One of the biggest decisions facing Council in the coming four years is the UDO overhaul. If elected, what are going to be your priorities in dealing with that?
I think Asheville does have to contemplate how to become a busier city with more people in it. Ten thousand or so people are going to move here over the next decade and if we want that growth to happen in a way that’s reasonable and fair and planned, then we need to get ahead of it and thinking about infrastructure improvements and all the ways we need to maintain our quality of life.
You mentioned Asheville becoming a busier city, are density increases in your view part of that and if so, how?
For one thing, the zoning doesn’t need to apply density increases to fill up with more people. Right now, most areas of Asheville are only at about half of the density they’re allowed to have. My neighborhood in West Asheville has an average of 5 housing units per acre and its zoned for eight. Haw Creek has two units per acre and it’s zoned for four, North Asheville is about the same way, about 2-4 units per acre. The city could become a lot denser and busier than what it is now without any change to the zoning at all. Worrying about density is not the right question we need to be asking.
The only neighborhood in Asheville that’s maxed out its density, as it’s zoned now, is Five Points between Broadway and Merrimon and across Merrimon in Chestnut Hills. Those have eight units per acre and that’s what they’re zoned for. That’s not exactly how zoning works, you can’t say nothing else can be built there, zoning works on a parcel by parcel, kind of subjective basis. In a lot of ways both of those are great, livable neighborhoods close to jobs and things like that.
There are a lot of areas of the city that are less dense that feel less planned and they feel busier and more crammed for. Rather than just necessarily talking about ‘are things going to get denser?’ we should be talking about ‘are they going to be walkable, are they going to be close to jobs, are they going to be good places to live?’ or are they going to feel like North Atlanta and Hong Kong.
On that note, one proposal you’ve mentioned is looking for ways for the city to incentivize small landlords. Can you go into some detail about that: how would it work and where would the funding come from?
Right now 43 percent, a little less than half of all the rentals in Asheville, are not big apartment complexes, they’re single family homes, they’re single spaces above a store, they’re basement rooms or backyard apartments, attic rooms.
That was really found to be unusual in this big housing report that the city commissioned and that everyone was pouring through last year. Unlike a city like Raleigh or Charlotte or Atlanta, Asheville’s housing stock is really heavily dependent on small, individual rentals run by just regular folks. That presents a lot of interesting opportunities and problems, but the gist of it is that all of the city’s work to create affordable housing and more housing stock is all focused on big, big apartment complexes that add 100, 200, 300 units at a time. There’s no program in place to address the small landlord, small homeowner part of the equation.
To me the problem with that is that you’re looking at a lot of regular folks that are struggling with Asheville’s rising costs and they’re coming under a lot of pressure to convert their rentals to short-term rentals, to cover those expenses and make a little more money. A lot of them are an aging population that could suddenly age out of owning all these houses and all of a sudden half our rental stock converts to short-term rentals or drops off the market. I feel very strongly that there should be some support in place for small time homeowners and landlords that want to provide some affordable housing. That’s the program that we’re missing.
What that might look like is either a property tax discount for people who rent a long-term space at certain rates. We could stagger it so you could get a percentage off of your property tax if you rent under a certain amount, and a bigger percent if you rent under a higher amount. But that’s doable and It would be a property tax discount. You wouldn’t be writing people checks necessarily, you would be giving them a rebate on their propert taxes and it would be great if that would net out the recent property tax increases we had, because those have been causing them to raise their rents.
Another proposal that’s been floated round and seems like its gaining some traction is for someone who builds a garage apartment or a basement apartment where they were having to pay somewhere in the range of 7-8,000 to connect that apartment to the city’s water lines and electrical lines, that you could waive that and essential give them a 7-8,000 bonus if they kept their rents under a certain amount.
Another proposal for affordable housing is an inclusionary zoning ordinance, possibly based on Chapel Hill’s or Davidson’s, what’s your thoughts on that?
I think inclusionary zoning is one of the ways that has been proven best in cities that have passed it, to work. But the idea that the city should court a definite lawsuit. The legality is very much up in the air and the idea that the city should do this and court an expensive lawsuit that we stand a good chance of losing, that’s a heroic thing. But that’s not a thing you want to say recklessly.
