Asheville for All

We sent the letter below to Asheville City Council on July 9th.

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Asheville’s City Council has two new rule changes that they may consider this year. Together, if passed, these rules could promote more housing and more housing options in our city’s core neighborhoods and along transit corridors.

Asheville’s zoning code is supposed to promote walkable neighborhoods with abundant housing, like this. But arbitrary rules are limiting what gets built. Source: Haywood Road Form District, Asheville NC Code of Ordinances.

1. Legalize More Apartments!

Currently, Asheville has an arbitrary rule that says apartment buildings can’t easily be built with more than forty-nine homes. Anywhere in the city.

That’s because City Council is required to consider projects with fifty homes or more on a per-case basis. This politicizes the process, and it adds time and costs to the process of getting new homes built. It can take months and months for City Council to review these cases.

And the prolonged process also makes it significantly easier for wealthy residents in high-demand neighborhoods to try to prevent apartments from being built near them—even where our zoning code already allows them.

This arbitrary rule applies to everyone that might want to build homes—even non-profit home builders, and even those seeking to build subsidized homes at below-market costs.

A rule change would make it so that if a planned apartment meets the standards laid out by our local laws—standards that are already tailored to each neighborhood or “zoning district”—it will be more likely that the building can be constructed “by right,” which means without unnecessary political costs and delays.1

2. Support People Over Parking Lots!

Currently, Asheville has arbitrary rules that require new buildings to include a minimum number of parking spaces. These rules are called “parking mandates.”

When homes, including apartment buildings and detached houses, are required to have a certain number of off-street spaces for cars, that makes it less likely that housing can be built on smaller lots. It also means fewer homes can be put in that same available space. All of this results in higher costs for tenants relative to the size of their home, and fewer homes to go around overall.