In the face of public outrage, Asheville city hall is set to open the floodgates on a wave of new hotels while the industry does more damage than ever

Above: The message is simple. No. More. Hotels.

Asheville hates hotels. This is not new, of course, but that rage has only grown during the last few years. Hotels have forced out our friends and the gathering spots in our communities. More hotels means more police crackdowns, more tourists, more gentrification, more segregation and more evictions.

From redlining to “urban renewal” to the present day, the quest to make Asheville a tourism destination for the wealthy and white has been a driving force behind the destruction of whole neighborhoods.

Even with the 2019 hotel moratorium the industry has kept doing horrific damage. Hoteliers successfully lobbied city and county governments to drop pandemic restrictions, spurring a string of major outbreaks. In August when locals protested at the Renaissance — particularly notorious for endangering workers — cops brutally attacked them. Even as local COVID-19 infections and deaths climbed to their highest rates ever last month, the hotels stayed open. Last week city hall used tourism as an excuse to demolish a houseless camp hours before the coldest night of the year. They do that to cater to hoteliers and their wealthy customers.

Now Asheville city hall is about to open the floodgates on even more new hotels. While the moratorium was put in place due to public outrage against the industry, staff and plenty on city council have gone in the opposite direction, writing rules that are even friendlier to hoteliers than the existing status quo. They’ve pushed them forward at breakneck speed. By the time council takes up the rules at a hearing tomorrow, Feb. 9, they will have been public for only a week. That’s intentional.

So, let’s look at exactly how bad this is and what you can do to fight it.

Wait, more hotels? Seriously?

Yes. This may surprise some of our readers. Hotels are, to put it mildly, not popular in Asheville. Even during the Blade‘s first years locals were already angry at their spread.

Before the moratorium all hotels — regardless of size or which part of town they were in — had to come before city council. While council approved plenty of them, doing so meant major public fights in the face of increasing public outrage.

After signing off on the infamous Flatiron hotel — which ignored many of the city’s own development rules and kicked out around 70 local businesses and organizations — council faced such a backlash that they finally started rejecting hotels. Months after the Flatiron’s passage council passed a yearlong moratorium on any new hotel development, something they’d sworn was impossible just months before. Due to the pandemic that moratorium was extended until later this month.

Given that context, many locals expected whatever new rules that emerged to be more restrictive on the hotel industry. But the opposite happened. Last year city staff started presenting drafts of new rules that took away council’s power over hotels. Their presentations emphasized the supposed “benefits” of the tourism industry. Even some on council balked: when the moratorium came up for extension last year several members mentioned they were wary of giving up their hotel approval powers.

But the city’s planning department, who are pushing the new measure, ignored that. The final rules they’re proposing read like a hotelier’s dream.

The new rules remain adamant about taking control over the vast majority of new hotels away from city council entirely. The measure doesn’t even place approval in the hands of a city commission. Instead city staff will directly decide hotel approval, with some input from a handpicked design commission that’s not even directly appointed by council.

By itself, this already ensures that we’ll see a wave of new hotels. Council occasionally rejected them, not because they cared about the public welfare but because they were intimidated by public outrage. Staff have never seen a hotel they didn’t like. They bent over backwards to turn the Flatiron into one and have repeatedly pushed measures to allow more of them through.

This isn’t speculation. From 2010 to 2017 almost all hotels never went before city council. Instead top staff and the planning board (made up of architects, realtors, developers and others who directly profit from gentrification) were able to approve them directly. The result was a massive wave of hotels. That was the point.

This time around city hall is claiming things will be different. Staff’s approval powers are supposed to be limited to just a few areas of town — “just eight percent” of the city, they claim — and to require hoteliers to provide “public benefits” like a donation to the affordable housing fund or a commitment to pay a minimal wage.

In reality this does nothing to stop hotels at all. The areas of town where staff will have control include places like downtown, the river district and swaths of West Asheville. These are the spots where hoteliers want to build. The supposed benefits, as we’ll get to in a moment, are paltry, especially compared to the evils involved. There’s no amount of bribery that can compensate for the damage the hotel industry does to our community.

Why are we just hearing about this now?

City officials have intentionally rushed this through because they know the public hates it. The new rules were announced last Tuesday. They were presented to the city’s planning board the next night. The same board was supposed to hold a special public hearing on the issue at 9 a.m. last Friday (already a time when most locals couldn’t participate) but the board prohibited any public comment and just voted to send the new rules to council anyway.

That’s a massive open meetings law violation, blatant even by city hall’s miserable standards, but that’s what they did.

Who the hell is behind this hotelier-friendly crap?

The city planning department, particularly director Todd Okolichany and head planner Shannon Tuch. Okolichany was city hall’s point person on pushing through the Flatiron hotel, even though it broke many of local government’s own rules. Tuch is notoriously conservative, both in the gentrifying projects she endorses and in trying to use zoning rules to shut down local leftist and harm reduction spaces. If these new rules pass, these are the officials who will control hotel approval.

Indeed, despite the pretense that this is some balanced attempt at the public good, they’ve already let the mask slip. When the new rules were initially proposed to the planning commission last week, one board member noted approvingly that the main point of them was to provide “clarity” and predictability for out of town developers looking to build new hotels.

What’s the deal with those “public benefits”?

