A downtown for the rest of us

by David Forbes January 25, 2016

The future of Asheville’s downtown is in the balance. It’s time to have a much broader discussion about what that future should look like

Above: downtown Asheville by night. Photo by Max Cooper

Downtown Asheville never really leaves the news. It’s not just the seat of government or the location of a huge amount of local commerce and culture, but the front line of gentrification and changes that raise major questions about who holds power and who gets a future in Asheville. It’s even famous outside our city as both a tourist mecca and an apparent example of an urban success story.

But everything from the loss of a late-night diner to disappearing benches, the metastasizing of the hotel industry, the moves to redevelop public housing and attempts to restrict busking have all fueled discussion about just what the hell is happening to the area. That list is, it should be noted, far from comprehensive.

Last week saw the annual State of Downtown luncheon. Held by the Downtown Association, a group whose leadership claims to represent the city’s core (an assertion I believe highly debatable given some of the controversial proposals those leaders have put forward over the years), the event brings together business owners and local government officials. That’s a group that, whatever one thinks about the merit of their particular views, trends towards the elite.

Given all that, it’s a good time to start a discussion a little more focussed on the concerns of the rest of us: there’s no lack of voice for Asheville’s business magnates, high-ranking city staff or elected officials. Whether you live, work or just like to come to downtown, feel free to weigh in about where you think this is heading and what needs to change. Below are some personal thoughts I’ve considered over the past few months. As we get more responses I’ll include them throughout the week.

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I’ve covered this city’s issues and politics closely for a decade. I’ve worked in downtown since 2007 and I’ve lived here since 2008. Downtown’s revival from a largely abandoned district to its current state is a fascinating story and one that’s been analyzed from a lot of angles. I think the wave of the “creative class” (not my absolute favorite term, but we’ll use it) attracted here over the past three decades are one important aspect. While that left out a lot more people than is commonly admitted, part of that welcoming attitude was also real, and it certainly helped make Asheville a place that became home for many of us.

But every story of an era of apparent success has its ignored spots, its downsides and flaws. Those have a habit of coming up to haunt a society as the years and decades continue. Failure to grapple with them is what leads to civic disaster.

To some degree I think that’s what’s happening now. For some time, I’ve been trying to think about what and who was left out of the revival so to better diagnose the nature of what we’re dealing with now and how Asheville might need to evolve to keep the heart of a city we love. Here’s a list of some things that deserve a closer look:

Emphasis on personal relations over power structure — As a smaller city where a lot of people knew each other, the culture prized personal relationships over building organizations or changing power structures. Given the cultural make-up, this was understandable, and it can work o.k. when there’s an abundance of cheaper housing and people are working for independent business owners at pretty small operations.

But it’s also really fragile, and all the economic pressures in the business world prioritize making cash by any means over building a great city. What happens if the business sells? Or the business owner turns out not to be such a great person? Or they’re awesome but fall ill or retire? Despite some notable exceptions in the non-profit sector (where Asheville’s reasonably strong), the emphasis was mainly on the personal over “what lasting structures do we set up to ensure good wages/culture/broad prosperity, etc.” That had a cost and it ceded the field to those groups that already had a measure of organization, which tended to represent wealthier interests and view the scrappier, more working class aspects of Asheville’s culture as a nuisance rather than a point of pride.

One interesting “what if” is if the example of the Food Co-Op unionizing during the early 2000s had spread to more businesses. That could have helped ensure better wages and working conditions across the board, because there would be ways to enforce that as tourism boomed. That would have given just about everyone a stronger hand to face a changing city, and provide the local economy with a stronger base of support. Instead, Ashevillians from a variety of viewpoints are now scrambling to organize as the harsher side of gentrification sinks its teeth in.

Ignoring wages for too long — Asheville has terrible pay, well below the state average. Part of that’s because the sectors tied to tourism don’t usually pay well, and part of it is, frankly, because the culture here doesn’t prioritize pay as much as it should.

Wages weren’t as big a priority as they should have been from the get-go during Asheville’s revival, for everyone from city leaders to business owners, and without more aggressively political groups like unions to enforce them or make sure there was pressure to raise them, they’ve overall stayed stagnant or even dropped while the tourism boom has happened.

Heck, the city of Asheville — despite most of a decade declaring its commitment to the idea — didn’t fully pay a living wage until the latter half of last year, and a lot of senior staff really didn’t like the idea even then. Flagship businesses like Tupelo Honey and French Broad Chocolates have even dropped their living wage certification even as tourism expanded and business boomed.

