When Hurricane Helene Hit, Asheville, North Carolina, Banded Together—And Became 2025’s Nicest Place in America

Molly and Meherwan Irani took a leap of faith when they moved with their 3-year-old daughter, Aria, from San Francisco to Asheville, North Carolina. It was 2005, and relocating from a major international city to an Appalachian town seemed, Molly recalls, “a wild experiment.”

But a few weeks after settling into their new home, they attended a downtown event called the Shindig on the Green, where local folk and bluegrass musicians entertained a motley mix of tourists and locals who lounged on picnic blankets or danced freely. Little Aria spotted another girl her age from across the field, ran to her and embraced her.

“They spent the entire night dancing in each other’s arms,” Molly ­remembers. “And surrounding them was a community square dance. In that crowd, holding hands, were punk-rock line cooks and elderly people, all different walks of life. And I thought, I don’t know that I’ve seen this happen anywhere else. This is why we’re here.”

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The perfect mix of artsy, quirky and welcoming

Asheville and its environs—­Western North Carolina, as the area is known—gets its hooks into people like that. People move there to rediscover community, to go back to the land, to make art or music, or just to live in a place surrounded by spectacular scenery while still enjoying world-class cultural offerings. These are just some of the reasons we have named Asheville the Nicest Place in America 2025, after receiving a record number of nominations for the city and surrounding area.

“It’s a unique and amazing place,” says Cheryl Antoncic, who visited Asheville from Hartford, Connecticut, to do a little hiking in 2018 and fell enough in love with the place to move there and open a barbecue restaurant. A city of about 100,000, Asheville sits squarely in the Blue Ridge Mountains at the confluence of the picturesque French Broad and Swannanoa rivers. Depending on where you are 
in town, you might catch a glimpse of Elk Mountain or Bearwallow Mountain—and for that matter, you might catch a glimpse of a real black bear wallowing in your backyard.

Once famous as a tuberculosis sanatorium, the city has morphed throughout the decades into a haven for the arts. It crackles with studios, galleries and museums, with artists and craftspeople plying their trades—ironworkers, painters, filmmakers, potters, sculptors, glassblowers—with much of that activity centered in the vibrant River Arts District, smack along the French Broad River. The city lags behind the country as a whole when it comes to diversity but enjoys a reputation for openness and tolerance.

“I just love it,” says Denice Chesler, a retired microbiologist who moved to Asheville from Maryland in 2019 to be with her partner. Her sister, Diane Pounsberry, is one of a few people who nominated Asheville
after visiting. “It’s just a beautiful place and a safe environment as far as not having to worry about people’s prejudices,” says Chesler.

Just outside of town sits the astonishing Biltmore Estate, constructed during the Gilded Age as a residence for George Vanderbilt, and today a tourist destination billed as America’s largest home (it sits on 8,000 acres and boasts about 175,000 square feet).

In Asheville proper, you’ll find well-preserved art deco architecture in City Hall and other buildings (unusual for a small mountain city, and the result of a 50-year development freeze after the Great Depression), a thriving civic center, the Asheville Black Cultural Heritage Trail, all manner of festivals and street performances, live music of any genre any night of the week, a symphony, an opera, several breweries, a plethora of award-­winning restaurants, and the University of North Carolina at Asheville with its 3,000 students.

“Literally something exists for everybody in Asheville,” says Antoncic. “You can take an art class, dance, woodworking, gardening—whatever you want.”

An undercurrent of resilience and support

But beneath the very real outer layer of artsy quirkiness, Asheville and Western North Carolina are perhaps best defined by two more solid character streaks. The first is self-reliance.

“Folks have a really impressive array of skills here,” says Emily Peele, who came to Asheville from Virginia in 2010. “People are capable and knowledgeable and handy. They know how to grow their own food, build their own bridges and homes and chicken coops. That type of stuff made me decide, OK, I’m going to put down forever roots here.”

The second is commitment to community. That’s what struck Sophie Hull when she was considering moving to Asheville from Philadelphia in 2015. “The way people treat each other is just kind of unique,” she says. “There’s a lot of support. People look out for each other. It just feels real down here.” She took the plunge and now can’t imagine living anywhere else.

Notably, those two traits are shared by two groups who don’t normally get talked about in the same sentence: far-left anarchist punks of downtown Asheville and far-right libertarians living out in the hills and hollers. Both traits, and both groups, and everyone in between would be called upon when Western North Carolina faced the worst natural disaster in its history.

Unexpected devastation

Hurricane Helene struck Western North Carolina on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024. It had made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 hurricane the day before, but it lingered as a tropical storm, cutting a path of destruction up through Georgia and South Carolina. When it reached the mountains of Western North Carolina, it dumped biblical quantities of rain onto already rain-soaked hillsides, creeks and rivers.

