Asheville for All

The following is Asheville For All’s public comment letter to Asheville’s Planning and Zoning Commission, ahead of its January 22nd meeting.

* * *

Dear Commissioners,

Asheville For All is excited about three proposed UDO revisions on the January 22nd City of Asheville Planning and Zoning Commission agenda. At the same time, we have some real concerns about some of the details.

Commercial Districts

This is a welcome, common sense set of changes that we hope will spur more mixed-use and residential development on our commercial corridors, particularly those corridors that are closer to the city’s center, near jobs, schools, and amenities. Undoubtedly, the other two UDO changes need to be approved as well for this one to be effective.

Parking Mandates

Again, we are hopeful that eliminating costly parking mandates will work in concert with the other proposed revisions to spur more housing in high-demand, high-amenity parts of the city. To quote the Parking Reform Network, parking mandates are a “pseudo-science” and are a relic of mid-twentieth century, car-centric thinking. We will be glad to see them gone from our commercial corridors.

We believe that it is a truly missed opportunity, however, not to include all residential neighborhoods. The 2023 Asheville Missing Middle Housing Study and Displacement Risk Assessment recommended serious parking reform in our core residential neighborhoods. So did last year’s Affordable Housing Plan.

We hope that the Commission will again vote to eliminate all residential parking mandates, as it did last year. It is well-known that parking mandates prevent housing from being built where it is most needed, particularly more attainable forms of housing. By keeping Asheville’s high wealth residential neighborhoods off limits to more infill, this UDO amendment as it is written today appears to endorse socioeconomic segregation—keeping the status quo for “the neighborhoods” while limiting options for struggling families to large developments on busy corridors ONLY.

Cities from Ann Arbor to Anchorage, Alaska, to Austin, Texas, to Birmingham, Alabama, have all completely eliminated their parking mandates. Durham did it too. The world has not ended for any of these cities. In Minneapolis, comprehensive parking mandate elimination has been credited for the primary reason that rents have decreased. Anchorage, Alaska appears to be already seeing benefits too.

A blanket elimination would have the added benefit of reducing the length of our already complicated UDO.

One final aside: we noticed that the Urban Place Form District (aka “Urban centers”) is not targeted for parking reform. This would leave all of South Tunnel Road, for example, with parking minimums, and this an area where urban style development is certainly desired. We understand there may be a complex reason for this omission; the Urban Place Form code includes incentives for shared parking, for example. But this omission may be another illustration of why simple elimination of costly parking mandates might prove to simplify the UDO.