Elaine Lite: A Serious Voice For Sane Development
ByClick here to donate to Elaine’s campaign.
While there are many issues facing our city, growth and development issues are far and away the most current and the most far-reaching. Over the last year we’ve seen a rapid rise in community activism as Ashevillians work feverishly to try to have a hand in shaping the future of their city. Developments are springing up like poke weed, and our city government, while doing its level best to manage the situation, finds itself drowning in development related issues: What do we want? What do we want to become? How do we enforce the laws already on the books? How do we balance maintaining our tourist economy, being inviting to transplants, and holding fast to the quality of life that we enjoy as citizens of this beautiful city?
The race for Asheville City Council is going to come down to just a few issues, with the most important being how best to guide growth as thousands of people move to our beautiful town. The debate over growth and development tends to get oversimplified into two mythical camps: Don’t Build Anything Ever! vs. Build Anything, Anywhere, Anytime!
A more accurate way of framing the issue of growth and development is this: Those who believe that private interests ought to hold sway vs. those who believe that the public interest ought to hold sway.
The right way forward lies between the poles of these dichotomous frames. Elaine Lite, candidate for City Council best exemplifies the right attitude towards sane development practices.
From Elect Elaine: “I feel strongly that we must protect our mountains from overdevelopment. Uncontrolled development pushes up housing costs for working families and squanders the natural resources of our unique region. I believe that we can protect the environment and ensure that community needs are met, including affordable housing, good jobs with living wages, and a thriving local economy based on local, small businesses. As a member of Council, I will push for comprehensive land use planning, strong regulations, and enforcement to protect and preserve this special place.”
Members of City Council have wrestled with the problem of rapid growth and development, but they have fallen short due to a lack of effective planning and adherance to existing regulations. Elaine Lite lays out a serious plan for Council:
“Protect quality of life and infrastructure by controlling growth. – Overdevelopment brings traffic, noise, and pollution to our neighborhoods, and pushes up housing costs so that working families have few affordable housing options. We must begin to look at the cumulative effect of each development that the City approves, and let citizens decide how and where we want to grow.
Support strong land use regulations and enforcement. – This includes strict enforcement of the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), for example, requiring Staples to comply with city sign regulations.
Enact Comprehensive Land Use Planning. – I will seek to work with County Commissioners on a comprehensive plan for Asheville and Buncombe County to determine which areas should be more densely developed and how to preserve farmland, forests, and open space inside and outside of City limits.
Support strong steep slope ordinances to protect our mountains and promote public safety.
Protect and expand green space and public parks, including the Richmond Hill Park and Pack Square. – I will oppose any sale of public land and I will advocate for preserving Richmond Hill. I support full public access to Pritchard Park, our City’s downtown “living room†and oppose private development on public land at Pack Square.”
Click here to donate to Elaine’s campaign.
If you believe that government has a responsibility to protect Asheville against irresponsible overdevelopment while encouraging sustainable growth, then you have a candidate who agrees with you.
She’s going to need your help to make it happen.
For the next three days, Scrutiny Hooligans is hosting an online fundraiser for Elaine. Your donation makes it possible to train volunteers, create yard signs and bumper stickers, host community forums, and run the rest of the campaign machinery. The money you donate today will go directly towards building a better future for the city of Asheville.
When you donate, be sure to tack on .07 cents, so the Lite campaign will know that this money comes from the netroots community at Scrutiny Hooligans. Your $100.07, $25.07, or even $5.07 is vital to helping Elaine campaign effectively in a nonpartisan primary that relies almost wholly on name recognition.
6 Comments
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:57 pm
I ought to mention that I am not employed by the Elaine Lite campaign. I’m just a local blogger who supports her.
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August 3rd, 2007 at 9:22 am
Elaine Lite says:
“Uncontrolled development pushes up housing costs for working families”
That’s just not honest. First of all, all development is controlled. Most developers (and Holly, Robin and Brownie) will tell you it is quite controlled in the City, despite the occasional lack of enforcement. Second, in an affluent, expensive market like Asheville, there are two main sources of truly affordable housing: apartments and funky old houses that are not yet gentrified (that means “substandard”). Those are the niches where working people can still manage to squeeze into our little Carmel in the Mountains. The first is being killed by single family zoning policies. The second is being killed by gentrification and market forces. Lite not only doesn’t seem to understand what’s really going on around her, she offers nothing to slow these problems down.
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August 3rd, 2007 at 9:43 am
P.S. If the middle of a fundraiser is not the place you welcome this type of criticism, please delete these posts and forgive the intrusion.
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August 3rd, 2007 at 9:56 am
You’re welcome anytime, Not Thomas, I just wish I had time this minute to address your points. I’m at Yearly Kos. More soon!
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August 3rd, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Another source of affordable housing comes from requiring new developments to contain a certain precentage of “affordable” units. Mecklenburg County has an ordinance to that effect, and I’d imagine that Elaine is thinking along those lines as a solution.
Of course, we do have kind of a weird situation in Asheville – I sometimes think that our city council elections are an outlet for frustration with county-wide problems.
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August 3rd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Friends,
Thank you for highlighting the dear, wonderful, fabulous Elaine Lite.
Elaine supports inclusionary zoning with housing trusts as a way to ease the affordable housing problem. Does anyone have a better solution? Because, population growth, topography and the market have made affordable housing impossible without such public policy. But even with this policy in place, the affordable housing issue will be very hard to resolve, as there simply aren’t enough resources to go around.
We do not have the carrying capacity — ecological or infrastructure — to sustain the current development frenzy and accept the “growth for the sake of growth” mentality that pervades our culture, especially in light of global warming and peak oil.
Elaine advocates regional planning and a detailed comprehensive plan — where we all get together and say, this is how we will develop our community (all of Buncombe) … this is how much growth we can realistically accept … here’s where we will allow tall buildings of x-story height … here’s where we need incentives and conservation easements to preserve farmland … this is where it’s acceptable to have urban village zoning under x-conditions. I’ve heard her say many times, “You wouldn’t run a business without a plan, why are we running our city and county without a solid development plan?”
We don’t have that now, and it’s a problem for the developers — as they usually have to go (in the city) to technical review committee — to try to figure out what’s acceptable while people in neighborhoods have no real predictablity at all as to what may be placed next to their homes (in most cases, their biggest lifetime investment). In the county, there’s hardly any protection at all from bad development.
BTW, Elaine has spent the last year and a half attending planning board meetings in both city and county … technical review committee … city and county commission … making personal visits to development sites where the people below have been dreadfully impacted by poor development practices … she’s met with enforcement officials … city and county officials … etc. to discuss at length what we’re facing and to educate herself.
Over the past two years, she’s been studying policy and taking unpaid time out of her personal life to comment out of the goodness of her heart for the community — all the while publishing Critter magazine not just here, but in several cities. I’m very thankful someone of her caliber is willing to run for what is a thankless, underpaid job.
Cheers,
Heather
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