The cracked pedestal

by David Forbes October 20, 2014

From the Atlantic to Salon, national media and urbanists celebrate Asheville as an example — and draw all the wrong lessons

Above: Fireworks over downtown Asheville. Photo by Bill Rhodes.

Periodically, the national media will rediscover Asheville. Most commonly this consists in the jet set finding out that we have good food, beer and a drum circle. But there’s another brand too, one that might have a bit more impact: writers holding up our city’s core as an example for others of a way forward.

A case in point is a Salon piece by Charles Montgomery, excerpted from his book Happy City. While entitled “Wal-Mart: an economic cancer on our cities” (an overall point I agree with), it’s mostly devoted to Asheville as a counter-example to the big-box style of development of the hated mega-corp and the “blast radius of lower wages and higher poverty” it produces. 

As the subhead declares: “In Asheville, N.C., a dense downtown generated jobs and tax revenue and restored the city’s soul.”

This isn’t the first time this narrative showed up either. A few years ago, the Atlantic’s city blog featured a similar piece extolling the same model.

For a town bent around tourism, it’s not surprising that Asheville’s really, really good at first impressions, including on policy types looking for a quick, easy solution to the complicated problems facing cities today. For those understandably frustrated with big box sprawl, it’s an appealing myth.

But if people want to embrace our downtown as an example for rewriting cities across the country, they damn well need to start paying attention to the bigger picture, because this particular pedestal is not exactly in the best of shape.

Montgomery’s piece exults:

Retail sales in the resurgent downtown have exploded since 1991. So has the taxable value of downtown properties, which cost a fraction to service than sprawl lands. The reborn downtown has become the greatest supplier of tax revenue and affordable housing in the county—partly because it relieves people of the burden of commuting, and partly because it mixes high-end lofts with modest apartments. All of this, while growing what one local newspaper emotionally described as, “a downtown that—after decades of doubt and neglect—is once again the heart and soul of Asheville.”

There are some major blind spots here.

Affordable? Earlier this year we made a list of the most unaffordable places in the country. The housing situation is so bad here that even the local government’s regularly calling it a crisis.

As for the vaunted tax revenue, our city still regularly faces budget crunches and has major issues dealing with aging infrastructure and how to allocate limited resources.

Nor is Asheville particularly dense; spots like downtown and the core of West Asheville just give that impression. Crunch the latest population numbers and you’ll find that out of 18 cities in North Carolina with a population over 50,000, we rank 10th in density, well behind cities like Charlotte and Wilmington that are usually thought of as exemplars of sprawl. The fact is, Asheville has yet to embrace density — let alone affordable housing — in any serious way.

As for jobs here, many of them don’t pay that much better than Wal-Mart. The Asheville area lags badly behind in wages, even compared to other places in North Carolina. Despite a well-educated workforce, workers here take home about $400 less a month than the state average. Our economy is heavily reliant on the food service industry, especially downtown, and its workers make a median wage of $9.07 an hour. That drops even lower when one takes some of the more highly-paid professionals like chefs and managers out of the equation. With tips, waiters here bring in $8.86 an hour, bartenders $8.73. Over in the retail field, cashiers make $8.85 an hour and retail sales associates manage a whole $10.49.

For context, our area’s living wage — the minimum required to make some kind of life in Asheville — is $10.35 an hour with health benefits or $11.85 without.

As for our civic culture or soul, the rising costs mean artists and other creative types are increasingly pushed farther out, into locations that have major issues. On the political side our voter turnout’s brutally anemic in local elections, rarely breaking 15-20 percent.

And that’s before we even start to tackle the brutal history that leaves us an incredibly segregated city.

I live in downtown, the neighborhood that’s getting held up on this pedestal, and I’m fortunate enough to live in one of those success stories: a renovated building that holds businesses as well as apartments and has, miraculously, maintained some level of affordability. While that’s great, it’s an exception; most of the new development in the neighborhood these days are hotels, and I’ve seen entire streets turn from affordable housing into vacation rentals.

While there’s plenty of economic growth, many of the people living here are seeing precious little of it. The fact that the profits are going to business owners and the wealthy a little closer to home, rather than the Walton family, is probably cold comfort to Ashevillians that can’t pay their rent.

So yes, the revival of downtown was a real achievement. But one success doesn’t make a city and Asheville’s story, for better or worse, didn’t end in the early 2000s.

Holding the “new Asheville approach” as Montgomery puts it, up as an example without knowing the larger story and its far more uncomfortable lessons will lead to some real problems. While they might not be toiling in Wal-Mart many, many workers in both chain and local businesses here still face poverty wages, a lack of benefits, few protections, skyrocketing rents, increasing sprawl and an uncertain future.

There are lessons here, and a big one is that a city’s success depends not on a miracle of design but on a real hope of a better future for most of the people living there. That’s something that requires action on many fronts and solutions coming from many different populations, and some necessary conflicts that aren’t going to be easy or comfortable.

While that’s not exactly what those seeking quick-hit TED-type bromides want to hear, it has the benefit of being the truth.

Just for starters, that would mean a push for affordable housing in every neighborhood, real confrontation with segregation, a politically-engaged population, more unions and a ferocious attack on low wages. If that sounds impossible remember that not that long ago people also said downtown would always be abandoned.

If Asheville can stop playing “remember the 90s,” if we can believe that our best days are ahead, if we can pull off the hard work mentioned above, then we actually can be an example. These problems exist elsewhere too, and it would be our city’s finest hour if some real solutions started here.

And if the national media want to profile our home, a little more honesty wouldn’t hurt them either. This story — and the real lessons it imparts — isn’t ours alone.

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