ASHEVILLE – Millennials – some of them at least – say they feel Asheville has spurned them. They can’t find an affordable apartment. They can’t get a decent job.

Some employers complain the local labor pool — many of them millennials, the generation often considered to include people 18-34 — lacks the skill set they require.

According to Meridith Elliott Powell, a nationally known business growth consultant based in Asheville, “Both sides are absolutely both right and absolutely wrong.”

People tend to wait for everyone else to fix their problems, said Powell, who has advised clients including ING and IBM on challenges such as understanding communication styles and behaviors in the workplace.

The most recent employment figures show Asheville does have job openings in unprecedented numbers. But those jobs, too, aren’t the ones everyone would want. So, whether millennials are being done wrong could boil down to individual circumstances.

April marked the ninth consecutive month with the highest level of nonfarm payroll employment ever for that month in the Asheville metro area, according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Total jobs in April hit 218,400, those data show.

Those figures are not seasonally adjusted, which means federal officials did not alter them to account for fluctuations such as seasonal hiring during the holidays.

The Asheville metro area comprises Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson and Madison counties.

Tourism and retail are the primary drivers in Asheville’s economy. But they don’t pay well. Average annual wages last year for tourism jobs in the Asheville metro were $17,569, according to BLS data released earlier this month. Retail paid a little higher, at $24,761.

The wasteland

For Lauryn Higgins, one problem might be that the city is too small.

Laid off from an area mortgage company last month, Higgins, 23, remains unemployed. She got another job soon after being let go by the mortgage company, but that didn’t work out, she said Tuesday.

And applications for publishing company and graphics design firm positions failed.

So exasperated with her situation, and the city she’s lived in for 13 months, is Higgins that she’s planning to skip town in December. Possible destinations include Charleston, South Carolina, New York and Seattle.

“The traditional 9-to-5 jobs young people are looking for are not to be found,” Higgins wrote in a Citizen-Times opinion piece published Sunday. “A generation ago, college graduates were turning down jobs and negotiating their salaries; now our generation is just begging for a salary.”

A 2014 Mars Hill University graduate, Higgins said in the interview that Asheville is too small.

She criticized her peers, too. She meets lots of people younger than 25 without a college degree, “just hanging out, not really doing much to prepare themselves for what’s next,” Higgins said.

But she doesn’t want to blame her cohort. “Asheville seems to attract people who are stagnant.”

Austin Davis, 22, a UNC Asheville senior scheduled to graduate in December, isn’t impressed with the city either.

The anthropology major said his experience here has been that employers ignore his training and abilities.

“Asheville is very picky in who they select,” said Davis, a Raleigh native who’s living in the city for the summer.

It frustrates him that his resume, which includes academic training and two internships, isn’t enough, Davis said. Some employers don’t know what his anthropology skill set is — multiple research approaches and data analysis, for example, he said.

Davis concedes those with genuine experience and hard skills — internships and math aptitude, for instance — are going to have an easier time getting a job.

And he said he understands having the specific know-how relevant to a particular place will result in more success.

He cited being a musician in Asheville as an example.

The lucky ones

Singing, songwriting, playing guitar and managing his band have enabled Andrew Scotchie, 22, to live off the income he earns from his art.

Some months are “very hard,” he said, and the room he uses as his office where he lives near downtown Asheville is “very small.”

“But I’m doing fine,” said Scotchie, founder of Andrew Scotchie the River Rats band. “I make enough to put a roof over my head, buy the equipment I need, pay my band members, buy merchandise, put clothes on my back and the guitars I want.”

Scotchie emphasized that part of his success was due to a collaborative attitude among musicians in Asheville.

They could compete with each other, but they don’t, he said. Instead, they help each other to achieve their goals.

“In the music and entertainment worlds, we’re working together — I’m thankful for that,” Scotchie said.

It’s the opposite of what he sees in the world of 9-to-5 jobs, he said.

“There’s so much competition there,” Scotchie said. “People slip through the cracks. There’s not a lot of people hoisting other people up in that world.”

A public policy and public affairs fellowship program in Los Angeles hoisted up Cortland Mercer a couple years back.

He credits that experience with leading him to his position as an associate at the High Lantern Group in the company’s Asheville office. The strategic communications firm is based in Los Angeles.

Mercer, 27, grew up in Charlotte. He describes the concerns his fellow millennials have about Asheville, which he agrees “is a great place to be,” as legitimate.

His superiors invited him to move from Los Angeles and return to North Carolina.

“I had to consider where I was in my career and I worried about what professional opportunities would be there,” Mercer said. “I was moving back for a good job. But what about the next one? I could be setting myself up for something that’s not advantageous.”

