Send a Pro-Housing Message on THREE Proposed Asheville Policies

The City of Asheville is weighing three pro-housing reforms this January and is asking for input from people like you!

We’ve developed a guide so that you can easily complete the city’s survey in less than ten minutes.

Getting Started

ACTION: Turn Off Your VPN

If you have a VPN, or use a similar feature such as Apple’s “private relay,” turn it off! That way, your survey response will register as being from the right area.

ACTION: Open the Survey

The city’s survey can be found here. It should open up in a separate tab or window.

As you scroll down, you’ll find the three different topics on which you can provide feedback.

PART I: “Amendment to the Site Plan Review Thresholds for Development”

INFO: What’s It All About?

Asheville’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) (aka its zoning and development code) has a funny quirk. Even if a site is zoned for a good number of apartments—let’s say it’s on a major commercial corridor, like Sweeten Creek Road or Patton Avenue—newly proposed buildings aren’t immediately eligible for permits, even when those proposals are fully compatible with all of the city’s rules and regulations.

That’s because we have “zoning thresholds.” Right now, if any building or group of buildings is proposed with fifty homes or more, they need to get approved by City Council. This unnecessary process means that new buildings are costlier and they take longer to build. It also means that because of the nuisance, many projects won’t even be proposed at all.

The newly proposed reform does a number of things, but here are the highlights:

First, it raises the threshold in most cases to up to 100,000 square feet of floor space. (The code will no longer base the threshold on the number of homes in a development. Using square feet makes more sense and is more consistent with other rules in the UDO.)

Second, it states that even if a residential (or “mixed-use”) project is more than 100,000 square feet, there is an additional way that developers can avoid the process of going to City Council. (The proposal must of course still adhere to all of the rules and regulations of the zoning code.) The way they can do it is by setting aside a certain percentage of the homes to be built as income-restricted, with below-market rents.

INFO: What’s Asheville For All’s Take?

We’re going to break this one up into two parts.

First, switching from a threshold of forty-nine homes to one based on 100,000 square feet is undeniably good. (You can read more about our support for this policy change here.)

The second part is trickier. While we advocate for policies that will make Asheville more affordable for all kinds of working people and their families, we are concerned that tying a faster and more consistent permitting process to unfunded mandates for “affordability” will have unintended consequences.

The city is effectively saying that homebuilders are going to be responsible for solving the city’s affordability crisis. Now, whatever you think about developers, this just doesn’t make much sense. It’s like asking a grocer to fund the food stamps program out of their own pocket.

In city after city after city, these unfunded mandates—sometimes they go by euphemistic names like “value capture” or “inclusionary zoning”—have proven to be either ineffective or even detrimental to the twin goals of increasing overall housing supply and encouraging socioeconomic diversity.

Recent studies in Portland, Seattle, and Pittsburgh, among other cities, have shown that these policies actually discourage builders from building where we need more homes, and encourage them to build elsewhere. (In Asheville, we already see too little homebuilding inside city limits and relatively more outside of it, because of the city’s less than hospitable infill policies.) In Los Angeles, a very well-esteemed researcher has shown that because these schemes raise the cost of infill home construction and prevent projects from being built, thus making housing shortages worse, the ultimate cost of unfunded mandates for below-market-rate homes is borne by renters of all income classes.

Every city’s housing market is different, but most research across the country shows that the unintended consequences of these unfunded mandates get increasingly worse above mandates of five or ten percent. For this reason, Asheville For All is suggesting to Asheville’s Planning and Zoning Commission and City Council that the proposed unfunded requirements for below-market-rents be effectively halved.

(You can see a detailed chart of our recommendations here.)

As an aside, we continue to advocate for a restoration of Asheville’s Land Use Incentive Grant (LUIG), which up until a year ago, was a mechanism for creating more below-market-rate homes that did not put the financial burden for doing so on renters.

ACTION: How to Fill Out the Survey

Whew! This one might seem complicated but you can still let your voice be heard on it.

