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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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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“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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