Asheville for All

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

On Tuesday, I joined the Tourism Taxes for Affordable Housing coalition in delivering public comment at the County Commission meeting. We wanted to take the opportunity to thank the county government for its continued pressure on the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority (BCTDA) to use the new BCTDA “LIFT Fund” to subsidize housing development for working people, and to let folks know what we’d been up to as a coalition.

When I do public comments, I like to share them here on this blog. And so the full comment is reproduced below, after the break. But looking at it now, I think the ideas inside it might need some more substantive exposition, so consider this a (very?) lengthy preface.

I’ve delivered a couple of public comments on this subject before, so I wanted to try some new things. I wanted to try to include some of my personal story more—something that advocates always say to do, but I’m not naturally inclined to do it!

And that led me to think about why I consider this issue a matter of solidarity. The idea of solidarity says that for a good percentage of the population that might experience the world through different levels of luck, wealth, privilege, fortune, misfortune, hardship, exploitation, or oppression, that group of people nonetheless have interests in common. In progressive advocacy and politics, the alternative to solidarity is charity or pity. And though you might win some people over with pity, it’s solidarity that’s more likely to create lasting change.

I’m not a service worker. But I believe more housing for service workers is good for me and people like me. It is personal to me.

So in drafting the comment below, this line of thinking brought me to the idea of how scarcity tends to spread. It creates compounding problems. And it brought me to think about how alleviating scarcity in one part of the housing market can alleviate it in other parts.

This very idea—how more housing mitigates pressure on rents and home prices in neighboring markets—is rooted in what people that study housing call “chains of moving” or “moving chains.” The idea is that when a new home gets built or becomes vacant, the people that move into that home free up a home somewhere else. And then people move into that home, and that frees up a home somewhere else. The important part to this, and one that is becoming increasingly well documented, is that these chains move across local neighborhoods, and across income levels.

In short, even though new homes are costly to build, and therefore they cost money to rent or buy, the added supply still helps. (And it’s important to say that new homes are costly to build for .)