I think it was too easy for too long to assume that the relatively cheap housing and low cost of living would last. There’s also still a stigma, from many in the local elite too, that undervalues service and creative work, even though it’s vital to our economy. One of the dark secrets of Asheville is that plenty of local businesses also pay bad wages, skirt labor laws and contribute to the problems we face. Will that change? Will other local businesses and groups start seriously pressuring them to change? As the tourism gold rush continues, some are even becoming corporate chains themselves.

Not tackling segregation head on — Asheville remains an incredibly racially segregated city, especially economically, even compared to many others across the state and Southeast. That’s a deeply-rooted problem with a lot of causes, but acknowledging that blatant, obvious fact remains controversial in too many quarters here.

Dismantling that takes a lot of direct, intentional effort and confrontation. A lot of that didn’t happen during the downtown success story period, and does in fact reveal that Asheville’s culture is, in some major ways, far less inclusive than it pretends to be (Dwight Mullen and the State of Black Asheville project have analyzed this at more length). Not only did that perpetuate a major injustice and lead to our city becoming less diverse, it also meant that too many black entrepreneurs, thinkers and creatives left for places with more opportunity and less segregation, sapping the city of important talent.

Too much emphasis on the superstars — The common narrative about downtown focuses on a slew of success stories. Some of those are legitimate, but the problems just mentioned leave Asheville in danger of having a “weak bench” to face the future because there’s a huge economic gap between those stories and the people trying to work their way up now. The low wages mean that our potential future leaders and creative types are barely scraping by, rather than saving up or having the time to perfect their craft or plan for the future.

I recently talked to a local artist working more than full-time, well below the living wage, who calculated that even a solid part-time job at $12.50 an hour would give them enough resources and time — albeit barely — to both pay the bills and develop their art practice to the point where it might be sustainable. But those jobs are in short supply, so a lot of people work on until they get fed up and leave for places with more opportunity. Those cities gain their talents and skills. The odds of future success stories get lower and lower unless someone’s already starting with a lot of wealth, and the culture hollows out accordingly.

Too often the culture here forgets that a thriving city needs opportunities for the people that make it work, across the board. Great artists, for example, come from great artistic cultures — they don’t emerge out of thin air. It can be easy to lose sight of that when there’s too much focus on the individual success stories.

A lack of necessary confrontation — This is the downside of the “live and let live” culture. I’ve seen few places where asking basic questions, offering obvious criticisms or even fairly gentle satire is seen as some sort of radical aggression the way it too often is here. Almost all of the above problems (especially the low wages and segregation) continue partly because of an aversion to facing them head-on or calling those responsible (for example: downtown businesses dropping a living wage commitment during a tourism boom or gentry blatantly calling non-wealthy Ashevillians “undesirables”) out. Too often during the downtown revival era mounting social problems went un-confronted until they got extremely dire because the mentality is too often “everyone needs to agree and avoid open conflict” rather than “some ideas or powerful individuals need to outright lose so others can take their place.”

Despite the Blade‘s goal of diagnosing the realities in our city — including the ugly ones — at heart I believe many of these problems can be solved (or at least drastically improved) in an area that many of us care deeply about.

To believe that can happen with all of the exact same people, ideas and organizations in the exact same positions they’ve traditionally occupied is, however, a much harder argument to make. History says that any effective reform requires actual changes in the balance of power.

But most ominously, the aversion to talking honestly about Asheville’s issues has pervaded down to the individual level. Whenever we run a piece at the Blade on why people feel forced to leave the city or how they’re facing desperation, I get a wave of mail and messages from locals saying that this mirrors their situation, but that they can’t talk in public about it because they’ll get fired or even harassed for just mentioning the general situation they’re in. The cult of nice here can get pretty damn cruel and too often it keeps us from even fully discussing the problems we need to start facing.

I hope that changes, because pretty soon we won’t even be able to get a cheap late-night burger in town.

— David Forbes, editor

Part of the thoughts above were put into form after reading the following letter we received from downtown resident Paul Choi late last year:

I’d like to ask you a question:

Do you agree that Asheville’s current boom is due to a creative class we haven’t had before, particularly of restaurants and beer? Yes, people come to Asheville for the mountains and hiking and the Biltmore House, but we’ve always had mountains and hiking and Biltmore House. Yes, people come for the shopping and entertainment, but we’ve never had something like the LaZoom bus, which is promoted by a flying, bicycling nun. Yes, there were a handful of decent restaurants 10 to 15 years ago, but nothing that put us on the map like Cúrate (and, quite frankly, they wouldn’t hold up to today’s restaurants). Yes, there was a generation of business and property owners that kept downtown Asheville alive through the bad years, but they’re not the reason people are flocking here now. Yes, we have an active Tourism Development Authority (TDA) whose job is to promote our city, but they can’t seem to find their way around a creative idea, instead choosing to release a terrible, pay-for-play, video advertisement on Buzzfeed which barely made sense to anyone who lives here, and essentially acted as free air time for C-grade operations like Tupelo Honey. (To watch the video, search: Buzzfeed 9 reasons blah blah blah Asheville. The 12 Bones scene is a tragedy; it’s not even 12 Bones!)

