We've Lost the Plot

Lessons on Fear and Leadership from Asheville’s Embassy Suites Controversy

Intro

In 2017, Asheville’s City Council blocked a proposal for an Embassy Suites hotel downtown. The developer brought a full slate of expert witnesses to the development hearing to show the project satisfied every condition the city required. Despite this, council voted no. After the developer sued, the city lost on appeal all the way to the state supreme court and, after five years and more than $200,000 in publicly financed legal fees, the hotel opened anyway.

It’s somewhat important that council was wrong legally, but what’s more important here is how they lost sight of basic planning principles due to fear. Council’s questions and objections revealed a set of fears I’ve heard from elected officials across the country. They reveal how we—electeds, planners, and citizens alike—have lost the plot on urban planning, development, and growth.

The twin fears of traffic and parking

Throughout the hearing, council lamented the lack of existing parking downtown and the hotel’s ostensible contribution to worsening the situation. This is despite the fact that they had no quantitative evidence of a parking shortage. Sure enough, a study released a year later would show that parking lots and garages across downtown were nearly never full.

Council was also uneasy with the potential traffic this development would bring, expressing and agreeing with public testimony that queues at a nearby light were already bad enough. This development would surely worsen that, they claimed.

The twin fears of parking and congestion are so gripping, our submission to the car so great, that it’s difficult to realize they are contradictory. Council demanded more parking, which would only encourage more driving, while also lamenting the potential traffic the development would cause. They were asking for driving to somehow be easier and more accessible, as if increasing accessibility would not inherently make driving more difficult.

These are fears, however, that elected leaders are themselves responsible for. They ultimately decide how to regulate land use and invest in various forms of transportation. They have no one but themselves to thank for a land use and transportation system designed around the car. It’s absurd, then, for them to point the finger at developers and say, as if aghast, “look at what you’ve done!”

It shouldn’t be the developer’s responsibility to solve downtown’s traffic woes. While cities can and do require developers to contribute to transportation improvements, this is marginal to comprehensive infrastructure investments a city undertakes. The best way to manage traffic through development requirements is in the form of alternative modes—not through parking.

To be fair, the car dependency hole we’ve dug is undeniably deep in most places, and getting out of it won’t be easy. Downtown, however, has all the qualities that make life without a car possible: short blocks, interesting architecture, active storefronts, and a mix of uses. Yet we’re so car-brained and fear based that, even in a walkable downtown, de-prioritizing the car is hard.

Fear of property value decline

Despite the applicant’s expert testimony to the contrary, council questioned whether Embassy Suites would devalue nearby hotels in what they considered to be a saturated market. While this case was specific to hotels, I find the fear of property value decline common when any new development comes to town.

The most generous interpretation of this fear is that it’s leftover from when planning was concerned with nuisance uses that would actually have detrimental effects on the values of surrounding properties, like a coal plant or a meat factory. A more critical interpretation would say it’s an outdated view that weaponizes the ostensible protection of property values to insulate the well-to-do from people economically or racially unlike themselves. You can trace the demonization of innocuous development to the foundational 1926 Euclid v Ambler decision in which Justice Sutherland referred to apartments as “parasites…which come very near to being nuisances.” But to assume the worst of all new development and to micromanage growth as some sort of moral imperative is to misunderstand how cities create value.

Development itself can increase an area’s desirability and therefore positively improve land value. I’m not sure of any case where infill development has led to a decline in surrounding values. Why then is the burden on developers to prove something that has never happened won’t happen? It’s like council is saying, “tell us our deepest, darkest fears won’t come true!” When council puts the burden of proof for an unsubstantiated fear on the developer, a zoning hearing becomes less of a discussion of public interest and more of a therapy session.

Dense development, typically far from being a nuisance, is also more fiscally productive for cities as it produces more taxable value per acre than less dense forms of development like single family homes. To fear this kind of development as a precursor for a loss in value is absurd, especially from the perspective of a city councilor.

Fear of imperfect development

The result of elevating unsubstantiated fears above everything else is that vacant land is prized more than new development and subsequent tax revenue. Council would rather have seen this downtown lot sit vacant than see a tax-paying use take its place.

There seems to be a belief that if council waits long enough, the perfect development will come along. But how long should a property sit vacant, producing little tax revenue, serving as an eye sore to the neighborhood, before the costs outweigh the benefits of an elusive dream?

