Is Asheville being 'loved to death?' We're getting there...

John Boyle | The Citizen-Times

Show Caption Hide Caption Is Asheville being loved to death? Columnist John Boyle looks at the Asheville tourist scene and the livability of the city for regular working joes.

I will certainly not be the first to say this, and I am certainly not lamenting it as hard as a lot of other folks, but Asheville is at a tipping point.

This is probably not a news flash, if you've been awake and in the city in the past couple of years. Whether it's excessive traffic, mushrooming hotels and apartments, skyrocketing home prices or just the throngs of people disembarking from tour buses downtown, we're inundated.

Undoubtedly, I'd rather live in a place that's booming than busting. Trust me, it's more pleasant to write stories about the tallest building in town undergoing a gazillion dollar transformation than chronicling a tourist getting doused with lighter fluid and robbed in a hotel elevator (true story from a city in Virginia where I worked).

But we're getting close to hitting the "tilt" button here, if we haven't already lit it up.

Consider the recent proposal for apartments on Overlook Road in South Asheville, a crowded, winding road in the heart of an area that is getting overrun with traffic, apartments and commercial activity. Residents banded together to fight the proposal, which is not uncommon in itself, but the passion was more intense than I've seen in a long time.

The Greensboro developer dropped the plans for 230 apartments and 30 town homes on a wooded section of Overlook, and the well-organized, vocal opposition played a major role in that. Residents made it clear they've had enough congestion and construction.

For a while now, everywhere you turn in Asheville it seems you land behind a dump truck or a concrete mixer, or a crane is lowering building materials onto the next hotel or set of apartments. Or you're stuck in traffic, or behind a tourist nibbling ice cream on a narrow downtown sidewalk.

I recently wrote about the transformation of the former BB&T Building, hands-down Asheville's tallest and ugliest building, into those aforementioned condos and hotel rooms. Taking a tour of the building and looking over downtown, you can't help but be struck by the cranes and the new buildings, whether it's A-B Tech's massive new Ferguson Center for Allied Health and Workforce Development, the 12-story Cambria Hotel by the Grove Arcade, Buncombe County's new Health & Human Services Building or the apartments going up on Patton Avenue near I-240.

We reported in December that Asheville has $187 million worth of new hotels coming online. That figure is probably out of date by now, as new ones keep popping up.

We left quaint a long, long time ago.

Like it or not, we are a tourist town, and we always have been. But sweet mother of New Balance walking shoes have we got a lot of tourists on the streets these days.

An astounding 10.9 million people traveled to Buncombe County in 2016, up more than 5 percent from 2015, and they spent $2 billion in 2016. That's a 6.7 percent jump over 2015, which makes restaurants, art galleries and retail shops happy.

All this comes from a recent study the Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau commissioned, which also highlighted this fact: Every day about 30,000 tourists are spending $183 around here.

So yes, it's our lifeblood. But it's also our bane.

It translates into a lot of people using a lot of roads and walking on a lot of sidewalks and filling up a lot of parking decks. Then a lot of them like our mountain oasis so much when they visit, they decide to retire here, and that drives up home prices.

A lot.

I've heard stories of bidding wars in hot areas, with homes being bought after Face Time tours over the phone. A 1,200-square-foot bungalow in West Asheville, formerly the working class neighborhood for regular Joes, can fetch close to $300,000.

In the first quarter of 2017, Asheville had a fantastic seller's market, with 327 homes sold in Asheville and 510 in Buncombe County. In Asheville, the median home sales price set a record, at $275,000, and the county was close to one set last year, at $243,450.

Is that in your price range? What if you're working at a hotel or a restaurant? Or if you're cobbling together a couple of $11-an-hour jobs?

Didn't think so.

Yes, it's gotten a bit nuts around here.

As an Answer Man writer said to me recently in a question about development, "With out of control growth, Asheville is quickly being loved to death."

In January, we started the year off by making Realtor.com's list of "The U.S. Cities That Are Gentrifying the Fastest," snagging the No. 2 spot. The author noted our fair city has reached 50 percent of its gentrification potential and the median home price increased from $125,000 to $235,000 from 2000-2015.

Our view: Gentrifying list is no medal for Asheville

Rents are equally onerous for most working folks, and we don't have enough apartments. The vacancy rate has eased a bit, to 2.7 percent in the last report, but we still need a lot more, and that will help rents come down — if they can get approved.

And while the job market is ridiculously hot right now — Asheville had a 3.2 percent unemployment rate in April and employers are having trouble finding enough workers — our wages lag behind some areas of the state with more industry and tech.

Wages have just got to come up. Asheville consistently ranks as one of the most expensive places to live in North Carolina, yet employers in many cases offer wages that don't take that into account. When you can't afford to live in a place, it's not so livable anymore.

Median household income in Buncombe County was $47,296 in 2016, about $700 above the state average but lagging well behind bigger metro counties such as Mecklenburg (Charlotte — $59,049) or Wake (Raleigh — $66,950).

It's not like I'm the breaking ground with all this. I think everyone knows Asheville is a tough place for regular working stiffs to make a living and to afford to buy a house.

Report: Decent housing out of reach for many Buncombe workers

More: 64 apartments, half below market rate, coming to Asheville downtown

And we just keep taking any and all development we can get. It's like we're so scarred by the days back in the 1980s and '90s, when much of downtown was empty, that we feel like we've got to take everything we can get while the gettin' is good.

The city of Asheville and Buncombe County, along with key groups like Mountain Housing Opportunities and Habitat for Humanity, have been seriously hammering on the affordable housing issue for years now. But the ugly truth is affordable housing remains woefully inadequate around here, and we're going to need a lot more workers to staff all these hotels, restaurants and brewpubs.

So, bring it all together and maybe we do just need to take a breath and work on ourselves for a while.

Let's get even more affordable housing built and look at more ways to keep rents down and homes in a range people can afford to buy.

Maybe more of that money spent promoting Asheville could go to making Asheville more livable, because, yes, you can love a place to death.

This is the opinion of John Boyle. Contact him at 232-5847 or jboyle@citizen-times.com