User:Mike Lewis

You won’t know what’s happening ‘til the PortaPotty is on site and the bulldozers start moving earth.

For a couple of years, the Affordable Housing Task Force has been meeting to draw up an affordable housing plan and craft the amendment to the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) that would implement the plan. At Monday evening’s Coalition of Asheville Neighborhoods (C.A.N.) meeting, Assistant Planning Director Shannon Tuch presented the draft to CAN Board. Two board members served on the Task Force, so the proposed amendment was not entirely new to us. Both of those folks opposed certain aspects of the proposed amendment. I do too. Some of my reasons follow.

The title of the amendment is “Use By Right, Subject to Special Requirements (USSR) Sustainable Development Projects” (the abbreviation drips with irony). The draft is posted on the CAN Wiki site: wiki.AshevilleCAN.org/Research and Information/UDO Amendments/Density Bonus Plus. The proposed amendment would allow duplexes, triplexes, and quadraplexes in single family neighborhoods. CAN and Ms. Tuch solicit your comments.

The Planning and Zoning Commission will consider the amendment on July 22. Time TBA. P&Z chair, Cindy Weeks, is out-of-town and I have not been able to reach her to ask if she will recuse herself from voting as she did at The Larchmont hearing. The July 22 meeting will also be one of the first meetings to be attended by the two new P&Z members, one of whom is Holly Shriner, whose appointment was so controversial last winter due to lack of experience and apparent conflicts of interest.

Affordable, workforce housing is a severe problem in Asheville and needs to be addressed. I openly supported The Larchmont, and still do, but the proposed UDO amendment could turn my worst nightmare about affordable housing a reality. If you thought that The Larchmont was a “done deal,” you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Unless you closely follow the permitting process ( a near impossibility for most of us) you won’t know what’s happening until you look out your window and see the PortaPotty on site and the bulldozer moving earth. For the USSR developments, there will be no notification; no signs posted with a big red Z; no notification of people within 200’ of the site; no notification of your neighborhood rep.; no P&Z hearing; and no hearing before City Council. The entire evaluation and approval process will take place within the Planning Department. There might be a Technical Review Committee (TRC) meeting, and its schedule is available from the Planning Department. But how would you know when to call? Moreover, the public is not allowed to speak before the TRC. The fact that the public is denied input is my biggest objection to the amendment. But there are many others ranging from lack of clarity in the amendment, to the “Good Neighbor Agreement,” to the Development Incentives. Who will own these properties? If MHO would own them and maintain them, I would find the amendment somewhat more palatable. My fear is that this amendment will foster an unholy alliance between the politically correct; affordable housing advocates; unscrupulous developers all cloaked in moral argument; and facilitated by a weak housing code (yet another City ordinance). The Code was gutted several years ago, and now says a rental dwelling doesn’t have to be inspected unless there is a complaint or at sale. We in the Grace neighborhood can look around us a see how rental property owners maintain their investments. By and large, it isn’t good.

Allowing the Planning Director discretion whether to allow any parking in front of the house is just asking for trouble. I’m not talking about on-street parking. The way I read the document the parking would be where one would normally find the front yard. We already have people pulling their vehicles into front yards (and back) in our neighborhood, and it doesn’t help curb appeal for the rest of us. On Gracelyn Rd. recently had a vehicle abandoned and defaced over three weeks before it was towed, and the police knew about it all the while. The owner lived a block away. The rule is that vehicles parked in the same spot for more than seven days are towed after one week. That doesn’t have much to do with affordable housing except that the car’s owner lived in one of the “dormitories” that have sprung up around the neighborhood. Furthermore, it does speak to the general lack of ordinance enforcement Asheville. I can’t bring myself to believe the terms of an affordable housing ordinance would have better enforcement.

Although there is nothing in the proposed amendment, elsewhere in the UDO there are rules specifying spacing between certain structures. I understand that there is a proposal to remove those requirements.

We are blessed to have, I think, the best Planning Staff with which I have been associated. Two of them are our neighbors. But I didn’t vote for the Planning Staff. The Planning Staff works for the City Manager. Under that aegis, past Planning Staffs have given us Staples, GreenLife, Walgreens, and other developments all over town that were allowed to ignore the rules, or operate under no rules at all, or rules that had no penalties.

The method for administering the proposed amendment is not new. For some time now, Council has sought to push decisions further down the organizational structure. It’s more efficient, and it makes for shorter City Council meetings, and it distances Council from thorny issues likely to anger voters. In that vein, one informal proposal has been to allow staff alone to make development decisions on projects with footprints up to 100,000 sq. ft. But given the City’s record of poor enforcement of any and all ordinances, I’m not yet willing to allow City Council to escape responsibility for the City’s actions.

Go the wiki site, read the proposed amendment and make your own comments. And don’t forget the P&Z meeting July 22. Bring a sandwich, a good book, and a pillow to sit on.

If there is enough interest, we might call a neighborhood meeting and invite someone from the planning staff to review the ordinance with us. Time is short. Let me know.

CAN has been in the process of planning a forum on affordable housing in conjunction with the Asheville Design Center sometime in late September or October. I hope we’re not overtaken by events