Occupancy Tax Spending Reform Shouldn’t Be About Xenophobia or Nativism
November 15, 2023
This member commentary post does not necessarily reflect the views of Asheville For All or its members. Most of the time, I like and appreciate the work that the Asheville Watchdog does.
This member commentary post does not necessarily reflect the views of Asheville For All or its members.
Most of the time, I like and appreciate the work that the Asheville Watchdog does. And I believe wholeheartedly that the Buncombe County occupancy tax should be democratized and spent on community needs. And so I was looking forward to last week’s coverage of the Tourism Development Authority and how that institution relates to the matter of housing scarcity in Buncombe County.
The Watchdog published two articles on housing and the TDA last week, on Monday and Tuesday. And many of the people quoted in these articles made salient and important points. But I’m afraid that as everything added up, the articles may have brought as much heat as they did light. So I want to share a few quick thoughts, ones that arose both as I was reading the pieces and as I was watching the ways that different people responded to them.
First, there should be no place for xenophobia and nativism in the movement to democratize Buncombe County’s occupancy tax. That means remote workers are not to blame for our problems, nor “transplants” more generally, and it certainly means that we can do without dogwhistles referencing “Chinese construction” workers.
Pitting locals against newcomers is the wrong way to frame this issue. To be clear, I don’t believe that the Watchdog is novel in doing so. Rather, I think it’s something like the natural outcome of adding up all of the dominant discourses around both the TDA and housing. It’s in the air. As the journalist and shrewd observer of housing politics Jerusalem Demsas pointed out very recently in a different context, matters of tourism and housing seem to encourage people to adopt a scarcity and zero-sum mindset.
Second, I believe asking “how many tourists is too many” is the wrong question to ask. It assumes a static understanding of Asheville and Buncombe County and its capacity to host people in both short and longer terms. Cities grow over time. Their fortunes improve. Or they decline. All of these things are the result, in part, of policy from city, county, and state institutions, and these things change over time too. Tourists and transplants come and go for all sorts of reasons outside of the TDA’s power—the ebb and flow of pandemics, maybe for one example—and to suggest that there is a single number that we can cap our county at, besides being misanthropic, is to assume a static mindset.