And I’m not convinced by the people that are saying that the city would have a good chance based on what happened in Davidson.
So your assessment is that the Davidson and Chapel Hill examples don’t necessarily show that the law will work?
They [the Davidson cases] were settled and the argument is that the developer settled because he sensed that he would lose and this was the developer of a large apartment complex suing the city over the requirement to include a certain amount of affordable housing. The argument in favor of doing this is that he settled because he thought he would lose the legal battle. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m not convinced, and a lot of other people aren’t either.
It would be great, but we also have to be aware, with the legislative environment. A law came within hours of passing, just a few weeks ago that would have very explicitly forbidden cities from doing this. It’s not just the state of the current law, it’s that we would almost certainly face legislative action if we tried to do this, that would potentially remove even more of the tools we have to address affordable housing. The law that almost passed would have prevented Asheville and every other city in North Carolina — but you might as well call this the anti-Asheville bill of October 2015 — from doing almost anything to address or incentivize or require affordability.
What I do like, and I think it’s the town of Cary that did this. They passed a requirement that if a new big store — like our Harris Teeter on Merrimon or our Whole Foods on Tunnel Road — those are really big buildings, not occupied most of the time. You can imagine them occupying this column of airspace all the way up to the stratosphere. Why are they not building apartments on top fo these. We have this busy road service by tons of buses on Merrimon Avenue and it would be a great place for more people to be able to live, close to restaurants and jobs. But it’s lined on both sides by one-story buildings with almost no housing along it. Why is a Harris Teeter not required to put housing on its roof. Why is it only one story?
I believe the town of Cary tried to require it, and the legality of that is still in question. But even when cities can’t require it, they can very much suggest that sort fo thing and they can tailor their zoning to make that happen and by various means they can negotiate that into deals for conditional zoning and for anything that’s big enough to come up for planning review and approval.
Another issue that’s created a debate about affordability is, of course, the short-term rental issue. On that, you’ve mentioned that you’re in favor of a regulation regime. How would that regime look to balance — because you’ve also mentioned affordability concerns as well — regulating them without opening the floodgates too wide?
That’s the big question. I’m very serious about neighborhood integrity and that’s the way I started in my involvement in Asheville life; by forming a neighborhood association against the impacts of all these changes that are happening here as a result of our growth. I’m very serious about affordability but I’m in this situation where I’m faced with a ban that’s not working and I’m concerned about the inevitable legal challenge on the ban that could again strip away Asheville’s legal ability to regulate this thing at all.
So I’m looking for ways to try to allow some of these while keeping a hard or soft limit on the number of them that are in the city.
And I can tell. I’m walking through the city right now, talking to voters, and I can tell when the door I’m knocking on is a short-term rental versus a long-term rental. So lots of cities have approached this different ways. Austin, Texas has a cap of three percent of the total housing stock and they’ll only permit them up to that point.
One of the more clever ways I’ve seen, since you mentioned conditional zoning, is treating a short-term rental as a conditional zoning. So you have a hearing in January, a day-long or two-day long session of the planning and zoning commission and a person that wants to do this shows up and one by one goes down the list addressing the possible neighborhood impacts. How are they addressing the traffic? Well, if they’re the only house up on a road on Town Mountain, they’ve addressed the impact, or if a person who’s making sure to provide parking. But it takes each one of these on a case-by-case basis. It allows the citizen — because there’s a zoning notice — it allows the surrounding neighborhood a chance to answer those claims, just like we do with a conditional zoning now. And then acommittee says ‘yes, you’ve addressed the impacts’ or ‘no, the neighbors make a good case that this is a bad idea’ or ‘this property received five noise complaints last year we’re going to decline you’ or ‘you’ve already been in front of us 10 times today with other properties you own and you’re a serial out of town landlord and we’re going to decline this one.’
You could do that and make one of the criteria how many others there were on this street or in this neighborhood. There’s so many factors and so many ways short-term rentals could impact the neighborhood it seems like there’s a great legal path to making this happen. But that’s one of only several possibilities being floated around. I gather the homestay ordinance is going to come up for approval very soon after the election. It seems to me like pure politics that it wasn’t addressed to anybody’s satisfaction earlier in the year. But what I understand from some people that are involved on both sides is that they expect that to come up in November.
