Asheville – NIMBY’s can be a thorn in the side; their existence is based on overriding the concept of property rights on which the country was built and prospered. This time, however, the NIMBY’s had a point.
Other than board appointments, the only item of business on Asheville City Council’s agenda was a request to build apartments at the former location of the Charlotte Street Fuddrucker’s. It doesn’t sound bad, as the area does have a lot of apartment buildings, and a lot of the old homes have been converted to multifamily housing. However, what was proposed was 186 residential units and 4,500 square feet of commercial space for the 2.34-acre lot. The structure would be three to five stories high, with 231 underground parking spaces and six more spaces on East Charlotte Street.
The property was located in the city’s Charlotte Street Transition Overlay District, the Charlotte Street Innovation District, and the Chestnut Hill National Register of Historic Places. The staff report explains, “The maximum density in the [district as currently zoned] is 20 units/acre but may be increased to 50 units/acre with the inclusion of 20% of all residential units being set aside as affordable. This project does include 20% of the units to be affordable but proposes 80 units/acre, exceeding the maximum and requiring modification.”
Kassinger Development Group was allowed to exceed the density requirements by working with the city for a Land Use Incentive Grant (LUIG). The grants have been around over a decade, and, as Mayor Esther Manheimer explained, they keep being tweaked and yet continue to fall short of functionality. It appeared from this discussion that council might eventually stumble upon price theory and the efficacy of personal choice in trading value-for-value in a sea of millions of fluctuating variables.
Council Support
But until that day, only Kim Roney would vote against the project. Roney didn’t like how the program provided a few units here and there rather than the 1,000 the city had targeted. But, rather than seeing the solution in deregulating the housing market, she suggested giving more public funds to nonprofit organizations in the business of building subsidized residences.
To get the grant, Kassinger promised to rent 37 units to families or individuals earning below 80% of Area Median Income (AMI), 19 of which would accept Housing Choice Vouchers/Rental Assistance for households earning no more than 60% AMI. These rent controls, which would last 30 years, earned the project 40 points on the city’s LUIG Scoring Matrix. The project earned another 20 points, each, for being locationally efficient and incorporating energy-efficient features.
In return, the city promised relief on the project’s tax increment for over 16 years. Annual taxes collected for the parcel were about $15,000, and the completed project was estimated to raise collections to where the city’s Community Development Program Director Paul D’Angelo calculated the developer could expect about $94,000 to be “granted back” each year. Council unanimously supported this much.
Residents, however, were concerned about how large the project was and a change in style. The developers had originally proposed a Tudor design, which could have been quaint. City planners, noting there are a few Tudors in North Asheville, but not enough to make it a conforming design, recommended the developers opt instead for a block-brick design like that of the City Bakery. This spurred one neighbor, Mike Rains, to use the word “ugly.”
Neighbors, expectedly, were also apprehensive about what a new, large project was going to do to traffic. The Charlotte Street road diet was performed with neighborhood support before the general public knew anything about this or a second large project currently under city review. Paula Coughlin said the additional road trips generated by the building’s residential and commercial tenants were likely to result in “gridlock and unsafe traffic conditions.” After a lame attempt to equate Fuddrucker’s traffic with that of a 186-apartment/mixed-use complex, city representatives assured, as they always do, that they did not expect traffic to be that bad. A formal traffic analysis could, however, be performed with sufficient pressure from neighbors.
Will Hornaday conceded, “We all know density’s coming,” but he challenged the project on the grounds that it “doesn’t match the rules” because it “strays in mass and scope.” He and others said residents buy property within a certain zoning under the assumption that the zoning is going to safeguard the things that made the property desirable. Now, there were two large, transformative projects for the neighborhood in the city’s development review pipeline, and residents “needed to know where the rails were.”
Eugene Ellison observed, “The city is not following its ordinances.” Carolyn Warner asked why the city has to put infill development in the charming places protected by overlay zoning instead of “areas that have already been destroyed,” like the strip malls along Patton Avenue. And Bill Murphy, observing zoning “doesn’t hold,” resolved he will have to move again.
Gary Davis, an attorney, took it further. He told council their current action was setting a precedent to allow conditional zonings to override an overlay district. Features of this project were more than double those allowed in the overlay. He asked if conditional zonings will also allow developers to build in the hotel overlay district without providing the city the public benefits those districts demand; and if they could be used to evade providing other public amenities the city strives to exact through its land use policies.