Asheville’s affordable housing challenge won’t get solved with magical thinking

We are loading in hotels where affordable housing could go… and more higher paying white collar, ‘green collar’, and ’no collar’ jobs to help pay for higher quality housing for each citizen. People in poverty in Asheville have emergency level needs. Increasing net worth by cutting housing costs and increasing SNAP funds while raising the Federal […]

Buncombe tourism advertising needs to be an industry expense versus public expense

Here’s my email on the occupancy tax and BCTDA: Subj: Buncombe tourism advertising needs to be an industry expense versus public expense, 6/28/15 Greetings to those with local fiscal and legislative control over Buncombe County’s Tourism Development Authority, Heather Rayburn is right that factors at BCTDA’s inception in 1983 no longer apply. I wish the […]

Teamwork and an open source approach to our challenges can replace AdvantageWest

I have talked about the old A-B Vision program Citizen-Times supported around 2002-2003 with Citizen-Times managing editor ‪Josh Awtry and how that kind of forum is needed again. This new ‘community conversation’ program should take up where GroWNC left off. I think asking what’s next after AdvantageWest closed—and I also say GroWNC should be included […]

Poverty Innovation

Asheville is experiencing the same inequality challenges as the rest of the nation is. The Ford Foundation has helped us all greatly by establishing how crucial getting America back on track id by forming sufficient local and state anti-poverty strategy supported at the Federal level. Short-term thinking in markets, e.g. the classic MBA theory of […]