Down in the peanut gallery

by Joy Chin September 3, 2015

While City Council wrangled over short-term rentals and the future of the city, I sat with the crowd in an overflow room. Here’s what I witnessed

Above: City Hall under renovation, file photo by Bill Rhodes.

The Aug. 25 Asheville City Council meeting saw a big fight over short-term rentals and their impact. Blade contributor Joy Chin, who’s written an in-depth analysis and opinion piece on the issue in our city, also attended. While I was covering the meeting from Council chambers, she was in an overflow room witnessing the audience’s reactions. Here’s her personal take on what happened. — David Forbes

For those who are unfamiliar, Asheville City Council meetings are fairly unique. Asheville is an opinionated and participatory city. People actually show up to Council meetings to make sure their voice is heard.

There are people who regularly attend to provide input on policy matters that ranges from the brilliant to the inane; there are also people who only show up when a particular issue hits home.

But how people behave depends a great deal on where they end up during these meetings. During particularly contentious meetings when there’s too many people to fit into Council chambers on City Hall’s second floor, the public is herded down to the first floor into a room with large monitors to watch proceedings live. In extreme cases, when that room’s full too, they’re also directed to the sixth floor.

This past week’s meeting was about Airbnb-style short-term rentals, which if you haven’t heard, are just a bit controversial here. People were spread all over the building: the second floor, the first floor, the sixth and whatever hallways they found themselves in.

With over 60 strongly opinionated people signed up to speak, this made for a chaotic situation, as people were unfamiliar with the building, unfamiliar with expected codes of behavior, unfamiliar with the particular rhythms of the meetings, and unfamiliar with the big picture and wonkish aspects of a brutally complicated, incredibly controversial issue that Council is forced to consider.

Despite arriving early, due to the large crowds I was herded down to the first floor, into the peanut gallery. The crowd was energized and angry; people made small talk as they prepared to battle for their self-interest. The majority of individuals were well-dressed in their REI-finery and what passes for professional wear in Asheville. A few showed up in suits.

Ages ranged from those in their 30s to 60s, and the crowd was overwhelmingly white. The first floor has a more relaxed and comfortable feel to it: there’s no battery of cops hanging around and poker-faced Council members on their wooden stands. While the Council chambers feel more like attending class in school — or even the most boring church on the planet — down in the peanut gallery there’s few authority figures to corral the crowd. People express themselves more honestly, more freely.

By the time City Council actually started the meeting, the crowd was already bored. As the meeting went through the rhythms of local government, discussing topics like naming a lobby and time capsules (and was that not a splendid celebration we had for veterans?), the crowd started to crack open books to read, pull out laptops, work on calendars, fiddled with their smart phones. This was not the battle they came for. Not yet.

The gentleman next to me mentioned the need for Snickers bars just to get through this; it started to dawn on the crowd that meetings can be very dry affairs. Quietly murmured conversations broke out in the room, and the raucous crowd in the hallways were having such a wonderful time that it was difficult to hear the proceedings over them.

The gentleman next to me explained that he was attending on behalf of his daughter. Short term rentals allowed her to afford to keep her house. He and his wife had moved here from Virginia, lived in a separate building on the property, and were working to help keep things running. He was out in the summer heat, mowing and battling kudzu. It was a family affair. I suggested goats for the kudzu and opined that his family didn’t actually seem like City Council’s target, but rather the corporate/commercial real estate investors poaching our housing market. He was unaware that such a phenomenon existed. Judging by the outraged responses of the crowd as various points of the homestay rules were discussed, they weren’t aware either.

When the topic at hand, the discussion of the homestay rules finally started, everyone immediately went silent and snapped to attention. Those half nodding off to sleep became alert. Books and laptops closed. The party in the hallways abruptly ended. Minds were focused; bodies tense.

The mayor tried to head off some of the confusion and rage by explaining that short term rentals, including Airbnbs, are already illegal in the city, and that what was up for debate were the homestay rules – and later, fines for those banned short-terms. These proposed rules were an attempt to legalize some aspects of short term rentals for the locals, but also to keep out the predatory real estate investors who do not care about our community. While she explained them as clearly as anyone could, anger started to rise in the crowd and they were perhaps even more confused than before.

