Looking to rent an apartment in Asheville? Good luck

ASHEVILLE –

To learn how Carole Schaefer, Rod Brombacher and Elizabeth Collins have lived during the last year is to understand how tough it gets to find a low-rent apartment in Asheville.

A retired furniture-industry saleswoman and designer, Schaefer has strung together housesitting arrangements to get by on a fixed income. For Brombacher, a former businessman struggling with health issues, having a bed for the night has meant staying in a homeless shelter.

Two jobs, fulltime as a Waffle House waitress and part-time as a retail sales associate, at 76 hours a week nets Collins $1,500 a month. But good luck finding the right apartment with a rent to fit that budget. She lives with her grandmother.

All three – Schaefer, Brombacher and Collins – meet the definition of "resident" in that each of them have dwelt in Asheville for a considerable time. But each also is very much without a home.

"The price range I'm looking for doesn't exist," Schaefer said. "Everything starts at $700. That's not something that's going to be manageable for me. Anything lower pretty much gets you a moldy basement in Asheville."

Builders, housing experts and city officials all agree. Apartments are hard to come by – especially if you are at the low end.

A housing-needs analysis of the four-county Asheville region comprising Buncombe, Henderson, Madison and Transylvania presented to the City Council last month found an apartment vacancy rate of 1 percent.

"We have an affordable housing crisis," said Councilman Gordon Smith, chairman of the council's Housing and Community Development Committee and the Asheville Regional Housing Consortium.

"I want government to respond to the crisis that it is," Smith said.

Buildable land

While the problem is most acute with low-rent apartments, the region's rental quandary isn't limited to that alone, said Jeff Staudinger, the city's assistant director of community and economic development.

Asheville is uncommon within the United States in that its "significant housing supply deficit extends to all income categories and all kinds of housing," Staudinger said.

Also atypical among regions nationwide: Asheville-area builders and developers have not responded to the need, Staudinger said.

"A specific example is that 67 percent of our market can afford to buy only homes priced at $200,000 or below. But only 27 percent of our (housing) inventory is priced below $200,000," he said. "That's unusual."

Normally, many options would exist, including homes selling between $130,000 and $160,000, Staudinger said.

A primary cause is Asheville's scarcity of buildable land. Mountainous terrain with limited water and sewer infrastructure pervades the region.

"Land that meets easy-to-build-on criteria is a rare commodity," Staudinger said. And becomes very expensive.

So developers who want to build homes that sell for half-a-million dollars "will outbid the developer who wants to build a $150,000 house almost every time," Staudinger said.

That dilemma extends to rental housing also.

Rents for the 137 vacant apartment units – of 14,198 total – identified in a recent study done for the city of Asheville's four-county region ranged from $222 to $2,550.

Bowen National Research, a real-estate market consulting firm, found median rents for market-rate apartments ranged from $832 to $3,300 and $583 to $1,187 for tax-credit units.

The Ohio-based firm conducted the study between October and December. City officials paid Bowen $29,750 for the report.

Population boom

Schaefer said she worries that competition for those few vacant apartments will only further drive up rents.

She organized a meet-up during the summer of people, like her, searching for a place to rent.

"Twenty showed up, all in the same boat – families, people with dogs and animals; they said they can't find anything," she said. "They're just plain frustrated."

Each time a housesitting assignment ends, Schaefer said she faces the stress of finding another one.

She's also aware that Asheville's population is ballooning.

"There's this huge influx of people coming here," Schaefer said. "Everyone I know has a friend who wants to move here. Where are we going to put them all?"

Using December 2013 data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey, the Asheville region population estimate stood at 425,219.

Bowen analysts project a 5.9 percent increase by 2020, or 450,307 people.

Census data from that same year for Asheville put the city's population at 87,236. Bowen researchers forecast a 7.6 percent jump by 2020, or 93,866 people.

Like Schaefer, Rod Brombacher, 54, has searched for rental housing for about a year.

