Build It, or Protect It?

Here is what is actually on the table. On July 28 the council is scheduled to vote on an anti-displacement resolution, a formal pledge that the city will protect existing residents as it grows. It is not a law by itself. The city attorney called it marching orders: pass it, and staff is expected to bring back real policy to match.

On August 25 comes the one with teeth. The council votes on a package of zoning changes drawn from a study the city commissioned back in 2023. If it passes, duplexes and townhomes would be allowed across the city, accessory dwelling units could be larger, and the rule forcing new housing to come with off-street parking would go away. These are small buildings, the kind that used to be normal on an ordinary street. The industry calls them the missing middle, the housing that sits between a single house and a large apartment block, and that most American cities stopped allowing decades ago.

Start with a number the city does not dispute, because it is from the city's own study: about two-thirds of Asheville's neighborhoods allow only single-family homes. In most of the city, a duplex is illegal to build. So is a townhome, a triplex, a small courtyard of cottages. Not too expensive, not unpopular. Illegal, by the zoning code.

That is the quiet half of the shortage. The homes urban renewal tore down are gone, and we tell that story in the shortage was made here. But even now, on empty and underused land the city still has, the rules mostly permit the most land-hungry, and often most expensive, form of housing there is: one detached house per lot. Supply stays scarce by design, and scarce housing is expensive housing.

The city has known this for years. The missing-middle study landed in 2023 and said plainly what to change. In March 2025 the council took a first step, allowing cottage-court and flag-lot housing, easing some rules along transit and commercial corridors, and starting to pull back parking requirements in a few districts. It was real, but it was a fraction of what the study called for. The August vote is the city deciding whether to do a much larger share of the rest.

How much housing is missing is not a mystery. The regional assessment says Asheville alone needs about 6,441 more rental homes and 5,217 more to buy over five years, part of roughly 34,358 the four-county region needs over five years. The widest gap is at the bottom, for families earning under half the area's median income. Meanwhile the typical Buncombe County home sold for about $500,000 this spring, while a family at the edge of the middle class, up to 120 percent of the area's median income, could afford about $372,000.

What the rewrite would add is harder to pin down. The city never projected a unit count, and the record from places that have done this counsels patience, not a flood. Minneapolis, the first big city to end single-family-only zoning, saw only about 255 of these middle homes built in its first two and a half years. Legalizing the housing is a floor, not a faucet. It is a necessary step that works slowly, and only if the rest of the market cooperates.

If almost everyone agrees the city needs more housing, why is this hard? Because of who paid the price the last time Asheville rebuilt itself, and who is afraid of paying it again.

The neighborhoods most worried are the ones the city calls its legacy communities: historically Black neighborhoods like Shiloh, Burton Street, Southside, the East End. These are the places urban renewal and redlining hit hardest, and the places where residents and city officials say rising rents and property taxes are pushing longtime residents out right now. Their fear is direct. Change the zoning to invite building, and the building comes to the blocks where land is still cheap, which is their blocks, and the people already there get priced out first.

That fear is not abstract. In May the council voted down a 100-unit affordable housing project in Shiloh, with one member saying she felt hyperprotective of the neighborhood. So the coalition that speaks for those neighborhoods, led by coordinator Sekou Coleman, wants the order reversed: build the anti-displacement protections first, prove they work, and only then loosen the zoning.

The pro-housing side, organized as Asheville for All, reads the same history and draws the opposite lesson. Their organizer, Andy Paul, argues that the way you protect a neighborhood from a single giant development is to let modest housing be built everywhere, so no one block absorbs all the pressure. Allow a little more housing broadly, the argument goes, and you are less likely to get a tower dropped into Shiloh. Spread the growth, and you spread the protection.

The city, for its part, is trying to walk between them. It is building a Displacement Risk Assessment Tool, a map that scores neighborhoods on how exposed they are, using renter cost burden, rising home values, and income. But the city is careful to say the tool only informs decisions. It does not veto a project on its own. That reassures no one completely: to the legacy neighborhoods it sounds like a study standing in for a guarantee, and to the builders it sounds like one more reason a project can stall.

It would be easy to pick a villain here. There isn't one. Both sides are pointing at something true.

The evidence on supply is not really in doubt. A large body of research finds that cities that allow more housing ease their cost pressure over time better than cities that don't. Loosening the rules is no instant fix, and by itself it tends to add housing at the higher end first, so it works slowly and works best paired with subsidy. But the direction is clear, and it is the case for the August vote.

And the displacement risk is also real. New building on cheap land near the center of a hot market can push longtime residents out, even though more housing tends to ease rents across a city as a whole, and Asheville has done exactly that to these specific neighborhoods before. A promise to protect them, with no tool and no funding behind it, is the kind of promise this city has broken in living memory. Asking for the protection to be real and funded, adopted alongside the zoning rather than promised after it, is not obstruction. It is memory.

One more limit: zoning is not the whole story. The city's own study blames Asheville's prices partly on tourism and second-home buyers, and short-term rentals pull roughly 5,400 homes off the long-term market before a single zoning rule applies. We follow that money separately in the tax no one can count. Fixing the zoning will not touch any of that. It is the part the council actually controls, not the only thing that decides what a home here costs.

So the honest verdict is uncomfortable. The zoning rewrite is the right thing to do, and doing it without real anti-displacement protection moving in step with it would repeat an old harm on the same people. The city's own evidence points the same way: because the rewrite adds housing slowly, the protection does not have to be proven before the rules change, only funded and in force when they do. Which is to say the fight over how these two votes fit together is not a distraction from the real question. It is the real question.

Two dates, and one thing to watch on each.

July 28, the resolution. A resolution is only words until something backs it. Watch whether it comes with a funded anti-displacement program and a finished risk tool, or whether it is a pledge with nothing behind it yet. The difference decides whether the August zoning vote arrives with protection already standing or still on the drawing board.

August 25, the zoning. Watch how much of the 2023 study actually makes it in, and whether the parking-requirement repeal survives, since that single rule often decides whether a small building pencils out. And watch which neighborhoods are exempted or phased in, because that is where the whole fight gets settled in the fine print.

The shortage was made by choices like these, one ordinance at a time. It can be unmade the same way. This summer is one of the times the city actually gets to choose.