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For housing abundance and diverse, livable communities in Asheville

Tell City Council to Vote YES on ALL FIVE Pro-Housing Measures on February 11th, for a Little More Housing Everywhere in Asheville

We sent the letter below to Asheville City Council on February 10th.

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Three images are shown: one shows small, detached houses; one shows a street lined with three-story, mixed-use buildings; and one shows a street with two-story townhomes.
Some working people want to live on a commercial corridor. Others might prefer a cottage court. Adding a little more housing everywhere in Asheville means that everyone that works, lives, and goes to school in Asheville can better find and afford a home. Image sources: City of Asheville “Missing Middle Housing Study and Displacement Risk Assessment” p. 13; City of Asheville “Urban Centers”; City of Asheville “Haywood Road Form District”, p. 1.

One Night; Five Votes

A package of pro-housing reforms is getting a hearing in front of Asheville City Council this month. We need YOU to let City Council that they need to vote YES.

The five reforms on the agenda for February 11th all update the city’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO)—its zoning code—in different ways:

Commercial Corridor Reforms

1. COMMERCIAL ZONING AMENDMENT: This promotes more multifamily housing and mixed-use buildings on the city’s transit-supportive corridors. It also incentives pedestrian-friendly design.
2. PARKING MINIMUM REFORM: This eliminates costly parking mandates in most commercial corridors. New apartments and businesses can choose to have fewer parking spots, making space for more attainable housing.
3. ZONING THRESHOLD REFORM: This makes permit approvals faster and more consistent for residential and mixed-use multifamily buildings that meet the UDO’s requirements. It also enables faster permitting for larger developments if they include below-market-rate homes.

Residential Neighborhood Reforms

4. COTTAGE COURT REFORM: This will legalize more kinds of “cottage courts homes,” which are small homes that share a common yard.
5. FLAG LOT REFORM: This will make it easier to add homes in back of other homes on smaller lots.

(For more details on the first three items, you can read Asheville For All’s recap of the January Asheville Planning and Zoning Commission meeting. For more on flag lots, you can check out this blog post from 2023.)

Open Letter to Asheville City Council

Dear City Council,

We urge you to pass all five pro-housing-infill UDO amendments on February 11th. Added up together, these modest revisions will allow a little more housing to be built everywhere in the city, and will especially promote more infill in the most high-demand, high-amenity neighborhoods and corridors.

Unlocking the ability to build a little more housing everywhere is a key to promoting equitable growth, preventing displacement, and lowering housing costs for all kinds of working people and their families.

We know that simply targeting one kind of neighborhood or corridor for growth, while freezing most of the city for the status quo, simply doesn’t deliver the benefits we need. In the past, so-called “opportunity zones” have resulted in displacement and speculation. And the “grand bargains” that keep wealthy residential neighborhoods off limits to growth have only promoted segregation, sprawl, and “opportunity hoarding.”1

On the other hand, allowing for infill broadly, and including high-amenity, high-demand areas, is the best proven way to combat the housing shortage.2

It is fortunate—and a testament to the city staff’s efforts—that these five UDO amendments have landed on a single City Council agenda. Taken together, they will bring us one step closer to a more equitable housing market and a more livable city.

* * *

Added together, these five new UDO revisions will:

* * *

The combination of all five of these amendments is essential. Parking reform unlocks the potential for the commercial zoning code changes to have an impact, for example. And the anti-displacement attributes of the threshold reform, as well as the broad nature of all five reforms taken together, means that the modest proposed changes to residential neighborhoods—though they were never likely to exacerbate displacement—are even more of a sure thing.3 On the other hand, small lot and missing-middle-related reforms for residential neighborhoods are likely to open up more ownership options and opportunities for a wider variety of working families than commercial corridor reform will alone.

After the passage of these five UDO amendments, there will still be work to do. More missing-middle-related reforms must come as quick as possible for Ashevilleans of ALL kinds of working backgrounds to be able to find and afford housing in the city. And as recommended by the September 2024 Affordable Housing Plan, the city must restore the Land Use Incentive Grant (LUIG) in order to make the development of more below-market-rent homes more viable without putting the cost of such homes on the backs of renters.4

But these five amendments are a big step in the right direction. We will be excited to see the enormous work of city staff, the Planning and Zoning Commission, and City Council on this matter reach a positive outcome on February 11th.

Thank you again for all that you do,
Asheville For All Lead Organizers

  1. Funnily, the phrase “grand bargain,” a way to describe typical exclusionary land use policy, was used recently in an unlikely pair of places: the left-wing Jacobin magazine, and the more ecumenical Strong Towns. Both sources point to the problems with upzoning corridors and/or relegating high density growth to urban peripheries without addressing “missing middle” and small lot infill reforms for residential neighborhoods. Richard Reeves coined the phrase "opportunity hoarding" to describe exclusionary land use policies. ↩︎

  2. Asheville’s 2023 Missing Middle Housing Study’s Displacement Risk Assessment, p. 97, stresses the case for broad upzoning as an anti-displacement measure. See also: Shane Phillips, Building Up the Zoning Buffer; Daniel Herriges, “What Would Mass Upzoning Actually Do to Property Values?”; Vicki Been et al., “Supply Skepticism Revisited,” pp. 37-42, 44; Simon Büchler and Elena Lutz, “Making Housing Affordable? The Local Effects of Relaxing Land-Use Regulation,” pp. 9-10. ↩︎

  3. Raising the topics of displacement and gentrification often conjures boogeymen, and we acknowledge that these boogeymen can constitute real political obstacles for city leaders. But the most up-to-date research on these topics is clear: broadly implemented “missing middle” and small lot reforms do not exacerbate displacement, and all of Asheville’s own studies on this topic recommend broad “missing middle” reforms as a means to combat displacement and strengthen vulnerable neighborhoods. ↩︎

  4. To understand why we believe that the cost of below-market-rate homes should be borne by programs such as LUIG, please see our recent comment to the Asheville Planning and Zoning Commission, wherein we cite some research from other cities on this subject. ↩︎

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