A former marketing vice president for the now-bankrupt Arden-based company, Info4cars, Brombacher said he suffered a nervous breakdown in 2007 and currently lives at the Salvation Army in Asheville.

Brombacher qualified for Social Security Supplemental Security Income disability payments, he said. He survives on $730 a month that he receives from the program. Brombacher said he pays $60 a week to live at the Salvation Army.

"If rent is up to $400, that's what I can afford," he said. But Brombacher said many rents he finds start at $1,000.

The number of scam artists he's encountered on sites like Craigslist frustrates him. He isn't considering leaving the area for lower rents because his daughter lives here, Brombacher said.

"I try to stay positive, but it's the most ridiculous thing when you're in a homeless situation," he said.

Elizabeth Collins' exasperation extends beyond having no place to go when the temporary stay at her grandmother's Asheville home ends.

Owning a 2-year-old pit bull, whom Collins said she bottle-fed when she got the dog at 4-weeks old, doesn't help. Many landlords have rejected Collins, 19, because of Ivvy's breed, she said.

Collins has considered moving to Tennessee, where finding housing that welcomes animals is easier, she said.

But her grandmother has late-stage pancreatic cancer. So she's staying put.

No one solution

Councilman Smith and Asheville city staffer Staudinger say they are trying very hard to help people like Collins, Brombacher and Schaefer.

Smith and his fellow council members in December voted to increase the number of units per acre upon which developers may build housing in certain parts of Asheville – as long as 20 percent of those units' rents fall under federal affordable-housing guidelines.

Those guidelines dictate, for example, that a single person living in a studio apartment should pay no more than $725 a month in rent and $60 in utilities. And, a family of four living in a three-bedroom apartment should pay no more than $1,003 in rent and $117 in utilities.

Smith said last week that no one solution to the problem existed. Instead, it would take many.

"It's going to take everyone putting their shoulders to the wheel if we're going to put a dent in this," Smith said during Tuesday's city council meeting.

In a separate interview last week with the Citizen-Times, Smith said city officials would continue policies they already are pursuing to provide lower-rent apartments and homes.

Those include pursuing federal funds and tax credits created for affordable housing and partnering with local nonprofits and the private sector to build more affordable housing, Smith said.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development offers tax credits that lower debt for developers and investors who build housing with lower rents.

Another strategy is to open up city-owned property to competitive bidding by developers who would build affordable-housing, Smith said. Still another would be to allow the same units in the River Arts District to be living and working spaces.

"We have a lot of things in the pipeline," he said. "We have a lot of momentum and community support. The tale will be told in the next six months whether we pass these policies or not."

A real community

Two Asheville homebuilders, Kirk Booth and Ward Griffin, have made providing lower-rent housing part of their missions.

"There's nothing greater than seeing people be able to rent a house that they never thought they'd be able to get," said Booth, who added he's been in the affordable-housing market for about 20 years. Booth runs Kirk Booth Real Estate.

But the cost of land in Asheville makes the affordable-housing business model a challenging one.

"I don't see the price of dirt going down," Booth said. So, federal grants and tax incentives, plus city council's increased-density measure last month all help, he said.

Griffin and his partner, Luis Hellmund, plan to break ground this spring on Oak Hill Commons. The 72-unit affordable-housing development will be located off Leicester Highway, Griffin said. Biotat LLC is Griffin's and Hellmund's Asheville-based affordable-housing development company.

Some one-bedroom apartments at Oak Hill will run as low as $725 a month and could max out at $900 a month, Griffin said. Three-bedroom units will start around $1,100 a month and range up to roughly $1,375 a month.

"We're trying to build a real community – the antithesis of an entire income bracket all in one place and all the others in another place," Griffin said. "We're hoping to provide an environment where someone off the street can succeed in the same place as a sheriff or a nurse – people who make a living wage, but still need an affordable place to live."