If you haven’t already, click on the first “ENGAGE” button from the link that you opened above. This will take you to the “Amendment to the Site Plan Review Thresholds for Development” page.

Scroll down to the input field where you can provide feedback. Consider the following to cut-and-paste, or to modify as you like:

• Raising the baselines for residential projects that otherwise meet zoning code requirements makes a great deal of sense—we need more housing in the city and fast! Won’t requiring below-market-rates (without any funding for it) compete with the goal of getting more infill where it is already zoned for it?
• Asheville needs more housing options on corridors and commercial nodes, and raising the baseline to 100,000 square feet is a great step in the right direction. Encouraging mixed use is great too. On the other hand, I’m worried that putting the burden for “affordability” on developers will backfire, just as it has done in cities from Portland to Pittsburgh. Have you considered using the Land Use Incentive Grant (LUIG) or similar program to fund affordability? Let’s not let wealthy landowners off the hook.
• Generic, city-wide thresholds are so strange. It only makes sense to allow “by-right” permitting when a plan to build housing meets all of the site’s zoning district’s specific requirements. Given that the city has a desperate housing shortage for all kinds of working people, and the vast majority of working people live in market-rate housing, is the city concerned that putting the burden for below-market-rate homes on the builders might cause unintended consequences—that is, reduced construction in areas targeted for more housing—that end up hurting renters the most?

(Don’t sweat it if you’re repeating what someone else has said. There is value in repetition!)

PART II: “Amendment to Residential Parking Requirements”

INFO: What’s It All About?

Parking reform is something of a hot topic. (NPR did a good summary of the issue a year ago.)

In short, for roughly three quarters of a century, cities across the United States have required new buildings to include parking spaces, and the rules by which they do so tend to be very rigid. Because of this, many of our favorite places in cities to walk around—this includes residential and commercial spaces—couldn’t be built today. Consider West Asheville, and those old brick buildings where the Westville Pub and Orbit Video and the West End Bakery are. These lots could not be developed today—believe or not—because they don’t have room for big parking lots.

Costly parking mandates have huge impacts on housing supply and diversity of housing types. They limit the development of walkable neighborhoods and the amount of housing that such neighborhoods can hold by essentially requiring that buildings be spread out from one another to accommodate parking spaces that they may not need. They prevent apartment buildings from being built on sites that can’t fit large parking lots. And they guarantee that when such buildings are built, even when in walkable neighborhoods, that those who don’t drive will still be effectively subsidizing the cost of those parking spaces that had to be built.

(We had more to say about costly parking mandates here.)

So what does the code revision from the city under consideration actually do?

The current proposal will eliminate just about all costly parking mandates in commercial districts. (It keeps some requirements in place, for places like churches and schools.) Think of roads, like Patton Ave., Merrimon Ave., and Haywood Rd., as well as bigger corridors like Smokey Park Highway and Sweeten Creek Rd.

The revision does not, oddly enough, touch the parking requirements in place for residential neighborhoods like West Asheville. For what it’s worth, Asheville’s Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously requested that city staff consider eliminating all residential parking mandates last summer.

INFO: What’s Asheville For All’s Take?

While Asheville For All supports any efforts to eliminate costly parking mandates, we are really disappointed—and somewhat perplexed—that city staff has chosen to ignore the Planning and Zoning Commission, as well as Asheville’s 2023 Missing Middle Housing Study which makes a strong case for reforming or eliminating parking requirements in our residential neighborhoods.

In the past few years, an overwhelming number of cities across the United States have eliminated all of their costly parking mandates. This includes cities as southern as Birmingham, Alabama; as northern as Anchorage, Alaska; as sprawled out and car dependent as Austin, Texas; and towns as small as Hanover, New Hampshire. Even Durham has done it.

There’s simply no reason, especially when one of the city’s stated goals is making our UDO (the zoning code) simpler and more readable, not to keep it simple and remove parking requirements altogether.

