BY SUSAN BEAN
Do you need more neighbors? Yes, please!
I love the neighborhood I live in, which is near UNC Asheville. I coordinate with my neighbors to host pocket parks workdays and annual block parties. I’ve turned my yard into a dog park. A 6-year-old boy from two blocks away rides his bike to deliver a newspaper. He makes it himself on single 8-by-10 inch sheets of paper, announcing things such as Halloween is coming! Youd better get your costume ready! I subscribe for a quarter of a week because I need the news.
Building healthy communities
MountainTrue, a non-profit organization that advocates for healthy communities throughout Western North Carolina, is also where I work. My neighborhood is a model of the healthy community we seek to foster. It is walkable, has easy transit access, and has green space and a tree canopy between houses and apartments. Its downright charming.
MountainTrue believes that more housing in areas like mine, with roads, water pipes, and transit, is a good thing. This is why we support the Asheville City Council’s open space amendment.
Infill and density are words that can cause concern in neighborhoods where residents like things as they are and don’t want to see trees chopped down in order to make way for more buildings. Asheville needs more housing options, and we have the chance to fill that need by encouraging good development.
If I had the opportunity to invite more people to my neighborhood, such as a duplex or small apartment building. I would be very sad to lose the trees. But I would love to have the chance to gain new dog friends or milk from someone in a snowstorm. It’s a trade-off I’m willing to make.
The missing middle
Open space amendments under consideration are designed to encourage the development of smaller housing units, such as triplexes or apartment buildings for eight to ten units. The key to Asheville’s missing middle housing policies, which include duplexes triplexes and small courtyard apartments, is changing the open space requirements. Some opponents have painted a picture of this amendment as if it would turn Asheville into a concrete jungle that only makes money for a few and destroys the lives of all those who live here. But that leaves the neighbors out of it.
MountainTrue is a non-profit organization whose mission it is to support resilient forests, clean water, healthy communities, and clean water. We love trees. Our staff members have spent their entire careers fighting for old-growth forests. They advocate for stream buffer protections, and call for fewer lanes on Interstate 26 to allow us to keep old trees and neighborhoods healthy and vibrant.
Missing middle development is a reality. People will live in these new homes if they get constructed. If they don’t get built in town then those people will move to new homes further away from the city center. There, acres of forestland or farmland could be lost to build new roads and suburbs. We can save forests and farmlands if we welcome them into our city.
I hope that you will join me in supporting the open space amendment. I hope you will also work with me to address the complex issues of how we will grow. It is crucial to develop areas with existing infrastructure in order to combat sprawl. It fosters healthy communities as well as a healthy environment. We want both.
Susan Bean, MountainTrue’s community engagement director, is also an Asheville resident and has wonderful neighbors.