I’ve seen this happen in Atlanta. At a 2022 Zoning Review Board meeting, a developer proposed reviving a vacant fourplex covered in graffiti. Approving the project would create new housing opportunities and improve a blighted property. I thought it was a no brainer.

The board members reviewing this proposal were conflicted. While it received support from the neighborhood, the site was zoned single-family, reflecting a neighborhood plan that had been completed a few years prior. The city staff report reflected the opinion that the rezoning would adversely affect “the balance of land uses,” which in this neighborhood were fairly mixed, as well as “the character of the neighborhood,” despite this building already existing. Staff also said it would have “a negative effect on adjacent properties,” even though many were multi-family as well.

The Board ultimately decided to defer to staff and the neighborhood plan and recommend denial. The consensus implicitly agreed that letting it sit vacant and covered in graffiti was better than seeing it occupied by local residents.

Likewise, Asheville’s city council would rather have seen the hotel site sit vacant than facilitate the development of a tax productive use. Embassy Suites today brings in about $140,000 in property tax revenue for the city. Between the legal fees the city spent on the lawsuit—over $200,000—and the 5 years the project was delayed, the city lost the equivalent of more than 6 years of property tax revenue—saying nothing of the property taxes for the county or the bed taxes for the tourism development authority. And they were willing to do this indefinitely, holding onto the blind hope that a perfect development would come along—that after witnessing their ineptitude a developer would willingly sign up to put themselves through that process.

Planners’ fear of leading

Last but not least, planners themselves are aiding and abetting the fear-based rationales used by elected leaders. The criteria the hotel proposal was judged against required the developer to show that the development wouldn’t worsen traffic. It also wanted them to prove that their proposal was in harmony with the “scale, bulk, coverage, density, and character of the area”—an impossibility in most growing districts, and certainly in one where the allowable height maximum of 265 feet is wildly out of proportion with most buildings. The planners’ own criteria seemed to contradict the type of growth they were trying to encourage in downtown. Thankfully, partly due to this court case, this criteria no longer applies.

Still, Asheville’s zoning code says that in the Central Business District they must attempt to balance all modes of transportation. This might feel innocuous, but in a country where the car has had an outsized impact on our built environment, continuing to “balance” all modes would mean leaving car dominance unchecked.

In the Atlanta case study I mentioned above, planners said that the fourplex was “incompatible” and it would “have a negative effect” on the surrounding single-family properties. This is language that is woefully outdated and just wrong. It has no basis in fact. It’s supported by no data nor any research. Its sole rationale I can only attribute to fear rooted in classist and racist beliefs. It’s a view that the planning profession should explicitly reject.

It should be urban planners’ job to challenge elected leaders’ incompetence. However, their regulations and recommendations can feed into outdated views that stifle cities. It’s true that politicians decide our fate, but planners can and do tee them up with the wrong priorities.

I believe in compromise for the sake of progress. I believe the planning profession is primarily tasked with managing change for the greatest possible outcome—and that inherently comes with compromise. But there are some things the profession needs to draw a line on.

There is too much historical knowledge about the perils of demonizing multifamily housing and the costs of decimating our cities for highways and parking lots; too much research showing how strict zoning makes our cities more expensive and segregated, and how building infrastructure for cars only induces demand; too much actual harm and death resulting from this infrastructure being dangerous by design; too many arguments against the pseudoscience of parking minimums and traffic projections; and too much data on the financial failures of sprawl. The planning profession has too much awareness and understanding for equivocating statements about “balancing all modes” in a downtown area or claiming that an apartment rehab would suddenly make a 64-year-old building incompatible with its neighborhood.

Using professional-sounding jargon (e.g., “adverse effect on the balance of uses”) to defend an argument that lacks any meaningful justification, and in fact is contrary to what history and research tell us, is at best misjudgment and at worst sophistry.

Planners must not allow their profession to be wielded as a cudgel to enforce harmful transportation priorities, outdated zoning codes, or narrow political agendas. Planners shouldn’t compromise their standards for political reasons. In planning, knowledge and ethics should always trump fear.

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Thumbnail art: “City Landscape.” 1955. Joan Mitchell. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Society for Contemporary American Art.