In Toledo, Ohio, police with access to the Fusus platform (the same platform at the center of Asheville’s RTIC) spent 18,751 hours in nine months watching live feeds from 275 cameras at twelve subsidized-housing complexes. That was double the time they spent watching the other 439 cameras in the entire rest of the city. One public-housing complex alone drew 3,822 hours of live police viewing. Over 80% of Toledo’s public-housing tenants are not white. A legal-aid attorney’s assessment: “It’s clearly discrimination on some level.” (Gizmodo, records-based)
This page records what cameras over subsidized housing have been used for, from eviction records and audit logs, who sets their rules, and what Asheville has connected.
The national record, from eviction cases
A 2023 Washington Post investigation surveyed housing authorities that bought cameras with federal security grants, and found the cameras trained less on crime than on tenants’ leases (Washington Post, May 16, 2023):
- In Steubenville, Ohio, the housing authority operates 161 cameras in its public housing, against roughly 100 police cameras in the entire rest of the city. Footage of a woman taking a laundry cart from a laundry room was presented to a judge as eviction evidence. A 52-year-old resident losing her vision was threatened with eviction after cameras caught her lending her key fob to the neighbor who brought her groceries. The authority’s director, on the record: “People choose to get evicted by their actions.”
- In New Bedford, Massachusetts, the authority used camera-motion analytics to log activity at one door for months to prove a single mother had an “unauthorized overnight guest”: her ex-husband, babysitting while she drove a school bus. “It got to the point where it was like harassment,” she said. She left to avoid an eviction record. A local legal-aid attorney said camera footage “regularly appears” in eviction cases.
- Camera density in the surveyed authorities averaged one camera per 14 residents; extremes ran to one per two. Eleven of 41 authorities said their systems had facial-recognition capability.
- Even HUD, which funded the cameras, said it never intended them for lease enforcement, then conceded using them that way “is not a violation of the grant terms.” It banned future grants from buying facial recognition, prospectively only.
- Public-housing evictions in jurisdictions tracked by Princeton’s Eviction Lab roughly doubled in 2022 while these systems expanded.
In Steubenville and New Bedford, the cameras were owned by the housing authority itself, governed by the authority’s own policy, with no audit anyone outside the institution read, and no say from the people recorded. The institution with the power to evict wrote the rules for the cameras over its tenants’ doors, and the footage went where that arrangement pointed it: at leases, guests, and grocery deliveries. The pattern continued in 2026: in August 2026, NYCHA tenants sued New York City for wiring public-housing cameras into the NYPD’s surveillance network through a “free Wi-Fi” program: “Any officer can just watch in real time any surveillance footage they want for whatever reason,” per the tenants’ attorney. (amNewYork)
Who consents
EFF’s analysis of Fusus put the structural point cleanly: the opt-in “applies only to camera owners, not recorded individuals.” (EFF) A homeowner choosing to share their own doorbell camera is making a choice about themselves. A housing authority sharing the cameras over its tenants’ doors is making that choice for people whose alternative is losing subsidized housing.
The law compounds it. Courts have generally held there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy in apartment common areas, and HUD “one-strike” rules let authorities evict for a guest’s conduct; legal scholars have called the combined result “the poverty exception to the Fourth Amendment” (Christopher Slobogin’s phrase, in a 2003 Florida Law Review article concluding that “relative wealth plays a major role in determining whether a person’s interests are protected”). (Vanderbilt · Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy) Renters get watched at a density homeowners would never accept, with consequences (eviction) homeowners never face. Compare the fight tenants in Brownsville, Brooklyn had to wage just to stop facial recognition at their rent-stabilized complex: they organized for months and won. Public-housing residents rarely get the meeting. (Brooklyn Eagle)
And where camera placement has been mapped, it tracks race and income consistently: a Christopher Newport University study of 614 unsealed Flock locations in Hampton Roads found Black neighborhoods surveilled at roughly four times the rate of white ones, with cameras in 75% of high-poverty tracts versus under 40% of low-poverty tracts. (WHRO) Amnesty International’s mapping of 25,500 NYC cameras found the same gradient and named it: “a digital stop-and-frisk.” (Amnesty)
The sheriff’s own count (2024 to 2026)
In May 2026 the county released 28 months of the Sheriff’s Office’s Fusus audit log. Of 225,439 camera events, 130,003 were on Asheville Housing Authority cameras: 58 percent of everything the center looked at, more than all 51 school sites combined, more than the sheriff’s own buildings. Pisgah View Apartments was the most-watched place in the county (39,404 events, 1,926 logged hours of live viewing), then Hillcrest, Maple Crest, Deaverview, and Aston Park Towers. Ninety-five percent of it was live watching, not recorded playback; the longest run was one account opening Pisgah View cameras 762 times in a row. The county withheld the timestamps. The full breakdown, by site and by account: Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office Fusus access log, 2024 to 2026.
Asheville’s housing cameras
- Of the ~2,000 cameras in the Buncombe County Fusus network as of 2022, roughly 500 sat in “housing communities and privately owned businesses”, and since downtown business exteriors numbered fewer than 20, the overwhelming majority of that 500 is housing. (Citizen Times · Mountain Xpress)
- When City Council voted (4–1, January 2023, Roney the no) to buy APD access to that network, the Housing Authority’s then-executive director, David Nash, spoke in favor, arguing HACA properties were, if anything, “underpoliced.” (Mountain Xpress)
- Who lives under them: HACA serves roughly 2,900 low-income households across eleven communities: Deaverview, Hillcrest, Klondyke, Pisgah View, and others. About 49% of HACA households are Black, in a city that is about 10% Black. (HUD subsidized-household data · Asheville Watchdog on the city’s Black population) The camera network Asheville built concentrates, by construction, on the city’s Black residents.
- In July 2026, APD re-launched a Housing Unit embedded with HACA (announcing 7 guns seized and 12 felony arrests in its first three weeks), while the RTIC that will consume these feeds moves toward 2027 operation.
- What has never been made public: which HACA properties’ cameras feed the network, and any notice or consent process for the residents recorded. We can find no published property list, no resident-notification record, no opt-out. (If one exists, we will link it here, and it belongs in a records request until then.)
No published record shows HACA residents were given notice, a consultation, or an opt-out before their homes joined the network. If such a record exists, we will link it here; until then, it is the subject of a standing records request. The residents most recorded by this system have so far had the least opportunity to weigh in on it.
Update, August 2026. HACA’s own records show how the relationship works in practice: in March 2026 its IT staff were updating DVR passwords “for all users who access the camera DVRs, including BCSD and APD”; on May 20, 2026 Interim Chief Stepp told the HACA board that “a member of the HACA team will be joining the program policy board” of the RTIC, and the minutes record no commissioner questions. APD’s Deputy Chief of Operations, Sean Aardema, sits on that board. (Ella Santos · board minutes)
Related: What a plate read becomes · Who Gets Watched · Follow the Money · Police oversight in Asheville, 1991 to 2026 · What Is the RTIC · Get Involved