Under the new rules hotels are supposed to meet a threshold of points. Displacing existing homes or businesses loses points, while a variety of “public benefits” gains them. If a hotel proposal hits a certain threshold, city staff can just sign off on the hotel without it going to council.

The benefits are, however, pretty paltry. Projects that will rake in tens of millions each year would just have to make a one-time donation of a few hundred thousand to get rubber stamped. They could accrue additional points by offering bus passes, contracting with companies owned by rich white women or paying a minimal wage.

For example, even planning staff admitted during last week’s meeting that the infamous Arras hotel — a luxury monstrosity — would be able to escape a public council vote by providing just a few more donations. Also keep in mind the officials overseeing these rules are the same ones with a long record of doing hoteliers’ bidding, which means they will look for every possible loophole to let a hotel through with minimal fuss.

The very idea reeks of equity-washing, looking for ways to provide a cover to keep a damaging status quo going. There’s no donation from a hotelier that’s going to compensate for kicking locals out of their communities or turning our city into nothing more than an amusement park for the worst people on earth. The way to stop the damage of the hotel industry is to stop building them.

Could city government just stop approving hotels?

Yes, they absolutely could. You’ll hear a lot to the contrary in the coming days. It’s untrue. Council has a lot of power over development and if they don’t want something built they have a lot of ways to stop it.

In fact we already have an example of city council doing just this. In 2018 airbnbs were essentially banned throughout almost the entire city. While council didn’t technically say “you can never build an airbnb in Asheville” they did change the rules so all new airbnbs had to go before them for direct approval which, given how hated that industry is, they were never going to grant. The only airbnb proposals that have gone before council since then have all been rejected (lax enforcement against illegal airbnbs is another matter).

One excuse being peddled by city officials, and some on council, is that they could get sued for not allowing hotels. This is untrue. While they’ll point to state courts overturning council’s 2017 rejection of the Embassy Suites project, that only happened because the project came forward under older local laws that city staff had specifically written to make council rejecting a hotel practically impossible.

Later that year council changed those laws to give them direct control over hotel development. Hotel rejections since, like the de facto ban on airbnbs, haven’t faced serious legal challenges.

The only thing that’s stopping council from shutting down new hotels is that they don’t want to.

Why would city council give up power over hotels?

Council love to shift blame and responsibility so they can keep up a “progressive” veneer while pursuing right-wing policies. Privately most of them don’t care about the damage hoteliers do to our communities. Some, like Mayor Esther Manheimer (a land use attorney), Council member Sage Turner (who tried to get city hall to back her own hotel deal) and Council member Sandra Kilgore (a realtor) stand to directly profit from the industry’s growth.

While it may seem counterintuitive that government officials would ever give up power, foisting hotel decisions off on staff give them a handy excuse when locals get mad about hotels. “It’s not our fault” and “it’s out of our hands” are favorite lies from city hall. Having to directly approve hotels themselves has cost many of them a lot of political support (supporting such projects was a key reason Council member Keith Young lost re-election last year). So elected officials would love to be able to let a wave of new hotels through without taking the political hit.

Does it look like council’s going to approve this?

So far, yes, though that could change. A disturbing sign, however, was council member Kim Roney — who ran on opposing hotels — releasing a series of videos this past weekend discouraging locals from outright opposing the measure. Instead she wanted Ashevillians to call for slightly better public benefits and make it more difficult to build hotels in some parts of gentrifying Black neighborhoods. She encouraged locals to consider how to “get to ‘yes'” and painted the passage of the new hotel rules as a foregone conclusion.

To be clear, “we have to get to ‘yes'” is a coward’s excuse common among the city hall establishment. It’s why we have a bloated, racist police department, the demolition of Black neighborhoods, rampant gentrification and hotels on damn near every corner. It’s a divide and conquer tactic that lets the forces of the status quo propose something terrible and then pushes people not to do the obvious and fight to stop it, but instead accept minor concessions and let it through. Shockingly, things keep getting worse.

But history shows that council’s not invincible. Determined opposition has stopped measures like the racist gerrymander of local elections, attempts to privatize even more of downtown and the police’s push to ban busking. Hell, that kind of outrage is why there was a hotel moratorium in the first place.

Due to the state’s remote meetings laws, council’s supposed to hold the public hearing tomorrow night and a final vote Feb. 23, just before the moratorium expires.

How can we fight this?

There’s a direct demonstration in downtown this evening in opposition to the new hotel rules and city hall’s recent demolition of houseless camps. Direct action is one of the most effective tactics to fight city hall and the gentrification of our city.

If you want to comment during tomorrow night’s public hearing, here’s how to do so, though city government intentionally doesn’t make it easy and you have to sign up by 9 a.m. tomorrow.

If you’re looking to reach council members directly with less hurdles, you can always try to call them on their personal lines. Even better, coordinate with some friends to phone zap them at the same time. Council’s trying to rush this through for a reason: they know the public hates it and they’re afraid of the backlash.

Esther Manheimer (mayor) 828-231-8016

Sheneika Smith (vice mayor) 704-401-9104

Gwen Wisler 828-333-1767

Antanette Mosley 404-395-3665

Sandra Kilgore 954-540-5593

Sage Turner 828-216-9284

Kim Roney 828-450-1099

Even if council does open the floodgates on new hotels, remember that the fight is not over. As long as there are people here we will always fight the destruction of our city. There are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them, and we are stronger, braver and fighting for our homes.

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Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 15 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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