The market

What’s not advantageous for some in the Asheville area is the region’s tourism economy.

A total of 27,300 tourism positions existed in April, federal labor data show. Retail tallied 25,300 jobs that month.

But education and health services boasted 34,900 positions in April. Average annual pay for that sector in 2014 was $46,152.

Mission Health had postings earlier this month for hundreds of openings with salaries between $44,000 and $137,000, said Jerri Jameson, spokeswoman for Asheville’s largest employer. About 10,000 people work at the health care company.

But as Davis, the UNCA student, said, if applicants don’t have the requisite qualifications, Mission Health isn’t going to hire them. Jameson concurred.

Compounding the difficulty of finding a high-paying job is Asheville’s bleak rental situation.

Bowen National Research, an Ohio-based real-estate market consulting firm, concluded in December that median rents for market-rate apartments in the Asheville metro area ranged from $832 to $3,300 and $583 to $1,187 for tax-credit units.

Worse, Bowen researchers found an apartment vacancy rate of 1 percent.

“Low wages, a lack of professional jobs and sky-high rents are pushing people out of the city,” Aaron Sarver wrote in a Sunday Citizen-Times op-ed piece.

“We’ve got to find a way to build more affordable housing,” Sarver said. The West Asheville resident, 37, is communications director for the Campaign for Southern Equality. That Asheville nonprofit advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality.

“Average rents across the board in Asheville and Buncombe County compared with median wages pose an affordability problem,” Sarver said. “That’s true, regardless of whether you’re a UNCA student or a senior on a fixed income.”

The median annual salary of all occupations in the Asheville metro area during May was $30,264, according to the most recent data provided by BLS.

The median represents the salary level in the middle of all jobs. That means the same number of jobs exist that pay below the median as exist that pay above the median.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technologyliving-wage calculator puts a Buncombe County living wage at $20,155 a year.

The bosses

A different type of conundrum sometimes exists for Asheville’s employers, said Emi Kubota, vice president of i play. Inc., a company that manufactures and sells baby products.

“Employers get stuck with bringing people in (from outside Asheville) and that has plenty of risk as well,” Kubota said. “People move here and say there are no jobs, but that’s because they don’t have the skills for the jobs that are here.”

Entry-level positions exist at i play., which employs about 65 people, 68 percent of whom are women. But Kubota said she advises applicants to obtain the necessary skills before applying.

“We can train for a lot of things,” she said. “But we can’t train people how to use Adobe Illustrator. We can’t teach the hard skills because we’re moving fast. We need people who can move fast.”

Qualifications for a job at i play. range from warehouse jobs to design and accounting positions.

Wages for positions in the distribution center start at $9 an hour plus benefits, with the opportunity to double with increased skills and experience, Kubota said. Professional jobs could start anywhere between $25,000 a year and $75,000 annually, depending on the necessary skills, whether they are sales and marketing, product design, IT, or accounting.

The company recently lost a valuable and skilled employee when a company in Cleveland, Ohio, recruited her and paid her twice the salary she was earning at i play., Kubota said.

“That was a surprise,” she said. “We weren’t checking comparable salaries for her level of talent on the eastern seaboard.”

Kubota said the experience was instructive in reminding i play. executives that people aren’t bound to Asheville simply because it’s a great place to live.

“People are mobile and are willing to move for better opportunities,” she said. “That’s something we have to keep in mind when putting together our compensation and benefit plans.”

Other employers, such as Ben Hamrick, chief executive officer of the Asheville accounting firm Johnson Price Sprinkle, accept that they aren’t going to be offering the same salaries as similar positions in Charlotte and Raleigh.

“It’s the price we all pay in exchange for being in the wonderful place we live,” said Hamrick, who also chairs the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce board.

Still, Johnson Price Sprinkle is always looking to hire people who fit the firm’s culture and starting pay per year may be in the low $50,000 range, Hamrick said.

That culture encompasses being involved in activities that improve the Asheville community. JPS wants to bring aboard individuals with a like-minded civic spirit.

“We’re finding that appeals to young people coming out of college — that they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves,” Hamrick said.

Like Scotchie, the musician, Hamrick said he, too, finds a collaborative ethic in Asheville.

Yes, bankers, lawyers and other professionals compete, but when they involve themselves in chamber of commerce activities, they put that aside to focus on improving Asheville.

“That might make Asheville unique,” Hamrick said. “I know it doesn’t work like that everywhere. That’s something that perhaps not all people here appreciate or grasp.”

It’s that type of vision that Elliott Powell, the Asheville business consultant, says area employers and millennial applicants must agree on to make the region economically viable.

