Asheville for All

Over the past year we’ve been making an effort on this blog to recap Asheville City Council meetings where big housing decisions have been made, so you can get a sense of who on the Council supports housing, who is less likely to do so, and what kinds of votes end up in front of the council in the first place.

This recap is a little different.

There were no votes related to housing in front of the council members on Dec 9th (Although the council did vote to appoint a new member to the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission, and that board has some degree of influence over what housing gets built and where.)

Nonetheless, it might have been a night of some consequence for the future of Asheville’s housing landscape and the costs of housing borne by its residents.

Support for “Missing Middle” Changes in Asheville

At the end of each city council meeting, after the business on the agenda has been concluded, Asheville City Council has a standing invitation to anyone that wants to speak on anything to spend three minutes doing so. So some of our members joined members of Strong Towns Asheville to speak on the subject of Asheville’s “missing middle” initiative, which has been effectively frozen since prior to Helene.

More than a dozen residents took their turn to speak to City Council expressing their desire to see the city stop delaying the implementation of this initiative. We also passed along the voices of a much greater number of residents, by way of an open letter that we emailed to council that morning. You can read that letter here.

You can watch all of the commenters on the city’s YouTube channel, starting at this timestamp.

These are some of the residents that spoke to Asheville City Council on December 9th about the need to restart the city’s Missing Middle Initiative. Included are representatives from Asheville For All, Strong Towns Asheville, and AARP Mountain Region NC.

Some highlights:

• Two commenters shared personal experiences where themselves or a neighbor were displaced as renters. Missing middle reforms, we’ve noted before, are an anti-displacement measure because they provide tenants with more options in a given neighborhood that meet their needs and are likely to be lower cost options. A greater amount of housing in a neighborhood also helps with rents by tilting the market in the favor of tenants rather than landlords.
• Young and old residents shared their concern for what’s sometimes called the “housing mismatch” in our city. Too many homes that take up too much land are devoted to nuclear families with two parents and one or more kids. But most of the households here and across the country do not have any kids at all. The lack of housing diversity in our city falls hardest on working people that are very young, and haven’t built any wealth but don’t need a lot of space, as well as older folks that find it hard to downsize because of a lack of options.