Sandra Smith has a name for the towering new homes squeezed onto tiny lots in Asheville’s historically Black neighborhoods: “Slim-talls.”
She pointed out one after another on a recent tour through her home neighborhood of Southside. They can be seen in Shiloh and Burton Street, where a row of gray-and-white slim-talls flank a stretch of its namesake main road. And Hazzard Street in East End leads to a mazelike corner of the neighborhood dominated by blue, red and even purple multi-story homes with slanted roofs.
Where there are slim-talls, there is gentrification. The recent decades’ massive influx of whiteness and wealth has sent home prices in these neighborhoods soaring far out of reach of most of Asheville’s Black residents and brought crippling property tax increases to longtime residents. Gentrification is finishing what urban renewal started, they say, fueling the decline in the city’s Black population by displacing residents and unraveling neighborhood bonds…