The Southside Advisory Board has started a petition about the renovation of the Walton Street Pool. What’s your position on the need for that and the prioritization, if you’re elected?
I’m glad to see it get some attention. I follow city budgets — and especially city capital improvements, the big infrastructure projects the city embarks on — and I haven’t seen the Walton Street pool on a city capital improvements budget since 2009. The last discussion I heard about it from City Council was back in 2010. At the time, the direction of Council seemed to be that they were going to close the pool and build some sort of Splashville-type fountain down Livingston Street at the Grant Center as a replacement.
Obviously this has gone under the radar for a long time and it’s been a real disservice to the residents of Southside and it’s part of the legacy of that neighborhood getting the short end of the stick from the city. So I’m glad to see it coming up. I don’t like to see it presented as this either-or option to some other things, like the park proposed apart from the St. Lawrence Basilica. That’s now how capital works lists happen. There’s always tons of parks projects going on. I hope the efforts of Southside move that back on to the list of things that need to be approved and that it gets some attention as a result.
In some other African-American neighborhoods in the city — Burton Street and Shiloh, for example — have raised concerns that despite detailed plans they still have unaddressed infrastructure needs. Does the city need to change the way it deals with getting infrastructure done, with the legacies of redlining you were alluding to?
Yeah, so to me the real shame about Shiloh and Burton Street, on top of all the history that they have, is that both of those neighborhoods have been extremely proactive in organizing and laying out a vision of how they want their neighborhood to be treated, grow and develop. Shiloh has the first neighborhood vision plan that was adopted by the city, so Shiloh’s vision for itself is actually adopted city policy.
Burton Street wrote a really great neighborhood vision plan about how they want to grow and develop and the city has so far declined to adopt it. It actually has to formally be brought into the city’s thinking about itself.
A really good example about Shiloh is that part of their vision about a neighborhood is that they were formerly on the grounds of the Biltmore Estate. It was workers at the dairy and descendants of freed slaves that were moved off the Biltmore Estate when that was happening. It became one of Asheville’s original black professional and working class neighborhoods.
One of the things they adopted in their neighborhood was that there’s a culture of walking down the streets in the evening and talking to people as they sit on their stoops and porches. So one of the elements of their vision that they laid out was for new houses to have porches and stoops where this culture of strolling, communal conversation could happen. And immediately after that plan was adopted a new set of houses was approved by City Council that had no stoops or porches was adopted.
Even after that was adopted, it seemed like it sat on the shelf. I take neighborhoods really seriously. Like I said, that’s been my first and main involvement in politics. Every neighborhood needs to be right now, how it envisions itself in 10-20 years and the city needs to adopt as many of them as possible and take them seriously.
You mentioned the neighborhoods we were just talking about having plans and not having them adopted. If you’re up there on the Council dais and staff aren’t carrying forward something like that, what do you do?
I push for it to happen. I think in a lot of neighborhoods it’s not going to happen by itself. Asheville has a lot of neighborhoods that are historical and very strongly organized and have a really strong sense of character. But the neighborhoods that are most vulnerable are more working class, more renting population. That’s transient and mobile and working shifts. So neighborhoods like Emma and a lot of the South Asheville and neighborhoods out in East Asheville concern me in that they don’t really have the cohesion yet and the kind of social infrastructure that leads to neighborhood grou[ps. A lot of them are just now forming them and starting to get a sense of themselves.
But when a neighborhood doesn’t have the capacity to do that, it falls on the city and the office of the neighborhood coordinator to say ‘look, how can we get you organized?’ and what resources can we offer to help you pull together. That’s something the new city council could lay out in its new strategic vision at its retreat in January. But I definitely think its something that has to happen before the zoning rewrite happens.
Another issue the city is involved in is the probable development of Lee Walker Heights. This also happens in the context of a back an forth between the residents and the Housing Authority. There are concerns about transparency, evictions and a number of other issues. As the city would be a partner in that redevelopment, if you’re elected, would you make any deal contingent on the approval of the Residents Council?