We believe that excluding residential neighborhoods from modest, common-sense reforms such as eliminating parking mandates amounts to a defense of socioeconomic segregation, and is a missed opportunity for allowing more housing infill and thus more housing options in all of our core, high-opportunity neighborhoods.

ACTION: How to Fill Out the Survey

From the main page that lists the three pro-housing reforms under consideration, now click the second “ENGAGE” button. This will take you to the “Amendment to Residential Parking Requirements” page.

Scroll down to the input field where you can provide feedback. Consider the following to cut-and-paste, or to modify as you like:

• Costly parking mandates are based on pseudo-science, and have resulted in sprawl and high housing costs. Why not eliminate them entirely? This revision seems to go out of its way to maintain parking mandates in our residential neighborhoods, even the core ones, and this runs counter to the suggestions in the 2023 Asheville Missing Middle Housing Study.
• Parking mandates run counter to every one of the city’s goals as stated in the comprehensive plan. They prevent infill housing, make transit less viable by requiring parking lots between everything and limiting density. And they make the nearly one-tenth of Asheville households that lack cars bear the cost of parking. Why are residential zones not included when the Planning and Zoning Commission has suggested that we eliminate residential parking mandates citywide?
• While any change to costly parking mandates is welcome, this amendment really feels like fiddling while the planet is burning. Transportation accounts for the city’s greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions. We need to do all we can to make alternative forms of transportation more viable, and we can do so AND bring down housing costs by eliminating parking mandates entirely. Why is the city promoting continued residential segregation by keeping residential parking mandates in place?

(Again, don’t sweat it if you’re repeating what someone else has said. There is value in repetition!)

PART III: “Amendment to Commercial Zoning District Standards”

INFO: What’s It All About?

Much of the city’s new multifamily housing stock has been developed in its “corridors”—places that used to be thought of as exclusively for things like restaurants, retail, and offices. This is reflective of a nationwide trend to get more housing near transit and “transit-supportive” places, and to make such places more “mixed-use.”

So the revision under consideration makes some tweaks to the city’s commercial zones. It allows for more apartments to be built without the approval of Asheville City Council in these places, eliminating limits on total residential square footage. (Other restrictions, such as height limits, remain in place.)

INFO: What’s Asheville For All’s Take?

In the last item, we talked a lot about the necessity of opening up our residential neighborhoods to more infill housing. But commercial corridors are important too, and so these updates are welcome changes.

One aside: Although it is not a part of the revisions being proposed, we do hope that the city will revisit “landscape buffers” as a reform complimentary to this one. Landscape buffers require developers to set aside a not insignificant amount of land in many cases where a different kind of use or zoning district abuts the property that they seek to build on. Besides simply limiting the viability of a project, these buffers can be detrimental to the “mixing of uses” that code revisions such as the one under consideration seek to promote.

ACTION: How to Fill Out the Survey

You’re in the home stretch!

From the main page that lists the three pro-housing reforms under consideration, now click the third “ENGAGE” button. This will take you to the “Amendment to Commercial Zoning District Standards” page.

Scroll down to the input field where you can provide feedback. Consider the following to cut-and-paste, or to modify as you like:

• We need “missing middle” housing, but these corridor revisions are really important and necessary too. Can the city tackle “landscape buffer” reform in the future as well? (These were cited as barriers in the city’s Nov. 2023 Missing Middle Housing Study, pages 54 and 156). Egregious landscape buffers prevent the same kinds of walkability and connecting different uses that this reform seeks to promote.
• These updates are welcome, especially as it appears that progress on “missing middle” has inexplicably stalled. It’s good to see residential uses being promoted in a mixed use context that maintains flexibility. Has the staff considered modestly raising height limits to promote further development on transit supportive corridors?
• Love the idea of getting more residential on corridors like Merrimon Ave. I did notice that the city staff report includes mention of putting parking in the back of new developments, but the carrots and sticks in the text revisions might be stronger on this. (For example, the reduced front setbacks are only for already-pedestrian-friendly areas.) How might the code changes under consideration better enforce walkability and better urban form?

PART IV: Thank You!

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