Above Asheville, in the areas of Chimney Rock and Old Fort, some 19 inches of rain came down. Ankle-deep creeks turned into raging rivers. Natural dams exploded, roiling their contents down through the hills, smashing homes, businesses, cars, trains and people as the water found low ground.

The residents of Asheville awoke to a new world of utter devastation. Trees and downed power lines were everywhere. Roads had been washed out. The River Arts District, Asheville’s crown jewel, lay beneath some 20 feet of still-rising water. No one had cell service. No one had internet. No one had power. No one had running water. The desolation was so complete that Asheville and its surrounding communities had been cut off from the rest of the world, and from each other. Only gradually, through portable radios and word of mouth, did residents begin piecing together the enormity of their situation.

“I’ve been through several hurricanes, but I’ve never been in a disaster of this scale,” says Asheville mayor Esther Manheimer. A storm like Helene was not supposed to happen to Asheville. Its residents are climate conscious. Ironically, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s international climate database is headquartered there.

Still more ironically, perhaps, Asheville had been seen as a climate haven, a safe place to settle out of reach of hurricanes and other natural disasters. But now the worst had happened. It was time to dig in.

Springing into action

The Iranis had thrived during their 19 years in Asheville. They had opened a successful Indian restaurant called Chai Pani, which had won a James Beard Award, and now they owned multiple other properties. Within two days of the storm, they had rallied a skeleton crew at Chai Pani to begin cooking for their neighbors.

On that first day, Molly looked up from her work to see that strangers had begun wandering into the restaurant, including some kids on their bikes, not looking for a handout but rather to give a hand. “And they’re helping us wrap sandwiches, this little group of kids, along with their mom and neighbors and people that we had never met before,” she says. They made 750 sandwiches that first day, and they would work for more than a month to sustain their fellow residents.

Similar scenes were playing out all over Western North Carolina. When Akira Satake went to muck out his destroyed pottery studio in the River Arts District, a family appeared in the entryway in boots and masks, ready to dig him out. Paul Greiner, a handyman at Devil’s Foot Beverage Co., hopped into his truck with a buddy and their chainsaws, and they spent the next four days cutting trees away from houses and cars, just one of many chainsaw brigades active in those early days.

Don Vess, a pastor from Salisbury, about two hours from Asheville, learned that his sister and brother-in-law had been washed away when a wall of water demolished their home in the little mountain community of Fairview, and that 11 other members of his brother-in-law’s family had been killed as well. Having grown up in the mountains, where people help themselves and one another, Vess did not sit still and grieve. He teamed up with several other churches and began shuttling emergency supplies and donations to the bereft community.

Anyone with an ATV, a side-by-side, a dirt bike or a four-wheel drive began threading the washed-out byways to reach people cut off from aid. Mike Toberer, whose company, Mountain Mule Packers, trains the U.S. military on the use of mules in operations, loaded his team and began packing insulin, ice, food and other necessities to remote mountain villages unreachable by vehicle.

Restaurants across the city began feeding their neighbors. Cheryl Antoncic’s restaurant, Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ, converted itself into a field kitchen for José Andrés’s international aid group, World Central Kitchen. Their effort lasted into April. At the peak of the crisis, they were serving 40,000 meals a day, not just in Asheville but at 300 sites within a two-hour radius of the city.

Unwavering support

For many, Asheville’s state of siege—no power, no water—would last for weeks. But the city had a secret tool at its disposal. Thanks to the unique mindset of the people who chose to call the place home, scattered throughout the town were community hubs that would serve as ever-­expanding (and ultimately overlapping) nodes of support and mutual aid. At Firestorm bookstore, residents met the day after the hurricane to begin organizing relief efforts, which took shape immediately.

At the Double Crown, a dive bar and live music venue, employees turned their workplace into a free medical clinic and free store. At the Buncombe County Register of Deeds, workers used their database of tax maps, real estate documents, and birth and death records filed by residents to conduct wellness checks throughout the city, ensuring that the elderly and disabled were looked after.

At the Asheville Tool Library, volunteers repaired chainsaws and generators and distributed donated equipment that came pouring in from all over. At Devil’s Foot Beverage Co., workers distributed cans of water to residents, along with donated diapers, heaters and all manner of goods.

At Static Age Records, co-owned by Sophie Hull, workers and volunteers prepared meals and organized a supply center of donated items. These efforts fell naturally into place because, for years, the people involved had cared more about human connection than anything else. Static Age Records, Hull says, has always been a place where vulnerable people and misfits could hang out and be safe. When disaster struck, people naturally gravitated to these spaces, which became distribution hubs and care centers.

