Public Comment for Asheville Planning and Zoning Commission
The following is Asheville For All’s public comment letter to Asheville’s Planning and Zoning Commission, ahead of its January 22nd meeting.
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Dear Commissioners,
Asheville For All is excited about three proposed UDO revisions on the January 22nd City of Asheville Planning and Zoning Commission agenda. At the same time, we have some real concerns about some of the details.
Commercial Districts
This is a welcome, common sense set of changes that we hope will spur more mixed-use and residential development on our commercial corridors, particularly those corridors that are closer to the city’s center, near jobs, schools, and amenities. Undoubtedly, the other two UDO changes need to be approved as well for this one to be effective.
Parking Mandates
Again, we are hopeful that eliminating costly parking mandates will work in concert with the other proposed revisions to spur more housing in high-demand, high-amenity parts of the city. To quote the Parking Reform Network, parking mandates are a “pseudo-science” and are a relic of mid-twentieth century, car-centric thinking. We will be glad to see them gone from our commercial corridors.
We believe that it is a truly missed opportunity, however, not to include all residential neighborhoods. The 2023 Asheville Missing Middle Housing Study and Displacement Risk Assessment recommended serious parking reform in our core residential neighborhoods. So did last year’s Affordable Housing Plan.
We hope that the Commission will again vote to eliminate all residential parking mandates, as it did last year. It is well-known that parking mandates prevent housing from being built where it is most needed, particularly more attainable forms of housing. By keeping Asheville’s high wealth residential neighborhoods off limits to more infill, this UDO amendment as it is written today appears to endorse socioeconomic segregation—keeping the status quo for “the neighborhoods” while limiting options for struggling families to large developments on busy corridors ONLY.
Cities from Ann Arbor to Anchorage, Alaska, to Austin, Texas, to Birmingham, Alabama, have all completely eliminated their parking mandates. Durham did it too. The world has not ended for any of these cities. In Minneapolis, comprehensive parking mandate elimination has been credited for the primary reason that rents have decreased. Anchorage, Alaska appears to be already seeing benefits too.
A blanket elimination would have the added benefit of reducing the length of our already complicated UDO.
One final aside: we noticed that the Urban Place Form District (aka “Urban centers”) is not targeted for parking reform. This would leave all of South Tunnel Road, for example, with parking minimums, and this an area where urban style development is certainly desired. We understand there may be a complex reason for this omission; the Urban Place Form code includes incentives for shared parking, for example. But this omission may be another illustration of why simple elimination of costly parking mandates might prove to simplify the UDO.
Zoning Thresholds
These thresholds are a redundancy, in the sense that they attempt to restrict further what our individual districts already restrict. So we strongly support putting residential thresholds on the same terms as other uses, using square footage rather than home count. And moving to a 100,000/150,000 square feet “baseline” is a big step forward.
We do have reservations about the terms by which new projects can receive standardized approvals above those baselines.
Asheville For All supports housing policies that will increase housing affordability for all kinds of working people and their families. But studies from Pittsburgh to Seattle have shown that these kinds of unfunded mandates, while perhaps well-intentioned, lead to unintended consequences more often than not.
Consider, for example, what might happen if the federal government decided to make grocers pay for the cost of food stamps. We would likely end up with fewer grocers in business, and higher grocery costs.
Because mandates for below-market-rate homes increase the costs of development, studies show that they decrease the rate of new home construction in the places where it is most feasible and more desirable. As a result, these policies can hamper housing supply and lead to more sprawl. (We already see a surprising percentage of new multifamily housing being built outside of the city, where burdens are less.) In the end, as studies suggest, it is renters at all income levels that ultimately pay for the costs of these unfunded mandates.
We continue to advocate for a return of the Land Use Incentive Grant (LUIG), which would have wealthy property owners subsidize the cost of below-market-rate homes, rather than having renters pay more. (Last September’s Affordable Housing Plan also endorsed a return of the LUIG.) Even a mandatory version of the LUIG would almost certainly produce better results. (Portland, Oregon is now experimenting with a mandatory, subsidized “affordability” mandate after seeing its unfunded mandates produce undesirable results.)
Certainly in the current high interest rate environment, there is a real risk to imposing what is effectively a tax on new construction. We freely admit that every city is different, but most studies where unfunded mandates have been implemented have shown that the unintended consequences of such programs compound when they demand more than five or ten percent of homes to be rented at below-market rates. Therefore, at the least, we suggest that the following revisions be considered:
| Residential (Non-Mixed Use) Table | ||
| Square Foot max | Staff Proposed Mandate | Asheville For All Proposed Revision |
| 100,000 | no mandate (baseline) | no revision |
| 150,000 | 5% at 80%AMI or 2% at 60%AMI | no revision |
| 200,000 | 10% at 80%AMI or 5% at 60%AMI | 5% at 80%AMI or 2% at 60%AMI |
| 250,000 | 15% at 80%AMI or 7% at 60%AMI | 10% at 80%AMI or 5% at 60%AMI |
| 300,000 | 20% at 80%AMI or 10% at 60%AMI | 10% at 80%AMI or 5% at 60%AMI |
| Mixed Use Table (30-80% Residential) | ||
| Square Foot max | Staff Proposed Mandate | Asheville For All Proposed Revision |
| 150,000 | no mandate (baseline) | no revision |
| 200,000 | 5% at 80%AMI or 2% at 60%AMI | no revision |
| 250,000 | 10% at 80%AMI or 5% at 60%AMI | 5% at 80%AMI or 2% at 60%AMI |
| 300,000 | 15% at 80%AMI or 7% at 60%AMI | 10% at 80%AMI or 5% at 60%AMI |
| 350,000 | 20% at 80%AMI or 10% at 60%AMI | 10% at 80%AMI or 5% at 60%AMI |
It is certainly likely that conditional zoning hearings will still happen for a good percentage of larger developments, for reasons that may or may not have to do with developers being unable to meet the unfunded mandates should they be imposed. We do fear that with these mandates in place, it will have the effect of imposing a kind of bar of expectations that will influence City Council’s decisions, and these new expectations could result in reasonable developments being denied approval where they would have been approved by the council previously—even though these mandates are not meant to apply to projects that go before the council.
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We greatly appreciate the work that the Planning and Urban Design Department has put into crafting these UDO revisions. We understand that they are operating under constraints. Finally, we are grateful to Asheville’s Planning and Zoning Commission for once again hearing and considering UDO changes that have the potential to aid in curbing housing costs for Asheville residents.