Asheville for All

Here’s what we found to be the most important housing-related items at Asheville’s Planning and Zoning Commission meeting of Wednesday, January 22, 2025.

Sweeten Creek Road Housing Project

A conditional zoning request for 3183 Sweeten Creek Road was approved. This project will bring more than three hundred apartments to the area.

Find out more from the slide presentation that city staff delivered on Wednesday.

👍 This conditional zoning request was approved by the Planning and Zoning Commission.

Three Zoning Text Amendments

The main event of the night was a bundle of three zoning text amendments—that is, revisions to the city’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), which is the code that shapes how the city grows and changes.

These amendments were all designed to promote more housing supply on the city’s “commercial corridors,” which are, generally speaking (though not always), synonymous with what the city calls “transit-supportive corridors.”

City staff made a point to tell the Planning and Zoning Commission that the night’s UDO revisions were exclusively focused on the “commercial corridors” shown here.

(We might think about “commercial corridors” as contrasted with two other categories: the “central business district” or downtown, on one hand, and the “neighborhoods,” which are zoned as “residential” and where you find mostly single family homes, on the other.)

City staff from the Urban Planning and Design Department gave a presentation to place these three code revisions in a greater context, and suggested that following the passage of these amendments, the staff would then turn its attention towards the “neighborhoods” in order to increase the potential for housing supply there.

The three zoning text amendments were as follows:

1. Project Thresholds

The UDO as it exists attaches some extra barriers to larger residential projects, even when those projects conform to the existing zoning rules for their respective site. Perhaps the most burdensome barrier is that if any proposed development includes more than 49 homes, Asheville City Council must vote to approve it.

This proposed revision seeks to bump up the “threshold” from 49 homes to 100,000 square feet. (The switch in measurement, from number of homes to square footage, is technical but it makes a lot of sense, and may encourage a greater variety of apartment sizes.)

The revision also includes a number of beneficial changes for smaller developments. .