Public outrage pushes Council out of City Hall and towards taking action on hotels and a racist gerrymander
Above: Asheville City Council, file photo by Max Cooper
Tonight, something unusual will happen. Asheville City Council will leave their usual perch in City Hall — still bedecked in the racist paintings of yesteryear — and head to the much roomier confines of the Civic Center ballroom. There, even more unusually, they may even take action to rein in hotels (though they might let one last one through first) and push to reverse a state-imposed racist gerrymander of local elections.
In the nearly 15 years I’ve covered Council, I’ve never seen them do this. There’s been plenty of political rows — especially as Ashevillians have become increasingly angry about segregation and gentrification in recent years — that have packed Council’s fairly small chambers, but they’ve typically just moved the rest of the crowd to overflow rooms. Council’s usually kept the ballroom for their own retreats or the occasional forum.
If you’re thinking that seems set up to tamp down public anger, you’re right. Combined with an arbitrary (and entirely made up) rule that Mayor Esther Manheimer repeatedly invoked forbidding applause or audible noise on any public issue, there’s a lot of efforts to keep our august officials from having to face too many of the city’s people at once — and ensure the populace don’t speak out of turn when they do.
But things change. Locals have repeatedly pressed for key meetings to be held in a larger space. On Aug. 27 activist Brynn Estelle, with the support of others in the audience, condemned Council’s use of made-up rules of decorum and a small meeting space to repress public backlash on issues like policing and gentrification. Notably Manheimer’s never invoked the fictional “no clapping” rule since. The Sept. 10 meeting saw locals loudly applauding a push to stop yet another luxury hotel, and more calls for key meetings to be moved to a larger location. This time, Council submitted.
Then there is, importantly, what they’re considering. Tonight’s agenda is dominated by two major items — a hotel moratorium and a reverse of a state-imposed gerrymander of local elections — that most of Council either swore was impossible or repeatedly delayed action on. Now both are on their agenda, as is one last hotel that might actually be headed for defeat. The fact that any of this is happening at all is proof city officials aren’t as invulnerable as they’d like you to believe.
The last hotel
At Council’s Sept. 10 meeting, BPR properties rushed to get (another) luxury hotel through before the looming moratorium takes effect. Anger against hotels, simmering for years, exploded after Council member Julie Mayfield turned coat and decided to support the widely-hated Flatiron hotel project.
That hotel means the eviction of around 70 small businesses and organizations to profit a notoriously vicious landlord, and the whole deal was mired in a slew of shady connections while ignoring many of the city’s own development rules. But Council voted to give the Flatiron hotel the go-ahead anyway, and Mayfield proved the swing vote. The backlash hit hard. Even an Asheville Citizen-Times piece noted that Mayfield was “the most hated woman in Asheville.”
She (and Manheimer, Vice mayor Gwen Wisler and Council member Vijay Kapoor, who also supported the Flatiron) suddenly decided a hotel moratorium was quite doable.
But there’s still one last hotel to consider. Because cartoonish hotelier villainy’s reached this level, BPR’s 72 Broadway project would kick out the farmers’ market and demolish two nearby buildings with historic architecture. While the hotelier’s promised that the market will still be doable, none of the farmers seem to think so.
To a person at the Sept. 10 meeting, they said that the building of the hotel would mean the end of their livelihoods, making an already-cramped situation impossible, Notably, this farmers’ market actually doubles the value of EBT, making it an essential resource for affordable fresh food for the city’s many impoverished. Its removal would worsen hunger in an already-hungry town.
To try and assuage the public, the developers of 72 Broadway downplayed that they were even building a hotel, instead dubbing it an “arts-centric development” in a letter to neighboring business owners. Of 165 units, the whopping majority of them hotel rooms, they promised to reserve nine (three condos and six rentals) affordable ones for “qualified creatives.”
The public didn’t buy it. Overwhelmingly, those who spoke in favor of the hotel were wealthy property owners, some of whom openly hoped that the coming hotel would kick out the homeless and “junkies” from the area. The public, including farmers, neighboring business owners and locals just outright fed up with the wave of hotels, were adamantly against it.
This time Council was far more wary than with the Flatirion. Mayfield and Kapoor had seemingly decided that 72 Broadway would be, finally, a step too far. The hotelier delayed the proposal until Sept. 24, as an outright rejection would have killed the project for a year. Typically, Council’s granted this privilege to the developer unanimously. Not this time. The move to delay only passed 4-3, with Council members Keith Young and Brian Haynes joined by Wisler in voting against.
