Buncombe County population might grow 80,000 by 2045. Is dense development a good idea?

ASHEVILLE - A first-of-its-kind project creating a roadmap for the coming 20 years is on the verge of changing Buncombe County's growth forever, especially as it relates to housing density and the risk of gentrification as the county's population is projected to grow by nearly 30%.

After a year of public input and county staff fine-tuning, the Comprehensive Plan 2043 came before the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners on Sept. 27 as a draft plan, rife with policy suggestions the commissioners are now seriously considering.

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The comprehensive plan — often referred to as the "comp plan" — will ultimately be a document created by local governments and residents to determine what the focus and vision of the community should be over a long-term, 20-year period.

On Sept. 27, commissioners got a first chance to publicly discuss this plan, which, among many other elements, assumes the county will likely grow by roughly 80,000 residents by 2045 — from roughly 270,000 right now to about 350,000 in two decades.

That’s according to two estimates — one from Woode & Poole Economics and one from the French Broad River Metropolitan Planning Organization — embedded in the Comp Plan presentation, given by Leigh Anne King of county-contracted land use consulting firm Clarion Associates, which is based in Denver, Colorado, and Chapel Hill.

King, accompanied by Buncombe County Planning Director Nathan Pennington, walked commissioners through four main areas that will likely get updated policies by spring 2023: conditional zoning, density, infrastructure, and affordable housing.

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Much of the discussion revolved around development in the face of growth and how county leadership could engage with the public on needs and issues.

“You have significant development constraints within the county in terms of places that you can actually develop,” King told commissioners.

She said only 21.9% or 21,588 of the county’s 98,600 developable acres don’t have constraints, meaning they don’t have features that would make them more difficult to develop.

This may mean Buncombe will have to focus on growth that is much denser rather than spread out throughout the county, according to King’s presentation.

“Density can be a very polarizing topic in a lot of communities, thinking particularly about what high-density looks like and where it goes,” she said.

But tight housing situations are “created equal,” she said. “You can have really poorly designed high-density projects and you can have really well-designed high-density projects. The important thing is thinking about the standards that are applied to … help growth as it occurs over time. ”

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'Accelerating' problem?

Applied standards are essentially at the heart of why the county is pursuing the Comp Plan in the first place: It’s considering a policy that will help guide staff and boards as they make complex and difficult decisions about the trajectory of local development.

That conversation dovetails with one that has dominated the county’s strategic and fiscal priorities in 2022: affordable housing.

On Sept. 27, commissioners discussed not only density and affordable housing but ways to prevent gentrification, a trend in which neighborhoods are overrun by development that forces out longstanding and often low-income residents.

“One of the critiques of the density argument from people who genuinely care about affordable housing … is, ‘Well you can build all that stuff, but it’s still going to continue to gentrify,’” Commission Chair Brownie Newman said. The answer to that is bleak, he explained.

“In an area that’s growing like ours, where there is population pressure, if we’re not producing more supply and there’s the development pressure, well we can guarantee you this problem is not only going to get worse, it’s going to accelerate.”

Newman and others mentioned the power of tourism and how it’s contributing to the situation.

“We spend a ton of money, taxpayer money telling the whole world to come here and check this place out,” he said. “Many of them decide to stay. And that it's so popular, we could, we could build a lot. And it would all be expensive, right? Just because there's enough affluent people in our society who think, ‘Living in Asheville would be my dream.’”

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He said Asheville needs density. It needs to increase the housing supply, but it has to craft a plan that will create regulation.

“Through our own investment and through our land-use policies we do have to create a set of policies so that it’s not all just driven by the market or the gentrification will just happen with the supply.”

According to the planning staff, the Comp Plan will go back to the community for more feedback as it solidifies.

That will likely happen in mid-November.

Andrew Jones is an investigative reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at @arjonesreports on Facebook and Twitter, 828-226-6203 or arjones@citizentimes.com. Please help support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Buncombe County expects to add 80,000 by 2045. Housing density coming?