Asheville for All

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Gentrification is in the news again, this time in a big Asheville Watchdog article.

And as is par for the course for Asheville, people are throwing around the word without really understanding what it is, confusing its causes and effects, and conflating it with displacement, while not understanding the causes and effects of that!

Here’s a brief comment on what Asheville gets wrong when we talk about gentrification and displacement, in the form of some references to different sources that I’ve found helpful in thinking more critically about this subject.

First, I want to be very clear: my purpose in questioning some of the assumptions presented in the Watchdog article is not to downplay the importance of considering displacement in determining policy. Rather, my intent is to show how those assumptions, which by no means have their beginnings in Asheville, can obscure the real solutions that we have available to increase housing stability for all kinds of Asheville residents.

Jenny Schuetz on “Late Stage Gentrification”

The claim at the core of this week’s Asheville Watchdog article is that new housing construction causes rising property taxes, which fuels gentrification.

It’s theoretically quite possible, I suppose, that all else being equal, in a highly constrained land market, that the presence of some new homes might signal to buyers, realtors, and developers that are happening through the neighborhood that this is a place worth checking out. But the research on this subject suggests that this common sense observation gets some things wrong.

A rise in property taxes on an existing home is driven by higher land valuation. (After all, the structure of the house itself hasn’t changed.) And housing policy analysts generally agree that high land values attract development, rather than development raising land values. The causation, in other words, is backwards. By the time that someone wants to spend a lot of time and money building a set of homes on Burton Street, that land must have already risen in value enough to make such a development make sense.

And what causes rising land value for residentially zoned land? Housing demand.

Jenny Schuetz, a Senior Fellow policy analyst at Brookings, makes a case in an interview with Ezra Klein for identifying “late-stage gentrification” as the moment when people, especially homeowners, suddenly get concerned:

. . . I should say that this is a tough area to reconcile people’s lived experience if you’ve been in a neighborhood that’s going through this process with what we know from the academic research, particularly by economists. So I should say, first of all, that the perception of developer coming in, tearing down some old buildings, maybe some old apartments that are relatively cheap and replacing them with big, fancy, new apartments or condos that are expensive, that’s actually pretty late-stage gentrification.