The hotelier has made no modifications to the proposal since, meaning that if Council votes for it, it means some serious gentry pressure’s swung some votes. That’s happened before, so it’s worth keeping an eye on how this fight goes down. If 72 Broadway loses or is delayed again, it’ll be gone for awhile, and due to rapacious greed such deals tend to fall apart as backers look for easier targets.
The moratorium
For years, as the hotel industry exploded in this town, Council proclaimed that they couldn’t do anything to halt it.
That was untrue, of course. Development is one area local government actually has a lot of power over. But back in the late 2000s the city bureaucracy, working with downtown gentry, convinced Council to vote away much of their power over development in downtown. As the years wore on, hotel after hotel was waved through by a city planning board packed with realtors, architects and developers that stood to benefit from gentrification.
While Council took their power back — after a major anti-hotel backlash in the 2015 election — in 2017, they’ve proven reluctant to use it. Council members have made excuse after excuse to send hotels through anyway, and hoteliers started promising perks — donations to the city’s affordable housing fund, historic preservation — that amounted to pittances of the millions they stood to gain or the damage they would do.
The idea of a moratorium — prohibiting Council from voting on any hotels for a year — is not new. But Council members like Haynes, who have historically been more critical of hotels, have failed to aggressively press it. As is so often the case, Ashevillians’ anger made the impossible suddenly turn into sound policy recommendations.
On Sept. 10 Council unanimously approved putting the moratorium on the agenda, and it’s unlikely to attract major opposition on the dais. The politicians want a respite. While the moratorium stems the tide for a year it also means that they’ll go through the looming 2020 elections without any major hotel fights.
The ostensible purpose of the moratorium is to give the city time to craft new rules for hotels. Expect a lot of the fight to shift there. Given a hotel-friendly bureaucracy (city planners went out of their way to push the Flatiron and 72 Broadway projects) and Council members’ reluctance to oppose the industry, it’s not impossible to see the new rules as once again shifting more power back to staff and gentry-friendly city boards. Hell, the official staff memo on the moratorium lists “no new hotels will be approved” as a negative.
Notably the city requires all lodging uses (i.e. everything from a single Airbnb apartment to a major hotel) to go before Council, but the moratorium doesn’t apply to all of them, just traditional hotels. This exception is already being exploited. A proposal to overhaul downtown’s Star building seeks to turn it into a multitude of single Airbnb units. It comes before Council later this year. It’s unlikely to be the last.
The gerrymander fight
For over a year, the state-imposed gerrymander has loomed over Asheville’s politics. In 2016, in response to declining far-right fortunes and growing Black electoral power in local elections, the GOP-dominated General Assembly started pushing an overhaul of Asheville’s elections, carving it into districts. That first attempt failed, but the next year state Sen. Chuck Edwards, whose district include a tiny slice of South Asheville, pushed a bill requiring Council to draw districts under rules that basically would have replicated the gerrymander the year before.
Council refused, and put the measure to voters in that year’s local election. Ashevillians rejected the district scheme overwhelmingly: 75 percent of ballots cast were against it. The same election saw left-leaning candidates exhibit increasing strength while incumbents were left fighting for their political lives. While 2015 had ended two years of an all-white Council, 2017 saw two Black Council members, the most in three decades.
In 2018, Edwards and the GOP proposed another gerrymander bill. Now Council would have five districts (drawn by the right-wing legislature, naturally), with one seat and the mayor still elected citywide. This time, state Sen. Terry Van Duyn joined on, backing the Republican measure and adding an amendment delaying elections by a year. In deference to her the rest of the senate’s Democratic caucus followed suit (Democratic state house members still publicly opposed the bill). Another amendment stripped Asheville of its primaries (city elections are non-partisan, so a primary narrows the field down before the general election).
Prior to this, Asheville had what’s known as an at-large election system, meaning all six Council members and the mayor run and are elected citywide. In recent years, Black communities in different parts of Asheville had combined with a broad anti-gentrification backlash to put the city’s old political status quo under increasing pressure. Establishment Democrats suddenly found they had a lot in common with the state GOP in favoring an election system rigged in a whiter, more conservative direction.
When the legislature passed similar bills targeting Wake County and Greensboro’s elections, local officials and organizations fought back quickly in court — and won. Not in Asheville. Despite Council members being publicly opposed to the gerrymander, they stayed silent as the months passed.
The public did not. Starting in January, locals publicly pushed Council to take action. They did so at meeting after meeting. As Manheimer and other city officials repeatedly trotted out excuse after excuse, Ashevillians kept coming back. The topic became harder and harder for them to ignore.