My observation is this: Asheville is a liberal, open, inclusive community made up of all types that share a common mindset of openness, willingness to try something new, and not judge (lest ye be judged). These types include hippies, punk kids, gay, trans, cyclists, coffee snobs, atheists, Southerners, politicos, (welcoming) Christians, foodies, designers, vegans, herbalists, astrologers, counter-culturalists, massage therapists, et al. Over the last ten years, creative individuals — the Katie Buttons (Cúrate, Nightbell), Brian Canipellis (Cucina24), Casey Campfields (Crow & Quill), Elliot Mosses (The Admiral, Buxton Hall), Carl Melissases (Wedge Brewery) — came to Asheville because of this welcoming, eclectic community. And they brought with them an upgrade for our senses. They fell in love with us and fostered that love to create magical experiences. These experiences were so f***ing good they set off a whirlwind of press and attracted the world to our town.

But as we grow we find ourselves facing certain problems. As opportunists rush in, hoping to score on Asheville’s newfound notoriety, changing its landscape from a charismatic, cool, and cultural hotspot to glass ‘n steel hotels and gaudy trinket shops, will we be able to maintain the lifestyle that attracted the creative class, the ones who brought the world to us? If we kick out the musicians and artists busking on public streets, are we deodorizing our culture only to replace it with the sickly sweet stench of sanitization? If we make Asheville only accessible to those with resources, will we end up alienating the very class of people that makes it special? I’m sure of one thing: I don’t want Asheville to end up looking like Greenville.

The announcement of the sale of 51 Grill, and its replacement with another hotel, is just disappointing. To think that 51 Grill — a late night, after hours, gluttonous, deep-fried, vomit inducing revelry — will be replaced by slick granite marble and televised fireplaces with paltry worker wages makes me want to throw up. Maybe it’s time for a change.

Dee Williams, a local advocate, business owner and one of the leaders of the local Ban the Box campaign, offers this thought:

Asheville ostracizes and diminishes people who speak out. Most of us who do cannot work a job here. The time will come when the talent will be needed, as all booms result in busts and I hope that those of us who are excluded will find welcoming places.

Local Allison Frank offers this: 

I moved to Asheville in 1998 from Seattle. Housing prices in Seattle were skyrocketing, you could never find a parking space downtown when you attended an event and it was really hard to find employment. Does that sound familiar? That is what Asheville has turned into. Seems to me that the power brokers who run the city only care about bringing in tourists for the too-expensive restaurants, the overpriced hotels and to support the service industry.

I used to LOVE going downtown, but in the past few years, it’s overrun with rude interlopers enticed here by our illustrious Chamber of Commerce. For example, in July, I had tickets to a concert at Diana Wortham, got to town 45 minutes before the show started and never could find a parking space – parking garage or street. I missed the show. Asheville’s city center resembles a carnival of rich gawkers who come here with wads of money to spend and have been shoving the locals out of their natural habitat. Locals have been displaced, overlooked and this place is going to turn into an ultra-hip, mega-expensive party town for the upper class. If I had any money, I’d move. Yes, I’ve made friends, supported myself and tried to impact the decisions being made by making my voice heard, but greed doesn’t care. It’s disgusting what has happened to this nice little town.

Local musician Brian White offers this: 

I came to Asheville in 1999 for school. Have lived and worked here ever since. I’ve struggled, I’ve succeeded, I’ve been somewhere in between on many occasions. I’ve made lifelong friends, and I’ve developed long-term professional relationships that have paid dividends. What made Asheville feel good and unique was the sense of community and true focus on local businesses and a tight-knit sense of working together – fostered by those businesses in many cases.

A lot of that, and a lot of those truly unique businesses that made downtown feel tight-knit and special are gone, along with the vibe and the people that made it all feel special. Max & Rosie’s, Cafe’ on the Square, Beanstreets, Vincenzo’s, Hannah Flanagan’s, Vincent’s Ear, Rio Burrito, etc. etc. The list could go on of places that really were ASHEVILLE, that felt progressive yet welcoming, that are lost to memory now for one reason or another. What we have now are businesses and individuals in power that are focused on bringing the tourists to town, as opposed to truly making an effort to be locally focused.