As the days wore on, these campaigns became better organized and surprisingly sophisticated. Several efforts to distribute water coalesced into an endeavor that branded itself Be Well AVL. Trucks hauling 275-­gallon containers full of water visited sites throughout the city, keeping to a schedule on spreadsheets maintained by volunteers. When a site’s tank was empty, anyone could text the container’s ID to a number to request a refill.

“Filling in all of the gaps—and there were many—all over the place were these neighborhood groups,” Mayor Manheimer explains. “And they just went to town.” The only way to flush toilets was with a 5-gallon bucket, too strenuous a job for many older and disabled people. “Flush brigades” formed throughout the city, with volunteers, many of them teens, hauling heavy loads of water up flights of stairs to clear toilets for elderly neighbors.

When a team that had dedicated itself to flushing toilets or delivering water or food encountered a need outside of its specialty area, it tapped one of the other grassroots organizations to supply what was needed.

Churches. Farmers. Nurses. Brewers. Nonprofits. LGBTQ+ groups. Everybody did what they could. Generosity was everywhere. “We had a needs board in our restaurant,” Molly Irani recalls. “People would write down a need that they had, and if somebody had the thing that was needed, they would bring it to the restaurant the next day. I had a neighbor who needed a chainsaw to dig out his car. The next day, a random stranger walked in with a chainsaw.”

A long road ahead

Now, many months after Helene blew through the region, Asheville is still struggling to get back on its feet. It was already one of the most gentrified cities in the country. Because of its tourism economy, it employed service workers who, before Helene, were already finding themselves priced out of their own real estate market by outsiders with money who were drawn to the city’s many charms. Now the housing problem is even worse, and with the city’s tourist industry in jeopardy, workers are losing their jobs and businesses are faltering.

“Small business owners are saying, ‘Do I file bankruptcy this week, or do I give it a month to see how fast the tourists return?’ ” says Molly Irani. “These are businesses that have given their blood, sweat, tears, heart to this community, and they deserve to be saved. We’re putting everything we have into trying to help them survive.”

The true meaning of community

As horrific and grueling as the Helene experience was, many of those who lived it look back on those days with a certain wistfulness. “People with different political beliefs, religions, football teams, came together to help,” says Gustavo “Ponkho” Bermejo, whose community organization, BeLoved Asheville, served tirelessly in the storm’s aftermath. “Only the people who experienced the love that was around could describe what happened.”

Such things are said after every catastrophe. Jaded by divisive news and apocalyptic movies, we’re pleasantly surprised to find that in the real world, when push comes to shove, people set aside their differences to get through. But the extent to which Asheville and Western North Carolina organized and looked out for one another is extraordinary and can only be attributed to the dearly held value of community shared by its colorful residents.

Grace Barron, a real estate agent who spent the month after the storm deeply involved in water distribution efforts, believes that Asheville’s response to Helene carries a crucial lesson.

“We’re all going to be navigating these climate disasters on an ongoing basis,” she says, “and people underestimate the value of social connections as a resilience factor. There’s one mentality, the prepper mentality, which says, ‘I’m going to hoard all these things so when something bad happens, I’ll be ready.’ But knowing your neighbor has so much more value—that’s actually the biggest protective factor you can have.”

About three weeks after the storm, still in the thick of feeding her neighbors, Molly Irani took the long way home from the restaurant to look at Helene’s devastation. Thus far, she had been able to do so only in glances, but now she felt ready to see more. Along the French Broad River, she spotted some people up in the trees ahead. Curious, she pulled over for 
a closer look.

A train car lay upside down in the riverbed. The trees along the bank were covered in shredded plastic, car parts, machinery. And
a group of women she couldn’t help but think of as “gray-haired hippie mamas,” high up in the treetops, were manually extricating the trash from the branches. These were, essentially, the same people she’d seen dancing on the grass around her daughter all those years ago.

“And I just started to cry,” she says. “I just sat there in my car, and I cried. And I thought, This is what will save us. Not just my town. This is what will save us as a species.”

Why trust us

For more than 100 years, Reader’s Digest has been known for its heartwarming true stories and focus on community. In 2017, we launched the Nicest Places in America, an annual contest that honors kind, inspiring people making a difference in their hometowns. Readers send in nominations, and Reader’s Digest’s editorial team vets the entries and whittles them down with the help of a panel of judges. This year, the judges included Today’s Al Roker, Tuesdays with Morrie author Mitch Albom, author and podcast host Mónica Guzmán, former Reader’s Digest CEO Bonnie Kintzer, StoryCorps CEO Sandra Clark, and Greg Hudnall, a former associate school superintendent in Provo, Utah, which earned the title of Nicest Place in America in 2024. We are committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.