That’s a good question. I haven’t contemplated that. I like the Residents Council a lot and I’ve been really happy to have some of their members supporting my campaign. I would say this about the Lee Walker Heights deal: I’m really nervous about it. For good and bad reasons the city has never undertaken such a huge a project as this. There’s a lot that can go wrong. There’s a lot of trust from the community, and doing right by the community, that hangs on pulling it off right.
There’s things working against it, from the Duke substation going in next door that’s going to possibly prevent some of the city’s access to federal funding for that project that they had counted on to what you mentioned, either the reality or the appearance that some evictions and inspection regime was pushing people out to deny them the right to return that’s supposed to be available to everybody. So theres’ a lot that has to go right and at the same time it has to be transparent in the eyes of the community that’s most affected.
Moving to downtown, a debate I’m sure you’re familiar with is the plot across from the Basilica that’s attracted a lot of attention. You’ve taken a position against the sale of that, to keep it public space. What’s your response to the criticism of the other side that the costs involved in that would be prohibitive or would knock out the possibility of other parks?
I’m a finance person, I follow the budget very closely. I am not convinced by the financial arguments. Right now the main arguments for the sale of the park seem, from a financial perspective, to be that the city needs to recoup the $2.3 million that was paid to originally purchase the land. That was 16 years ago that that happened. During that time there’s a lot of things have happened in the budget that have gained or lost us $2.3 million. At this point the argument that the city can’t be doing right by its budget unless it puts that $2.3 million back into the parking fund seems to me shaky at best.
To give some perspective on what $2.3 million means to the city budget, it’s a little less than two percent of any one year’s city budget. But, for example, last year the city was expected to spend about $2-3 million on finishing that road on Azalea Park and due some bad estimates and cost overruns the city’s actually had to budget about $4-5 million so the overrun is close to $3-4 million right now. When we say “we need this because we need the $2-3 million” a lot of the time we’re not considering that there went some good money. The Craven Street improvement project that was part of the deal to attract New Belgium here is about $6 million over what it was originalyl projected to cost. That was basically a handout to a corporation to attract them to town.
So when we say ‘how are we going to fund the parks?’ or ‘how are we going to recoup this parking fund money?’ but there’s no question of big, big cost overruns that happen in the city as a matter of course that, to me, seems like it’s not taking in the full picture of the city’s finances.
If that property was developed it would cost, at some of the best estimates, it would be worth about $50,000 or up to $100,000 in annual tax revenue. That’s not a small amount, that’s equivalent to about 50, 60 average Asheville houses. It’s not nothing, but it’s not a deal-breaker to the budget. It’s a third of one percent of what the budget brings in every year.
If the city had a will and decided to, we could easily say ‘protecting a public amenity is worth that to us.’ When the downtown master plan was written with a lot of public input, a lot of forethought six years ago and adopted by City Council, that spot was marked as a recommended park. Down in the South Slope there are two other target areas that are meant to have parks. The adopted plan says every two and a half minutes walking distance in downtown Asheville there should be a park. To me this is a question of when we take public input and spend money and make plans are we going to follow through on them or are we going to leave them on a shelf somewhere?
I’m a really big believer that the process works and that it brings the right people in to form the city we envision. If we just start a component fo the downtown master plan like the parks then I think we’re basically ripping up and throwing away the map.
Another aspect of downtown that’s attracted some ire and some attention is the large number of hotels going up. Given that there’s a UDO rewrite on the horizon, would you favor any rules changes or restrictions on hotels? What would those look like?
The first month in office I would like to propose the city lower that threshold for the review of big projects in downtown. That was part of the Downtown Master Plan, that’s the part we are honoring. It used to be anything over 100,000 square feet had to go to City Council, a citizen-appointed and accountable body for review and approval.
The Downtown Master Plan, passed during the years of the recession when there was a real fear that nothing would be built downtown ever again, raise that roof to 175,000 square feet. Since then, a lot of things that are of questionable value to the city have been proposed and built that come right under that threshold and there was no accountable review. They went to commissions like the technical review committee or the downtown commission or planning and zoning that don’t have enforcement power over what the community would like to see.
I’m not anti-development by a long stretch, but I believe community input and a community vision should have a lot bigger say.