As each new proposed change to the rules was read aloud, the crowd started cheering for things relaxed, or grumbling for things tightened up. The fact that full kitchens would not be allowed under the proposed rules was a particularly outrageous point for this relatively well-heeled crowd. A full kitchen! Outrageous! They’d spent so much money putting in that second kitchen for their (illegal) short term rental! How else where they supposed to afford staying in their home?

After the presentation of the proposed rules, and some questions from Council regarding the rules in an attempt to clarify them, the public spoke. There were multiple people admitting on the record, in front of Council and the world, that they were running illegal Airbnbs. There were demands that the Council stop trying to regulate anything at all, and let the free market play out – allow some of the locals to tap into those juicy tourist dollars.

Why should the hoteliers be the only ones to profit? Surely there’s enough demand to go around. All those cars in already crowded streets are not a problem. The fact that entire residential areas, entire neighborhoods, could be hollowed out for flighty drunken tourists (as has happened in other cities around the world) is also not a problem. Not their problem, at least.

There were also people admitting that they contacted the city to see if it would be legal to rent out their home or an accessory building for the short term rental market. One man said he had been told it was illegal, but unenforced… so he went ahead and started renting anyway.

Once again, you have a crowd acting, thinking, bonding over the fact that they think they’re on the same team, on the same side. Some individuals were on relatively fragile economic grounds, and renting out a room on Airbnb was keeping a roof over their heads.

But there were also people there with multiple investment properties who were doing just fine, just hiding behind the stories of those walking the tightrope. A tightrope, I might add, that still has them in a better economic situation than all the renters in the area.

For all the sad eyes and desperate pleas to Council from those lucky enough to get into the housing market before prices skyrocketed, they were still rich and stable enough to pull a mortgage in the first place. None of the public who spoke out spoke for renters, who pay more than those with a mortgage, just to have a temporary roof over their heads.

To his credit, Council member Gordon Smith pointed out this glaring omission from the public conversation. While an individual homeowner may not have to think about our insane long-term rental market and the countless negative effects it has on our community, City Council does — or it should, at least. And when entire houses that could be in the long term rental market are being used for short term rentals, it’s those stuck in the rental market who face the heaviest burden.

As much as this crowd thought that they would be financially ruined by the proposed changes or that they might simply make less money, relative to many other people in the area they’re doing just dandy. There are many people here who would love to have their problems.

That’s why the kitchens matter, wonky and technical as it may seem. Any space that has a full kitchen could conceivably be part of the long term rental market. It’s funny that when people talk about the “sharing economy”, they leave out long term renters who are actually part of the local community vs. the tourists who are just here long enough to throw some dollars and suck out a little lifeblood, one visit at a time.

And for all the people adding in these deluxe full kitchens to compete with each other in the short term rental market, but knowingly did it even when they knew it was illegal, that’s called blatantly breaking the law — a law in place for actual reasons, in this case. For those who didn’t know, or those who knew it was illegal but were told it was currently unenforced, that’s called gambling and losing. Instead the general feeling of the crowd was myopic self-interest, of “fuck you, I got mine”, combined with an inability to see the city from any perspective besides theirs. Instead of giving a damn about other individuals in the community, of the terrible housing market that is currently hurting our local community, of protecting our community from the corporate real estate investors — remember that actual people used to live and work in Chicken Alley — it was a rabid anti-government anti-regulation anti-community fest. If this is actually a city of progressives, then this was an ugly side of it: what it looks like when they feel that their interests are threatened and all that lovely sentiment about community promptly disappears.

As I was heading out near the end of the meeting, I talked with a couple I hadn’t seen before, a mother and her son. Compared to most of the crowd there, they were dressed more modestly. They were a little less polished, a bit more Carolina, and less out-of-town in their accents.

She said she ran a cleaning business in the county serving short term rental properties. She told me that she was paying her workers great money, over $12-an-hour money. She’d paid her workers more than $42,000 last year. Her son then went into a most peculiar argument that Millennials like himself don’t care about community, don’t care about cars clogging up streets, don’t care about any of these things anyway – so go ahead and let the unregulated “sharing economy” reign free, no one fucking cares.

He surely didn’t. Despite this, the camaraderie in the air was as warm as the night, and they offered to accompany me to my car on another floor of the parking garage. It was a gracious offer, but I declined, as I didn’t think it necessary. As I was chewing all of this over in my head I noticed their vehicle, a shiny, spotless new Mercedes Benz, logo glinting under the lights, as they drove off into the night.

Joy Chin is an Asheville-based writer and researcher.

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