A shadowy, pro-airbnb front group for the real estate industry is bankrolling Asheville city council candidate Tod Leaven’s ad blitz. Here’s who they are and what they’re looking to get in return
Above: Mailers supporting Tod Leaven, paid for by the ‘Neighbors Helping North Carolina’ front group
It is, as y’all are all no doubt aware, campaign season. Along with federal, state and other local races there’s seven Asheville city council candidates vying for three seats. Six will advance from tomorrow’s primary to November’s general election. That means a barrage of fliers and glossy mailers hitting boxes around the city.
In municipal races these are a key part of how candidates get the word out, especially as the budgets and returns are too small to make television ads worth it.
But, as you may have noticed, one council candidate’s showing up a lot in this season’s barrage. Like many locals I’ve received no less than three mailers touting lawyer Tod Leaven’s campaign, more than for any other candidate running this year in any other race. There’s one glorifying Leaven himself (“his community roots have remained strong”), another touts vague promises to “prioritize public safety” and “upgrade roads.”
The most recent one focuses on housing, which Leaven’s campaign seems to have honed on in recent weeks in an attempt to distinguish him from the other gentry running for office. Here too things are pretty generic, with items like “expand housing access” and “support homeownership.” No actual proposal is listed.
Having covered local elections since 2005 I generally hang on to campaign fliers to see what candidates are trying to pitch and how it contrasts, nigh inevitably, with the reality of their records. But while examining Leaven’s I noticed something particularly unusual.
His campaign didn’t pay for these mailers. Not a single one.
In the upper left corner of the ads there’s a note that the mailers were purchased by Neighbors Helping North Carolina, with a Greensboro P.O. box listed.
This isn’t typical for a local race. Indeed all the other mailers I’ve received, for a wide array of local candidates, are paid for by “committee to elect [candidate]” This is pretty standard. A local candidate’s campaign gets donations and then their committee, the formal legal entity for their run for office, will purchase the mailers and other advertising.
Given the rhetoric and name, one might expect Neighbors Helping North Carolina to be a coalition of neighborhood groups or affordable housing advocates.
You’d be wrong. Very, very wrong.
The group’s official website is generic to the point of incoherence, its only art clearly stock photos. A “who we are” section just has a paragraph that reads:
“Neighbors Helping North Carolina is dedicated to ensuring we have vibrant communities in which to live, work and play. That means we want a healthy economy with plentiful opportunities in safe and sustainable communities. We support candidates for elective office who share those values and dedicate themselves to making our towns, cities and state a wonderful environment for all North Carolinians.”
No staff or board are listed. But a note at the bottom of the group’s main page says the site is paid for “with a donation from NC REALTORS.”
That too is a bit deceptive, to put it mildly. In fact Neighbors Helping North Carolina is a full-on front group for that capital letter organization, which is the trade and lobbying group for the real estate industry.
The NC Realtors’ site itself lists the expertise of Katharine Wendt, their political operations director, as including “Neighbors Helping North Carolina.”
Looking into Neighbors Helping North Carolina’s documents filed with the N.C. Secretary of State’s office, the reality is even more clear. The group’s previous name was the N.C. Homeowners Alliance and before that it was the North Carolina Property Rights Fund. Both names carry far more conservative connotations than its current one. As the populations of the state’s growing cities have steadily identified less with open conservatism over the past two decades it’s obvious why they’d change it.
The registered agent for the organization is none other than Andrea Bushnell, the CEO of NC Realtors. The group’s Greensboro address is the offices of NC Realtors.
According to Transparency USA, an organization that monitors political spending at the state level, the only two donors to the group are NC Realtors’ political action committee, which has given it $620,102 and the National Association of Realtors, which forked over $326,726.
There is, it’s safe to say, not a single neighbor in Neighbors Helping North Carolina.
This, theydies and gentlethems, is what a dark money front group looks like. These organizations can basically act on behalf of a campaign — doing things like buying ads to massively expand their reach — without facing the same scrutiny. Campaign committees have to more extensively account for spending and donations and make that information available through reports filed at state and county elections websites. Industry groups like NC Realtors are limited to pushing for policies rather than backing individual candidates.
But “Neighbors Helping North Carolina” doesn’t face the same constraints, even though it’s run by the exact same people.
So the obvious question is: what does the real estate lobby hope to get out of Tod Leaven?
On the NC Realtors lobbying page, dubbed “Issues mobilization,” our area features pretty prominently. One of their three featured “success stories” is the Land of Sky Association of Realtors’ push for even looser regulations on airbnbs in an area already utterly overrun with them.