There may be more businesses now, more jobs, but those jobs aren’t keeping pace with the outrageous cost of living that has cast a cloud over the area for the average worker and family. Asheville is now a ‘hip’ location that seems to merely serve as a springboard, as an advertising catchphrase and magnet. There’s still a lot to love about living here, which is why we stay, but if you didn’t experience Asheville before the current incarnation (2012/2013 to present), then it’s hard to understand why a lot of us who have been here for a while are so befuddled at the direction the city has moved in, and why it’s not just grumbling and griping when we comment on how things ‘used to be’. It’s a real concern about how things could be better for everyone, not just the ‘elite’.

Local writer, researcher and Blade contributor Joy Chin recently attended an important Asheville City Council meeting deciding the fate of the BB&T building, a well-known (if not exactly well-loved) downtown landmark. After, she wrote about her view of what happened that night, what it says about our city’s current system of power and how it deals with the issues facing its core.

System failure

The multimillionaire confidently strode down the aisle to stand before City Council, before the city. He wore an elegant black brocade jacket custom fitted to his torso. This was not a man who had anything to prove, but as a hotelier he did have a hostile crowd on his hands. “Not another f’ing hotel,” they had cursed in the past, and some had added “we’re making our stand here and now on this project.” The developer had an entourage of employees and supporters who took up nearly half the room, however a simmering, skeptical anger lingered from the populace in the remaining seats.

They, and the others not present that night, were angry about development taking over the city, development that benefitted other people while they stumbled over crumbling sidewalks. They were angry that the hotel tax mostly goes to bring in yet more tourists. They were angry about widespread low wages. They were angry about lack of opportunity, in this time when so many are struggling to stay afloat. They were also angry about that ugly building in downtown, the biggest one of all. Our beautiful city, with that wretched building towering over it.

But Mr. McKibbon was here to save the day. The developer and heir from Florida was here to save Asheville. He was here to save City Council from their lack of power, lack of ability to get much of anything with meat done. He was here to help them with their problems with the County, the State, and the lack of juicy hotel tax revenues. This man, the Good Oligarch, would solve our myriad problems.

He disarmed the crowd — most of them, at least — with humor, with effortless charm. He showed gorgeous architectural renderings of what could be. He would work with local artists. He would pay full time employees living wages. He would build condos — permanent housing — but at a final number of his choosing, yet to be determined. He would make large sidewalks for pedestrians and our beloved buskers. From my vantage point, the mood was changing, softening.

Local beneficiaries of his extensive wealth came to the podium to sing his praises. By the end of the meeting he would have the City Council – our elected officials – cheering his name. He would have us grateful that he was there, to solve our problems, the ones we couldn’t manage ourselves. He would turn that ugly building downtown into a shining jewel.

On his own terms.

As his name was praised in Council chambers — The Good Developer! The Good Developer Who’ll Make Us Pretty Things! – I shifted uneasily in my seat. The system is fine, they say, the system has always been fine. All this time we’ve just been searching for the right developer, and now he’s here.

Due to state law (and the current political landscape at the state level), there are limitations to what City Council can accomplish. They would likely face a legal battle to enact a local minimum wage (our mayor declared it outright impossible); currently they cannot keep any hotel room tax. Our infrastructure desperately needs updating yet it’s particularly expensive here, due to the mountains. We need money to deal with everything from housing to hunger to parks to bike lanes. Yet as good as the deal with McKibbon might seem, it could’ve been better for the city, a lot better. We could’ve demanded that all positions be living wage, as the City itself has done, albeit with some initial reluctance.

We could’ve demanded far more money into the affordable housing fund. This project is, after all, going to make McKibbon millions upon millions or they wouldn’t be doing it. But the real issue is that relying on one particularly wealthy individual (or even a few) to solve our collective problems is a game we’ll lose. The wealthy elite who benefited from bad systems aren’t going to be the ones to reform them. This city of dreamers is going to have to become more active, if we’re to save ourselves.

It’s one thing to have leadership from private individuals. Democracy is participatory; participation is good. It’s another thing entirely to depend on particularly wealthy individuals to raise our wages out of the goodness of their hearts or brief flashes of PR. Land in downtown Asheville is highly desirable to developers from all around the country, yet the city is driving easy — not hard — bargains to the people rich and connected enough to secure massive loans to build or revamp large, multi-story buildings downtown. It should be noted that bureaucratic hurdles of regulations and permitting are not the same thing as the city getting a good deal economically, although it may look that way from a developer’s point of view, since it is money and time out of their pockets.