“Government is not going to solve the problem,” Elliott Powell said. “Raising the minimum wage or establishing a living wage is just a Band-Aid.”

Instead, Asheville employers and millennials need to meet and discuss what they want this city to look like in five to 10 years, she said.

“Start with the reality of where we are, then ask both sides that question,” Elliott Powell said. “It’s going to take sacrifice from both parties.”

ASHEVILLE — City residents Wednesday criticized a proposed hotel room tax that one resident called a “slush fund” and said was arranged behind closed doors.

About a dozen people attended the morning Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority meeting where they called for the authority to share some of a $9 million hotel tax that could grow to $14 million under a bill in the General Assembly. That would reduce the burden on city property owners, who will see their taxes rise in July, they said.

Five Points neighborhood resident Heather Rayburn said it made sense when the state created the tax in 1983 to funnel the money back into promoting the area’s struggling tourism industry. But now, some of the tax should be dedicated to city services, such as road repair and police, she and five other speakers said.

“Today, it makes more sense for us to use the hotel tax to help pay for the services used by your guests,” Rayburn said. “Unfortunately, you view the hotel tax as an entitlement and not a tariff. But what other industry gets to tap into tax money to fund its advertising after overbuilding its market?”

TDA Chairman Bob Patel defended the authority’s control tax. Patel asked attendees to picture “how this county and city would look if you completely take tourism out of the formula.”

The issue of control of the hotel tax came to a head recently after some City Council members criticized hoteliers for asking state legislators to raise the 4 percent tax to 6 percent without consulting Asheville officials. Council members said they had been asking members of the tourism industry to support adding 1 percent for affordable housing. Council members said they then learned a deal was already underway between hoteliers and state lawmakers.

The bill to make the changes got tentative approval from the state House Wednesday on a 96-14 vote. It had been delayed because of concerns that changes not related to the Buncombe room tax were needed, but that turned out not to be the case, said lead sponsor Rep. Roger West, R-Cherokee.

The bill will become law if it passes a final vote in the House set Thursday.

At Wednesday’s TDA meeting, Rayburn continued the criticism of the deal.

“A tax is a user fee and, in a democracy, decisions about a tax should take place in the sunshine — not in secret, behind closed doors,” the Five Points resident said.

Stephanie Brown, executive director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the organization that carries out TDA functions, defended the deal.

“I think the process has been consistent with the way the taxes have been developed. It’s a tax on one industry that is kind of directed by that industry,” she said after the meeting.

In other places, such as Alexandria, Virginia, where Brown is from, the tax is levied by the city, which puts the proceeds into its general fund. The city then doles out portions for tourism, Brown said. But in North Carolina, the state legislature must pass a law creating the tax. In general, the state has restricted how the proceeds can be used, Brown said.

The specific state law written for Buncombe County puts the TDA in control of tax money. The law says the money must go toward promoting and increasing hotel business.

Council candidate Rich Lee was one of the speakers and said some residents might not understand the “constraints” of how TDA can use the tax.

“I would ask you, however, to consider the sentiment of the public and to take it seriously,” Lee said. “The perception is that Asheville’s boom is not being shared.”

This week, the council passed a 1.5-cent property tax increase. That sharpened the point for some residents.

Valerie Hoh, who lives in the Kenilworth neighborhood, said the TDA should find a way to help with the city costs, especially for downtown, which bears most of the traffic from tourists.

“After all, don’t these tourists come to Asheville for a thriving downtown?” Hoh said.

While the tax is meant to help the hotel industry, it has a multiplier effect that boosts the regional economy, tourism officials said. Brown introduced a promotional video at the meeting that showed figures including the creation of 24,856 local jobs by tourism — and the generation of $144 million in state and local taxes, saving each county household $1,232.

With the proceeds of the tax, 75 percent goes toward tourism marketing. But 25 percent goes toward product development. Those products or projects are also supposed to boost hotel business. But they can be products that can have community benefits, such as improvements at the John B. Lewis Soccer Complex or sidewalks and greenways in the River Arts District, Patel said.

“There is a lot of stuff that touches the average citizen of this county,” the TDA chairman said.

The TDA has taken some steps to put more of the funds into local government projects, Brown said. Those include a deal to make sure 25 percent of the new tax also goes to product development.

In deciding who gets the product grants, the TDA recently passed new guidelines that should also send more money toward city projects, she said. Multimillion-dollar projects can now get earmarked for multiple years of funding, she said.

There is also a fast track procedure in which an applicant such as the city could ask for money at a time that is outside of the regular grant-giving cycle.

Staff writer Mark Barrett contributed to this report.