“Land of Sky Association of REALTORS Dispels Common Misconceptions About Short Term Rentals Through Data-Driven Public Awareness Campaign” the headline blares.
The text below reads:
“This board serving three counties in western North Carolina is educating consumers on the key findings from recent studies that demonstrate not only the economic benefits of STRs within a community, but also that STRs are not to blame for housing shortages and affordability issues.”
This is, to put it mildly, ludicrous, like “smoking is good for your lungs” level absurd. Airbnbs have absolutely devoured housing in Asheville. At this point nearly 3,000 whole homes/apartments in the city and its immediate outskirts, according to the monitoring site Inside Airbnb, have been turned over to tourists. That means locals no longer live there. Not coincidentally housing costs have skyrocketed.
Indeed research clearly tying airbnbs to higher housings costs comes even from such radical sources as the Harvard Business Review and the Economic Policy Institute.
Asheville’s steep cost of living is a growing danger for the vast majority of the people living here. But one of the few groups that benefits is, well, realtors. The more property values go up, the harder it is for working class locals to afford them, the more money they make. Realtors can get a higher price for an airbnb than they can for a house that locals will actually live in, because it stands to make a property owner more money. Indeed they will literally advertise properties based on this.
So when they’re backing a local candidate this hard it’s worth looking into what they think they’ll get.
In December 2021 Asheville city council voted to basically let airbnb landlords rewrite the rules, adding multiple loopholes to their already notoriously lax enforcement. The result was, predictably, a surge in local households driven out to turn more homes and apartments over to tourists.
But the industry is so widely hated that other governments across the area, like Woodfin and Buncombe County, are pushing towards more restrictions, not less. City hall’s utter failure to enforce its airbnb rules is finally getting attention even from establishment media like the Asheville Citizen-Times.
So it’s entirely possible that growing public outrage will, as it did in 2018 when new airbnbs were de facto banned throughout most of the city, swing things in Asheville back towards finally reining the industry in. Actually curbing airbnbs would spur real drops in rents and housing prices, and that would mean less profit for those NC Realtors serves.
While the political views of individual realtors may vary, as an industry they lean incredibly conservative for those very reasons. The real estate industry stands to gain from all the forces making everyone else’s lives hell.
Indeed realtors have frequently shown up in Asheville’s local politics at its most far-right extremes, pushing for crackdowns on the poor, mutual aid and local activists. In 2021, for example, three far-right speakers demanded the resignation of council member Kim Roney for mild criticism of the police department. Two were wealthy realtors and the third a real estate lawyer. Most of them didn’t even live in Asheville. One explicitly said she wanted more poor people arrested because their existence scared the wealthy investors and transplants she was trying to sell properties to.
In this it seems they’ll have a ready ally in Leaven. While the mailers may be vague his campaign website is a bit less so. Under “public safety” there’s a photo of a police officer, alongside “security” a bank of surveillance cameras. Text under the latter image emphasizes “safeguarding our economic stability.” In a town where the police regularly carry out “special operations” to round up poor people for sleeping and asking for aid, it’s not hard to see where this is going.
Photos from a recent Asheville Police Department event at Mayfel’s feature Leaven standing arm in arm with newly-appointed chief Mike Lamb, known for falsely blaming the homeless for violent crime and pushing trumped-up “felony littering” charges to punish protesters and mutual aid volunteers. That latter was so absurd even the city’s own solid waste manager said the APD wasn’t telling the truth. Incidentally the restaurant is owned by Sherrye Coggiola, a realtor who’s also Leaven’s largest individual donor.
Leaven and APD chief Mike Lamb, from a larger photo published by the Asheville Police Department
In candidate forums he’s even asserted, with blithe cruelty, that providing the homeless with housing and basic services is “enabling” them. He’s an enthusiastic supporter of the Chamber of Commerce’s push for a downtown Business Improvement District, a proposal that would levy a tax on the whole neighborhood and give it to small cartel of wealthy property owners to fund their own private security force. Across the country BIDs have resulted in widespread harassment of the homeless and other marginalized communities (or any local the wealthy don’t like) while pushing out small businesses in favor of larger corporations.
So it’s not a surprise the real estate lobby is bankrolling Leaven, nor that they feel the need to do so through a shadowy front group. Loss, for the rest of us, is literally their gain.
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Blade editor David Forbes is an Asheville journalist with over 18 years experience. 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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