Editor’s note: This article is part of a special section in the Sept. 18, 2015 Asheville Citizen-Times that will be placed in a time capsule at the base of Vance Monument to be opened 100 years from now.
Dear future,
We’ve been waiting patiently in the dust beneath the Vance Monument, buried beneath the decades as a billion tourists have trooped through Pack Square in the past century. We’ve waited a hundred years for a word with you.
You’ve been waiting as well, eager to pry open this memento from the past, wondering what was life like, what were people like in the Asheville of old, in the year 2015?
Here at Pack Square, we are at a crossroads, as you probably are a hundred years hence.
Centuries ago, drovers brought herds of goats, geese, turkeys and other stock right across this high point of town on the old Buncombe Turnpike. In our time, we have brought hordes of visitors to our downtown, eager to eat at our restaurants, shop our small businesses, quaff the craft beers that our Asheville has lately become famous for.
With the renaissance of downtown Asheville, its Art Deco architecture and its vibrant street life of buskers and busy sidewalks, we have been discovered by tourists from around the Southeast and the world. We are a small city that punches well above its weight class, only 88,000 strong in a county of 250,000 people, but we play host to 9 million visitors a year in Buncombe County
Down on the French Broad River, the New Belgium Brewery is set to open later this year on a former landfill and livestock market. We are looking forward to some $50 million of investment in the River Arts District, and the revival of a former industrial area, now full of empty, graffiti-strewn warehouses. Where auctioneers used to sell crops of burley tobacco, now artists are plying their creative wares and tourists keep coming.
But we are beginning to wonder if we are victims of our own success.
Cranes dot the city skyline this fall of 2015 with five new hotels rising around downtown. We collect a room tax on our visitors, but that money goes mainly to market the town to tourists, not to pay for the sidewalks and roads and parks that visitors enjoy along with locals.
We dwell on our “Pit of Despair,” a city-owned lot on Haywood Street, across from the U.S. Cellular Center, which once was a premier showroom for Cadillac automobiles. Plans for another hotel came to naught in this site, but many worry that some new high rise will still overshadow the twin towers and dome of the Basilica of St. Lawrence. Why not another park, rather than another hotel? City officials worry about the health of the city coffers. Hard to tax pigeons instead of hotel patrons.
We are debating whether residents should be able to rent out their homes on Airbnb, booked over the Internet. We like our property rights, but we also like our privacy and property values. We want to get to know our neighbors, not just a short-stay vacationer, some argue. We want visitors, but we don’t want them necessarily pushing out full-time residents.
Visiting Asheville is a delight. Living in Asheville is getting tougher for many.
In 2015, we are worried about the shortage of affordable housing. With so many people clamoring to live in such a beautiful place, even with a limited supply of houses and good jobs, many are paying a premium. Asheville still lags behind our lager sister cities in the state as far paychecks to feed growing families. We’re talking about a living wage, and how too few in the growing number of hospitality and retail jobs are making that $12.50 an hour without health insurance.
Each year, many of our best and brightest pull up stakes and head elsewhere for bigger paychecks and more opportunities.
The four-lane Interstate 240, cutting through Beaucatcher Mountain and the middle of town, comes to a standstill each afternoon. Too many cars trying to squeeze into crowded roads, commuters creeping home over the bottleneck of the Jeff Bowen Bridge. We have been talking for years about untangling our infrastructure, but a new Interstate 26 connector is still likely a decade away.
We live in richest country in the world but one of four children in our county can’t count on where their next meal is coming from. More than half of all Buncombe County schoolchildren are getting free or reduced-price school lunches.
Are children still going hungry in a hundred years? Are workers still scraping by from paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford a home of their own?
We wrestle with these worries, fill the Asheville Citizen-Times with concerned letters and debate. A printed newspaper may seem quaint to you, but the news probably hasn’t changed, even if you get it differently, electronically, perhaps telepathically.
You may shake your head at our decisions, you may think we were foolish in many ways, or wiser back in our time. But after all, you are not much different than us. We are your great-grandparents and ancestors. You are living in the houses we had, traveling these same roads.
That probably doesn’t help the challenges you face. Traffic. Jobs. Tourism. How to govern yourselves wisely. How to provide for the less fortunate. How to raise your children and grandchildren. How to preserve the goodness of these mountains that hold you as tightly as they cradled us in 2015.
And if you are standing here on Pack Square, we’ve been there before you.
Look to the southeast; Mount Pisgah still looms on the horizon. You, like us, are still blessed to be here in these oldest mountains on the planet. Perhaps you walk your dogs as we do along the French Broad River, one of the oldest rivers on Earth, even older than the green mountains that surround you. Natives know the pull of these hills. Many more have come and keep coming, seemingly called to make their home in Asheville.
You may have heard of a writer native to these parts named Thomas Wolfe, though likely not many of you have read him. He grew up in town and left to find literary fame, but he always felt the call of Asheville. In his last book, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” published after his early death, Wolfe wrote:
“But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.”
So dear future, if we have any words for you, here they are: Home is not a given. You have to make that place for your family, for your neighbors, for the generations to follow.
Don’t be afraid of your time.
Work together.
It’s the only thing that’s always worked for Asheville.
Sincerely,
Asheville, 2015
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