An 84-unit housing project in Asheville’s Haw Creek neighborhood is moving ahead after a City Council vote Tuesday night.
The “Meadows at Haw Creek” development at 767 New Haw Creek Road has drawn sharp opposition from members of the East Asheville community ever since its introduction late last year. The debate over the 27-acre project pitted residents’ concerns about traffic congestion and infrastructure against the need for more housing in the rapidly-growing city.
“This Council has learned, and learned, and learned about how to best address a housing crisis,” Mayor Esther Manheimer told the more than 100 attendees at Harrah’s Cherokee Center shortly before Tuesday night’s vote. “And one of the fundamental things that we have heard is that you have to facilitate housing in your community, in your city.”
“And the number-one factor for whether or not you’re going to see people experiencing homelessness in your community is housing scarcity,” she added.
The vote was 5-to-1 in favor of granting the developer’s rezoning request, with Council member Kim Roney the lone “no” vote.
The project includes 49 single-family homes and 35 townhouses.
At a recent meeting on the city’s Affordable Housing Plan, City Council members heard that the city will need 14,000 new homes by 2050 to keep pace with population growth – a figure cited by an attorney for the developer at Tuesday’s public hearing.
Even so, the “Meadows at Haw Creek” project presented unique challenges, both in terms of the project site as well as the process by which the final proposal was negotiated.
At Tuesday night’s meeting, a majority of the two dozen speakers during public comment voiced concern about the inclusivity of the process.
“I’ve been hearing the word ‘community’ being used, and to me, it’s critical to uplift the fact that due to the way this process has been handled recently, that the broader Haw Creek community is really fractured. … Without transparency, distrust deepens and grows,” resident Ashley McDermott said.
Opposition to Haw Creek development
The Haw Creek neighborhood sits in a valley with narrow roads, two main entrances, few sidewalks and limited access to amenities such as shopping and public transportation. In addition to those issues, community members have raised concerns about the valley’s potential for flooding and the removal of tree canopy from the development site.
Opposition from residents forced City Council to postpone a vote on the project twice this year, as leaders of the Haw Creek Community Association (HCCA) negotiated with the developer, L.B. Jackson and Company, at meetings hosted by city officials. HCCA President Chris Pelly, a former City Council member, represented the community in the discussions.
Derek Allen, an attorney for the developer, said Tuesday that “a lot of work” had gone into trying to reach a compromise with community leaders, noting that three meetings were held in the past four months. Revisions to the project were being submitted as late as Tuesday afternoon.
“Our guys are here to do their business, and they’re here to provide housing units, and they matter. All these projects matter. We’ve seen study after study and speaker after speaker speaking to this ‘missing middle,’” Allen said, referring to much-needed housing that is larger than a single-family home but smaller than a high-rise apartment complex.
But as the negotiations continued, many Haw Creek community members said they felt as though they were being shut out of the process in recent months. A trio of residents from the Happy Valley neighborhood, which sits closest to the project site, went door-to-door gathering signatures and eventually formed a separate organization, the Happy Valley Property Owners Preservation Association, to make the community’s voices heard.
Manheimer attended a meeting of the association earlier this month, and Roney met with members Monday night. Both meetings were held outside on the lawn of Happy Valley resident Pat Holland, who helped spearhead the effort.
In an interview Monday night, Holland said that 63 of the 114 households in the subdivision, or about 55%, had joined the association. By contrast, he said, the Haw Creek Community Association represents a smaller fraction of the broader community, and its leaders do not live near the “Meadows at Haw Creek” site.
“We don’t need people that don’t live in our subdivision telling us what to do, how we’re going to live. … It not only disrespects me, it disrespects my neighbors. It disrespects the subdivision. And that’s where this is coming from,” Holland said.
‘Data doesn’t lie’
During Tuesday night’s public comment session, Pelly acknowledged that it has been a “bumpy road” to the final proposal and that some community members were excluded from the process.
“By their nature, serious negotiations require confidence-building and trust-building,” he said. “That means not publicly sharing everything being discussed. This is why there may be a perception we did not adequately communicate. For this, I accept full responsibility.”
He said the HCCA’s 12-member board of directors had voted “tepidly but unanimously” to support the 84-unit proposal, which he described as the “least worst option” because it addresses several community concerns and would preserve 5.65 acres of tree canopy.
The developer’s original proposal late last year called for a rezoning to allow up to 95 housing units. Without the requested rezoning, current land use in Haw Creek would have allowed “by right” the construction of up to 49 housing units – but, critically, the city would not have been able to enforce forest preservation.
In approving the rezoning request, several council members emphasized the city’s urgent need for more housing. Manheimer said “the data doesn’t lie.”
“Man, I really wish I could just be a coward and not vote for this, because that would be the easiest thing to do,” she said. “But I’m not. I’m going to support this tonight, and I’m going to do that because I think it’s the right thing to do.”
But, pointing to the city’s long list of stalled housing developments, she added: “I am very skeptical that it will ever be built.” The developer that obtained the rezoning has not yet purchased the land.
Roney noted the “serious lingering infrastructure concerns” surrounding the project and said that some of the neighborhood concerns likely could have been addressed “if we were willing to take the time to press pause and work it out.”
Given that postponement was not likely, Roney said her “no” vote reflected her “commitment to well-planned reasonable development on transit corridors with supportive infrastructure for a vision for climate and neighborhood resiliency so we can take better care of each other and our mountain home.”
