Asheville for All

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

In my twenty-two years as an apartment dweller, I’ve been displaced a few times.

The most recent occasion happened eight years ago, a couple of years after I moved to Asheville. I was living on Linden Avenue (a stone’s throw from Homegrown and Claxton Elementary School) in a large house that had been subdivided—probably a long time ago—to have four dwellings inside.

The landlord decided to sell the building to a new owner, who in turn decided that she wanted to live in my place. (It was the biggest unit in the building.) That meant that I was out.

I loved my apartment. I could walk downtown in one direction or to the “Brew and View” in the other. I had been living there for two years. My old landlord liked me. I had mapped out my early morning running routes that took me through Charlotte Street, Five Points, downtown, Montford, and the Reed Creek Greenway.

Now suddenly I had a new landlord who after giving me 60 days notice, started to harass me, insisting that she be allowed into the apartment repeatedly. (Presumably she wanted to measure for drapes.) After I let her know that she couldn’t legally enter my apartment without twenty-four hours notice, she began texting me expletives late into the night.

Renters get displaced. All the time. For all kinds of reasons.

Renters get displaced because buildings get old, harder to maintain, and they eventually fall apart. Renters get displaced because rents go up, and they can’t afford to renew their leases. They get displaced because landlords sell their property to new landlords with new ideas. Those new ideas can include redevelopment, condo conversion, conversion to single-family homes, and as I experienced, owner-occupying a unit in a multi-family building.

When a change to our zoning code is raised—in the context of potential “missing middle” reforms, for example—we dwell on the redevelopment part. We wring our hands over whether or not in the pursuit of increased housing supply, some people might be at risk for displacement. And it’s a part that’s worth addressing. But it’s also worth zooming out to think all of the ways that displacement happens every day.

(And if redevelopment-induced displacement is a real concern, “displacement” is also too often used as a rhetorical low-hanging fruit. Consider the treatment in this week’s Citizen Times article on planned “backyard lot” reforms. As presently drafted, the code revision under discussion actually prohibits existing homes from being torn down for the purpose of creating backyard lot homes. This fact didn’t prevent the paper from quoting someone, without clarification, in saying that these reforms might cause displacement.1 Further, , broad and shallow upzonings such as “missing middle” type reforms are the least likely to stoke speculation and displacement. This is one of the reasons why “missing middle” reforms are classified as an “-displacement” tool in .)