Asheville for All

This member commentary post does not necessarily reflect the views of Asheville For All or its members.

There’s a comment that I seem to run into whenever I speak about housing with local elected officials, from city council members to state legislators. And it goes something like this:

“We need more apartments to ease the housing crisis. But I just don’t know about all these apartment buildings. We also shouldn’t give up on giving people the dream of home ownership and building equity.”

The point I want to make in this post is simple: we can have our cake and eat it too. We can have more multifamily housing—including, but not limited to the “missing middle” housing types that are the subject of a current City of Asheville initiative—and we can have more opportunities for homebuyers at the same time.

Surprise: You Can Own Apartments! (They’re Called Condos)

First, we need to disentangle the “dream” of home ownership from the “dream” of owning a detached, single-family home, because I think these two are often confused in American culture.

For example, when John Boyle wrote recently at the Asheville Watchdog about the “starter home,” he was clearly picturing a certain archetypical house, maybe a bungalow, with a small yard of its own. (In fact, in his interview with a local home builder, he made it clear that he was unfamiliar with multi-family homes as a concept, referring to a “duplex” as a “double home” instead.)

This specific dream—of not just owning a home, but a detached one—might be peculiarly American.1 Consider that in most of Europe, the percentage of families that own homes is roughly the same as that in this country—about two-thirds—but the homes that people own are much more likely to be multi-family homes.

But even in the U.S., people do buy multifamily homes—condos, townhomes, flats, whatever we want to call them—as starter homes. Incidentally, I’ve had friends in Minneapolis that purchased townhomes in affordable, walkable residential neighborhoods as starter homes. I’ve had family members in New York City and Santa Monica that began raising their children in condos. One of my nieces spent most of her childhood and teenage years living in one owner-occupied condo or another. These were great homes in great places, where a single-family house would have been too expensive.

My brother raised his daughter in this low-rise condo building in Santa Monica, in a beautiful, walkable residential neighborhood with a mix of housing types. This is the kind of neighborhood that "missing middle" reforms in Asheville are likely to target.