City hall tries to sneak through a new measure, written by airbnb landlords, to bring in even more airbnbs and kick locals out on the street
Graphic by Orion Solstice
Tomorrow, Dec. 14, sees the last Asheville city council meeting of the year. It’s bad, even by the standards of these increasingly right-wing officials. On the agenda there’s three items pouring more resources (recruitment pr, body armor and overtime) towards the racist police department as well as city government’s vote on suddenly scrapping plans for a long-promised emergency shelter in favor of a shady land deal.
And then there’s the measure that will open the gates to airbnbs kicking out even more locals.
That last one’s gotten a lot less attention, because it’s buried in layers of planning jargon. But that’s what it does. If that measure, “to update definitions and regulations related to homestays,” passes, Asheville’s often shaky ban on whole home/apartment airbnbs will basically be dead. That means more people — a lot more — will get evicted or priced out of town.
So here’s a quick primer on how this is really bad and needs to be stopped.
Wait, I thought airbnbs were banned in Asheville? Does this revoke that?
Yes, since 2018 — when public anger finally pushed a reluctant council to act — new whole home/apartment airbnbs are banned in Asheville. Technically city council can approve individual exceptions to that, but they never have. The ban, as we’ll get to in a moment, has far too many loopholes and lax enforcement, but it does put some brake on just wholesale evicting entire streets to make more airbnbs.
Notably this measure doesn’t openly repeal that — because doing so would set off a firestorm of opposition — it instead seeks to sneak in a major way around it.
Asheville’s ban prohibits “short term rentals” (whole homes/apartment airbnbs) but allows “homestays” — supposedly guest rooms rented out by a resident that lives on site — with city permits. Plenty of whole home/apartment airbnbs sneak in under this provision. Airbnb landlords will pull tricks like hiring someone to pretend to be a resident or just claiming each airbnb is actually their primary residence.
Sometimes city officials are just incredibly lax about enforcement: a 2016 Blade investigation into the then-metastasizing industry found cases of homestay permits going to seemingly obvious whole home/apartment airbnbs. National figures estimate 92 percent of Airbnbs are whole home/apartment, probably higher in tourism hubs like Asheville. It’s likely a lot, even most, of the 725 homestays permitted by city officials aren’t just guest rooms.
While homestays are supposed to just be an extra room, maybe with a bathroom nearby, the new measure allows them to include a kitchen too. Of course a living/sleeping space, a bathroom and a kitchen is a housing unit. So with the new rule changes a lot of apartments could legally be converted into “homestays” overnight.
The measure includes some minor regulatory requirements to supposedly tighten up some of the existing homestay loopholes by requiring more documentation about who lives on the property. But that’s largely window dressing. With the kitchen provision the airbnb ban would be basically dead, and a lot of locals will be kicked out on the street to make room for (what else?) yet more drunk tourists.
A 2016 Blade map showing some of the whole home/apartment airbnbs caught by the city. Now there are far, far more
Who the hell wrote this?
City staff, technically. But even their own documents admit it was the Homestay Network, an association of airbnb landlords, who played a major role in crafting this measure.
Yes, that means airbnb landlords who stand to profit from more airbnbs just wrote new rules allowing…more airbnbs. Anywhere outside city hall this would probably be considered blatant corruption, but for Asheville government it’s “work with community representatives.” Naturally, by community they mean “rich people.”
There’s more. City staff’s own memo is blunt that the purpose of the measure is to help wealthy property owners, that the new measure “supports the tourism economy” and allows them “the greatest flexibility to move between short-term lodging and long-term living with the least amount of disruption.”
It takes a particular lack of humanity to look around at all the desperation in our city and think “you know who needs more help? The tourism industry. They’ve only been raking in record profits while hundreds of locals dropped dead of disease.”
This seems like it would hurt a lot of people…
Oh yeah. It will especially allow apartments near the core of the city to be turned into airbnbs en masse. Neighborhoods like Five Points, East End and parts of Southside, already under serious pressure from gentrification, would see a lot of devastation from this.
Airbnb already devours more of the housing supply here than it does in any other American city. Most people in Asheville don’t own a single home, let alone the multiple properties the vast majority of airbnb landlords do. Underneath vague talk of flexibility and “mobility” (for the rich to get richer) is the hard reality of people being evicted, getting kicked out on the street or pushed out of their communities all so tourists can have another party spot.
Does city staff just sit around and do this?
Yes. While supposedly neutral — just applying rules and suggesting changes — city hall bureaucrats pretty openly side with the hotel and airbnb industry. Not shockingly it’s not uncommon for local government planning staff to go on to lucrative consulting careers for exactly these kind of businesses.
In 2017, when rewriting hotel regulations, staff tried to sneak in a rule shift that would have allowed airbnbs throughout the city. Council balked when that fact went public. In 2019 planning staff let the Flatiron hotel developers openly flout the city’s own rules and infrastructure requirements.
Here, once again, staff broke their own rules to bring this forward. In 2020 these “homestay” measures came before council’s planning and economic development committee. The committee couldn’t agree on the measure allowing homestays to have kitchens. Normally that would stop a policy from advancing to the full council. But city staff ignored that and brought it back anyway.
How do we fight this?
City hall is trying to sneak it through for a reason. Airbnb is a deeply despised industry in this town, to the extent that it’s not uncommon for landlords running them to tell tourists to hide the fact they’re staying in them because of the backlash they’ll get. The more the public is aware of this measure, the steeper odds it faces. City officials have tried to sneak this through several times this year and have pulled it at the last minute repeatedly.
While far more is needed, making city council’s proceedings on this as miserable for officials is possible can have an effect. This is public hearing B on council’s agenda. You can sign up to speak any time before 9 a.m. tomorrow. More information here. You can sign up the speak on multiple items, so consider also signing up for the consent agenda (to oppose more resources for cops) and for Unfinished Business A (to oppose scrapping the shelter).
Failing that, you can always call council members directly. They’re particularly vulnerable on this issue:
Mayor Esther Manheimer 828-231-8016
Vice mayor Sheneika Smith 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
But remember that these fights don’t begin or end with a single meeting. Airbnb landlords are a predatory group that’s hurting countless people in our town just because they want to get even wealthier. If they had a shred of conscience they wouldn’t be in this business.
Anything that makes the operation of their businesses more painful, that makes running an airbnb more miserable than before, increases the likelihood that some of them decide it’s not worth it and stop their part in openly selling the city off to tourists.
Airbnb is a cancer. Anything that stops them is good. Any tactic that works to that end is justified. The same goes for all fights against this city’s gentrifying status quo. Our lives and communities are at stake; we have every right to defend them any way we see fit.
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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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