When developers tell Council that they’re going to build however many hotel rooms (versus luxury condos, which are at least some form of housing) as they like and City Council won’t have any say in the matter — in the heart of downtown — we have a problem. When Council members are full of effusive praise and thanking developers for this while insisting that they did everything right because they “respected the process,’ we have an even bigger problem.

It’s not that the majority of Council, or John McKibbon, or senior city staff are bad people — that’s not the point — but they are individuals extremely comfortable within the present system. Even if Asheville bears the absolute worst impacts of gentrification, this system won’t necessarily change — and being comfortable, they won’t necessarily feel the need to change it, not really.

If our politicians are this disempowered to accomplish our goals, then we need to be seriously exploring alternative ways, methods, and routes, because the current system is not serving us and downtown is taking the brunt of that.

Commitment to a bad process or system is not a good thing, nor is it a virtue. Too often the focus here is how leaders say they are committed – but to what? To rubberstamping something that went through a series of committees, filled with entrenched interests and a few minority voices who are ignored — or even backstabbed, as the city’s buskers and others have found out — by city staff? To this “consensus” that just happens to repeatedly work out for the status quo and more hotels?

As was pointed out with McKibbon, Council might have had no real legal grounds for denying his lovely project in any case, making the entire presentation a bit of kabuki theater. He followed the rules the city itself set up. All developers tell Council with barely concealed exasperation that they followed all the rules and regulations that were required of them.

It’s not the question of if we’ll end up with a beautiful building downtown, it has everything to do with how we got it, and what that says about how our needs are served (or not) in the city. Consensus is bringing us developers who want to be here anyway receiving the go-ahead (or even incentives) to build things we really don’t want, particularly in our downtown. State politics means that local government has serious obstacles on wages, which leaves us with begging oligarchs for higher wages (we’ll see how that works out) or — hear me out — focusing on non-governmental groups to deal with our issues.

We could even build some groups of our own; more co-ops, or land community trusts to keep housing affordable, or band together in unions for better wages (notably, millenials are very open to the concept of unions). The gears of government here are slow and creaky, and even as members of City Council assure us they care deeply about the city, both their ability and drive to truly help us may be very limited. Time for alternatives.

Left activist, former mayoral candidate and Blade contributor Martin Ramsey offers these thoughts: 

At the risk of sounding like a vanishing breed of romantic, I will categorically state that we are living in revolutionary times. The center isn’t holding, politics is polarized to increasingly divergent worldviews on the right and left. The climate is destabilizing faster than we expected. Our economy’s foundations are creaky at best, and the gains top heavy to a ridiculous degree. Asheville is stuck in the middle of macro problems that we’ll have to deal with, one way or another.

I, like any number of people, upon returning to Asheville from some less open, less adventurous, less interesting environ, felt like I was returning to my home, a mountain fortress against the world. People can be forgiven for this sentiment, but it’s an absolute delusion. Asheville isn’t unique in it’s housing crisis, but it is acute here. We aren’t alone in the falling standard of living for working Americans, although that is acute here. Our financial crunch on public services is milder than some drastic examples but austerity politics reigns here too, under the watch of very serious people who happen to be liberals.

There’s nowhere to run.

Absent any political pushback and organizing on the part of working Ashevillians, the a likely future looks like this:

• Downtown becomes a total simulacrum of an urban polis, an outdoor mall scattered with hotels, solely for the purpose of farming sales taxes from affluent visitors and condo dwellers.

• The working class is effectively marginalized to the surrounding suburbs by gentrification, limiting their representation in politics.

• Local businesses both due to market dynamics and rent pressure cater more and more to tourism or upper class consumerism as the non-necessity budgets of working people are squeezed more and more.

• Good ol’ boy network land owners sell en masse to big money interests, exacerbating prices and speculative development.

• Black Asheville dwindles while getting a kind word or two.

• When the economy tanks again in the next year or three, systemic crises strike leisure economies first. Asheville takes a huge hit.

• The bubble bursts.

It’s not a pretty picture. But anyone who is telling you that we’re going to magically avoid all the systematic problems facing other urban centers in our city/state/nation through ‘aspirational’ thinking needs to drink a little less craft beer kool-aid.

The only chance that working people have to reshape their city is via active involvement in left politics. And I don’t mean liberal glad-handing. We need organizations that will fight for more than one issue at a time, ones that see racism, economic inequalities, power, housing, and ecology as intertwined issues that must be resolved in concert.

We could use less advocacy and more organizing. Let’s get visible. We need power to fight for decent housing, meaningful work, just public services and a green future. If we don’t start building that power base soon, expect the next boom/bust to double up on the speculation, displacement, and hollowing out of a city with more than enough potential. Fight back.

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