As far as why there’s so many hotels downtown I think it’s really instructive to look at why are hotels the only businesses buying land downtown. Part of it is because the land in downtown Asheville has gotten so high already that the only business that can turn a profit is a big hotel. So we can ban hotels here and not address the real economics of it.
A really great example is that proposed hotel down by the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church> They owned the buildings of the old Valley Street Foundry for 10 or 15 years that the leadership of the church tried to find someone who would buy and build something of value to the community, like affordable housing and black-owned businesses, that would revitalize the Block there. They couldn’t get any takers.
The only time it came on the public radar at all was when, after years of paying tens of thousands of dollars a year on property taxes on that land they got an offer from a boutique hotel and now it’s going to be the Foundry Hotel. A hotel ban would not have done the right thing by Mt. Zion. What they needed was someone looking out for ‘how can we see their vision through? And what’s preventing this from being affordable houses and black-owned business again?
Another proposal that’s attracted some attention lately is the I-26 proposal coming through. Since those plans have come out, there’s been a fair amount of criticism. It seems like the state is moving forward with some things, like eight lanes, that are not what city government wanted to see. What approach would you take to that on Council? Does the city need to ‘get it done’ or is it just a bad idea?
The city needs to get something done but we need to be aware that the designs perpetuate the injustice that’s been done to Burton Street community. The original bypass that became I-240 decimated Burton Street, Asheville’s original historic black homeownership. There used to be roads at the end of Buffalo and Burton Street that connected all the way across West Asheville and Patton Avenue too. It was integrated, it was a thriving business center.
The current four lanes of highway almost obliterated them off the map. I find it just astonishing that 50 and 60 years after redlining and explicitly racist city planning, that we’re still looking at a proposal that takes all the houses off the Burton Street side of the highway and almost none of the houses off the mostly white-owned and rented Western side of the highway. How’s that even happening? When it goes to Emma many of the proposed paths run through what’s become part of the center of Asheville’s Latino community. How are we still taking out the houses of people of color. We’re talking something like 70 houses and 15 or 16 businesses under the most likely plan.
That has to be addressed. Anybody who’s concerned about racial justice and private property rights in Asheville, the path on that is really clear.
As far as the widening, that’s something that’s happening a few hundred yards from my house, so it’s something I’ve been following really closely. People need to be aware that the problem on that highway is not the width and the eight-lane solution being proposed is not mainly to do with traffic needs. Per this report that just came out the main justification given for that widening is so they can build a highway, divert half the traffic onto it, build the other half of the highway, like they’re doing down in South Asheville.
There’s no traffic justification now for the eight lanes, it’s only for the convenience of construction, which is unbelievable for something that’s 250 feet wide, almost as wide as a football field and going to deepen the gash across West Asheville.
The things you have concerns about, this follows the city saying for the past few years that ‘we’re going to work on trying to get a plan move forward in hopes that we might influence the outcome’ but the state seems to have proposed things that are contrary to that. Does the approach need to change from Council?
I think so. There’s no proposed alternative that really addresses all of the community’s explicitly expressed needs. So I think it would be a disservice to the community for the city to endorse such and such option. The I26ConnectUs group I’m on, which is the surrounding neighborhoods most impacted by the project seems to be taking an approach that we’re going to push our wants and needs as a community, that it needs to heal the connections of Asheville, that it needs to take into account people who walk and ride bikes, that it needs to minimize the impact on homes and businesses. We need to lay out a set of priorities and say ‘figure out how to incorporate this into your plan’ rather than say ‘we endorse this plan because it does the most.’
We’re already seeing some payoff with that, with the proposed greenway from the Haywood Overpass all the way around West Asheville and across a new pedestrian pathway on the Jeff Bowen bridge, but there’s a lot more that needs to be proposed. The other one is taking I-240 traffic off the Bowen bridge with another bridge because that bridge is nearing the end of its lifespan and more people driving on it ruins it more.
When we talk about affordable housing too and how important it is for this quarter acre of land across from the Basilica to become taxable property, I don’t know if anyone’s connecting that when 70 homes and 16 businesses are taken up by highway, those come off the tax rolls too. If you take the slope where Patton Avenue, from downtown, heads onto the bridge, you could fit hundreds of housing units and could fit half of downtown into that space that’s a tangle of highway exit ramps right now.
