Asheville for All

Here’s what we found to be the most important housing-related items at Asheville’s City Council meeting of Tuesday, July 28, 2026.

3862 Sweeten Creek Road

Outcome: Approved

Votes:
In favor: Esther E. Manheimer, S. Antanette Mosley, Kim Roney, Sheneika Smith, Bo Hess, Sage Turner

We’ve written recently about some housing developments in South Asheville that came before Asheville City Council for a “conditional zoning.” (For a refresher on what a conditional zoning is, you can check out this old recap blog post.) Here came another one, this one further south, near the airport, on Sweeten Creek Road.

And like some other recent conditional zonings, this one included potential financing from the federal LIHTC program, meaning that the homes would serve a range of income levels, all of them at most eighty percent of median area income (“80% AMI”). The development would also be bound to accepting housing choice vouchers. All of these things are good.

An aerial photograph showing 3862 Sweeten Creek Road. (The dashed line that is shown is just the city border.) Source: City of Asheviile.

There was minor neighborhood opposition to this one, and we don’t believe concerns such as those around traffic were well grounded, but again we’ll note that South Asheville is in a peculiar spot. It has more developable land, arguably, than other neighborhoods, but it’s also outside of the “core,” the more grid-like and/or walkable areas of the city such as West Asheville and North Asheville, that might relieve some of the “development pressure” coming to bear down on South Asheville if those parts of town were to be moderately upzoned. On the other hand, we might argue that there’s no reason that South Asheville itself can’t become a kind of “node,” if the concern is about the roadways that commuters take north. In this case, 3862 Sweeten Creek Road is a close drive to all kinds of schools, retail, and other amenities that already exist.

In any case, City Council approved this one unanimously without much fuss.

A Brief Note: Rezoning a Portion of the Asheville Mall

Next on the agenda, an owner of the Asheville Mall appealed to the city council to revert the property’s zoning code to what it had been in the 2010s. Several years ago, it had been converted to the city’s new “Urban Place” designation.

Asheville For All doesn’t take positions on “straight rezonings,” which is when a property owner seeks to change the underlying zoning type for their lot specifying what they intend to do in terms of (re)development. This was a particularly interesting case though, and if you’ve been following the discussion around the Urban Place (aka “Urban Centers”) reforms from five or six years ago, reading .