alternatives that provide pathways out of addiction and off the streets, not double down on the failing status quo.
Foremost among these alternatives are drug-free shelters. Critics who call drug-free zones “redundant” because dealing is already illegal are missing the point entirely. Take, as precedent, drug-free school zones, which have been layered on top of general drug law for decades precisely because some locations need an added deterrent to protect the vulnerable. The logic behind protecting a school zone applies just as plainly to a homeless shelter, sanctioned encampment, or a domestic violence shelter.
HB 437 is calibrated to that diagnosis. The bill’s felony enhancement targets the manufacture, sale, and delivery of drugs, rather than simple possession. It is aimed at the dealers exploiting a vulnerable population and the facilities that enable them, not homeless individuals struggling with addiction but seeking help.
With regard to camping, the bill doesn’t simply outlaw encampments without an alternative. It gives local governments a lawful path to designate camping sites when not enough shelter beds are available, and only if they also build the infrastructure that makes those sites better than unsanctioned ones: sanitation, security, running water, and coordination with the county health department for behavioral health and substance-use treatment.
In other words, a city that wants to allow camping under this bill has to build the assistance and treatment pipeline critics say is missing. Turning a blind eye to real human suffering can no longer be allowed.
The theme here is simple. North Carolina doesn’t have to choose between compassion and order — but it does have to stop pretending that doing nothing is a form of either.
North Carolinians aren’t asking their legislators to solve homelessness in one fell swoop. They’re asking for safer sidewalks, shelters that provide a real chance to escape drug addiction, and a state that stops pretending growing encampments and drug markets near homeless services are acceptable public policy. HB 437 is the best way to deliver those outcomes.
