News

LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: Zoning vote exacerbates housing crisis

By Lightning Editorial Board, Published: August 17, 2024

When 13 elected and appointed leaders passed judgment on a rezoning request for a residential development in Hoopers Creek, only two got it right.

Trey Ford cast the only no vote when the Henderson County Planning Board voted 7-1 to recommend denial of the request; David Hill was the sole dissenter when the Board of Commissioners slapped it down in a 4-1 decision.

The vote on Aug. 5 continued the regrettable trend of the  Board Commissioners siding with homeowners who organize, rise up and barnstorm public meeting rooms with horrific predictions of high-density development blowing up quality of life. If commissioners always say no to development on our famously inadequate farm-to-market roads, then they will greenlight nothing denser than estate lots, ensuring that the new housing stock we get remains out of reach for working families.

Landowners Kenneth and Alline Rhodes and Hoopers Creek Land LLC had sought a rezoning of a 13-acre tract from R2R residential to R1 residential. Because R1 is the highest density category, neighboring homeowners were able to paint the worst-case scenario, even if that was exaggerated and, by the applicant’s own public pledge, not what the developer planned.

Standard residential density in R1 is 4 units per acre. Intermediate residential density is 6 units per acre. And while R1 does permit a multifamily development of 16 units per acre, that use would require a separate conditional rezoning application. That’s why Jesse Swords, the attorney for the developer, all but offered to swear an affidavit that multi-family was not the intent.

“This is not a request for apartments,” Swords told commissioners. “If the plan was for apartments we would be here in a totally different setting in a totally different process. That’s not the plan here.”

Homeowners from two Livingston Farms developments, the Cove and the Reserve, happen to be in Fletcher’s high-density development zone, which allows four units per acre in single-family dwellings and 10 units per acre of multi-family units. None mentioned during their impassioned testimony that their own subdivisions were controversial back when the Fletcher Town Council annexed the former farmland and adopted the zoning more than 20 years ago.

“You’re lucky Fletcher took you in,” Planning Board member Jim Miller told the homeowners on July 18. “I doubt that Henderson County would have allowed your subdivision on this road, so that’s the ironic thing or it’s the pitiful thing.”

The rezoning that the landowner and developer sought is on property between the Cove and Reserve, which have lots of a quarter-acre and third of an acre respectively. In other words, as Commissioner Hill observed, the new development would have been consistent with, not a departure from, what’s there now.

“He is surrounded by quarter-acre lots,” Hill said. “They’re basically trying to mimic what’s around them. They’re basically asking for what’s there.”

The land is served by Hendersonville city water and Buncombe-based MSD sewer. The requested R1 zoning “would help accomplish Goal 7” of the recently adopted 2045 comp plan, which aims to “offer more housing choices, which can help bridge the gap in Middle Housing Development,” a staff report said.

Yet, apparently spooked by a primary election in which two incumbents lost their jobs, in part for their votes on development and floodplain regulations, commissioners have ceded land-use policy to the ascendant NIMBY nation power of neighbors who insist on slamming the gate behind them.

This, while  industry recruiters, plant managers, police and fire chiefs, public works superintendents and small-business owners rank affordable housing as the No. 1 need in the local economy and implore elected leaders to carry out public policies that help. When commissioners draw the line on residential density at half-acre lots, they’re ensuring that the affordable housing crisis continues.