At a July 2 forum on the issue, locals overwhelmingly spoke against the gerrymander. Civil rights activists and veterans decried it, Ashevillians repeatedly noted “I’m the 75 percent,” referring to their 2017 vote against the districting scheme. Even City attorney Brad Branham, in the process of largely dismissing the city’s legal options as too expensive or difficult, had to admit that the city could reverse much of the state bill — undoing the districts and reinstating primaries — through its own power to modify its charter.
While even more delays followed, public anger didn’t go away. On Sept. 10 Council finally moved to start reversing the gerrymander. Tonight’s public hearing is part of that. The final vote on doing so will take place at the Oct. 22 meeting.
Council waited so long on a legal challenge to the election delay that they lost their chance to have one this year and gave themselves all another year in office. Next year’s election — due to state law — will have a primary in March, meaning a long general election fight.
The conflict has been clarifying. Three Council members — Sheneika Smith, Young and Haynes — had called publicly for the city to fight, though activists also criticized them for waiting so long to do so publicly. Manheimer and Mayfield downplayed the city’s legal chances while Wisler largely remained silent.
But at the same time, Kapoor turned coat. He came out in favor of the GOP gerrymandering scheme — despite running against it in 2017. He later said he supported a compromise, with five district seats and the mayor and three Council members elected at-large (his proposal would add two seats). On Sept. 10, he was the only Council members to vote against moving. He claimed that the GOP-drawn districts were actually more favorable to Black voters and will better represent Ashevillians’ neighborhood concerns.
Kapoor’s arguments ignore reality to the point of being outright fiction. He quotes, out of context, an NAACP report noting that in many cities at-large districts can be used to prop up a power structure.
But those guidelines aren’t crafted in a vacuum and which groups an election system favors depend on who’s drawing it and why. The Blade‘s very first article on a possible state-imposed gerrymander over three years ago noted that in some cities where Black voters are concentrated in a particular area, at-large systems were supported by the right-wing, while Black communities and left-leaning groups pushed for districts (though, importantly, not those drawn by far-right legislatures).
In Asheville, geography and history flip the script. Indeed “Life beneath the veneer,” Darin Waters’ historic work on Black communities, politics and life in Asheville, notes that as soon as Black voters achieved rights to the ballot in the latter half of the 1800s, a district election system hampered them from exerting political power:
Unlike other cities, where blacks often constituted a majority in at least one ward, blacks in Asheville, as an examination of the 1870, 1880 and 1890 censuses show, were dispersed throughout the city, forming small neighborhoods in each of the city’s four wards.
This dynamic was only increased by segregation and redlining in the century that followed. While Asheville’s city institutions remained brutally racist, under the at-large system the political status quo discouraged local organizing and used establishment political pressure to stave off change. When Black and left-leaning voters rallied enough to use an opening in that system — if Black communities across the city voted for candidates or measures they supported, they could have an impact on every office up for election — to gain increasing political power, the far-right and centrists teamed up to change the system.
That’s an ugly fact, but it’s not a particularly hard one to understand.
To claim otherwise in the face of this evidence is already foolish. To assert that the far-right GOP would draw districts to ever favor Black voters is ludicrous. To claim the state-imposed gerrymander is good for Black voters, actually, in the face of both Black Council members and multiple civil rights organizations, activists and veterans loudly telling one otherwise is something else entirely.
Again, if anything the gerrymandering fight has been clarifying. The far-right sentiments of apparent centrists like Kapoor have come out in the open as has the extreme timidity of many others on the dais. The fact that the majority of Council still moved forward the reversal of the gerrymander is a testament to the sheer stubborn relentlessness of a lot of locals who refused to buy their excuses.
The point of the gerrymander was to cut off an avenue for local organizing, because many of the people and activists that were active in recent elections realized that was just one front in a much larger fight over the future of the city, one that could occasionally provide some check on the gentry segregating and crushing the city even more. Instead of a politics that reflect its left-leaning populace, better in the view of the GOP and their establishment allies, to keep Asheville the “progressive” fief it’s always been.
In that is the key lesson in all of this. City Hall is scared of you, and you don’t have to wait for an election to remind them of that. When they don’t act, you can. When they’re silent, you can speak. Your anger is justified, and you are not alone. If you join with more people, and you all direct your anger and your efforts, the politically impossible suddenly becomes very possible. If you show up — at this meeting or any other — remind them the city’s fate isn’t up to them.
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