Eight months ago, Hurricane Helene destroyed many of the things that made Asheville beautiful. Helene has not been the only destroyer. Private equity forced a few of our stores to close through bankruptcy, laying off workers. We have lost some of our favorite local hangouts to shortsighted profiteering. Some of our otherwise beautiful mountain roads are turning into traffic nightmares due to poorly planned real estate developments. Rather than creating affordable housing, all this has driven up rents beyond what local workers can afford to pay. Our county and state will likely raise our taxes to cover the costs of fixing those traffic snarls.
While we cannot prevent hurricane damage, we can do better than this. If we value our quality of life, we must do better than this.
Tragically, those who have worked to promote sensible development have been denigrated as NIMBYs. Now that the woods on Richmond Hill have been preserved, we will all have a park. We will all have scenery along the river. We won’t have to deal with worse traffic congestion on both Louisiana Avenue and Riverside Drive. City taxpayers will not have to pay to upgrade those roads and intersections due to the massive increase in traffic the development would have created. This is just one example of doing better…