People, as they’re cruising by at 70 miles an hour, aren’t aware of how much land in Asheville, which is really starved for land, is taken up by non-taxable highway exit ramps. But we need to make sure we’re not losing more of that land to an overbuilt highway project.
For a number of years now the city has not had a designated staffer to deal specifically just with the arts. Is that something that needs to change and are there any other ways the city’s approach to dealing with the arts needs to change?
Yeah, I think so. I go back to Ed McMahon the planner, this famous city planner that was involved in the revitalization of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, among dozens of other things, came to speak in Asheville a little while ago.
What I took away from that, more than anything, was that when cities lose the thing that makes them unique, they lose all their economic and competitive advantage. Asheville’s advantage is its arts and its built and natural beauty. When we lose our artists, our murals, our little minor touches everywhere we’re going to be a minor Charlotte, but in a worse location.
One of the main duties of Council is to deal with and oversee the City manager, the way our city charter’s written. Gary Jackson’s been in office for ten years and that’s seen everything from a AAA bond rating to major issues in the police department. What’s your assessment of Jackson’s management and does the way Council handle that oversight need to change?
Yes, definitely. The structure of city government right now is that Gary Jackson is the CEO of Asheville and City Council is his board of directors. There’s no situation where that dynamic changes. Previous arriving City Councils have fired city managers. Historically I think the tenure of a city manager is only four-and-a-half years, kind of matching up with elections pretty neatly.
But here’s what I don’t see, and I go to a lot of City Council meetings. Of everybody besides the journalists and definitely of all the City Council candidates I’m the one who’s attended the most City Council meetings that I wasn’t required to. There is not enough questioning and not enough pushback right now from City Council.
I wouldn’t propose to fire Gary, I think his work his good, but I think City Council has abdicated some of its ability to provide a check or at least to provide a double-check on the activities of Gary and the staff. When we get a budget, it’s not enough to just have good intentions. City Council needs to have a really high degree of financial literacy and a good, broad policy knowledge. If you don’t, you’re sort of helpless to the recommendations of this endless stream of experts that’s trotted in front of you and all the good intentions in the world are going to come out to nothing.
What’s an example of a case you’ve seen where there wasn’t scrutiny provided by Council?
In the past year or two, several rather large apartment complex projects have gone in front of Council that have had a lot of impact on surrounding neighborhoods and those weren’t addressed by Council during their approvals. When there’s not somebody saying ‘ok, there’s affordable housing units in this apartment, where’s the sidewalk for them to get to the bus?’ Where’s the nearest bus line running? Is the developer contributing to make that sidewalks connection or is this putting the city of Asheville on the hook for, in the two cases I can think of on Hazel Mill and Thompson St, something like $250,000 as a handout to a developer who’s probably making a pretty good profit.
The other example I can think of is on the matter of the living wage for city temporary and seasonal employees like the lifeguards and civic center staff. I’m going to insist on calling it the Civic Center until I die. If I’m elected, you’ll only ever hear the words civic center come out of my lips.
That was a situation where City Council, going through the budget process, believed they were allocating money for all of the employees of the civic center and the city pools to be paid a living wage — an amount that you can live on without needing government benefits — and it turned out that was under-allocated. Staff, more or less on its own, made a decision that the civic center, especially, would have to raise fees or reduce the hours of employees there.
It just was not questioned enough when it went through the budget process. The fact that a commitment to do right by those employees and raise their wage to a living wage was undercut, resulting in fewer hours or layoffs, is exactly the sort of thing that Council needs to be really clear on as it’s happening. If it’s not, if you’re only concerned about your pet priority or about keeping meetings quick and streamlined then you miss out on things like that and you’re prey to somebody else’s priorities.
Who else are you voting for in this election?
I’m not going to say. Considering that when I started running back in January when the field at the time that the three people currently in those seats had a pretty good chance of running again and then a week after I filed Julie Mayfield also filed, the shape of the race has come out really differently from what I expected when I started. Asheville’s lucky to have a lot of really good choices that present really different views. I think, in the end, people with merit and experience and good ideas for the city are going to make it.
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