- Website: lindseyforcouncil.org
- Employment: Manager, WE DO campaign, Campaign for Southern Equality
- Party affiliation: Democrat
- Previous candidacy: Ran for Asheville City Council in 2007
What are three achievable goals that you would champion in the next two years?
Fully fund the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Then work toward mandating the inclusion of an affordable housing component in new projects by developers. Three cities in North Carolina have such requirements: Carrboro, Chapel Hill and Davidson. If they can implement this policy, which has proven the most effective way to create new affordable housing units nationwide, so can we. Finally, I would support after-school programming in targeted communities and seek ways to use community development block grants to pay for it.
What are the best strategies for increasing affordable housing in Asheville?
We need to address this problem now rather than waiting for it to become even more daunting years down the road. First, fully fund the Affordable Housing Trust Fund at the original level: 1 cent per $100 of taxation. Second, increase density citywide by tweaking ordinances such as the one making it easier for people to build accessory dwelling units. Third, get developers to include affordable units in new development. As the chair of the Affordable Housing Committee, I’ve been glad to see affordable housing receiving more attention recently: We are now moving toward solutions.
What is one recent City Council decision you don’t agree with, and how would you have handled it differently?
I would have voted to fully fund the Affordable Housing Trust Fund this year.
What makes Asheville home for you?
I moved here as a homeless gay teenager, because I heard Asheville was a more accepting community. I first found work at Waffle House and in construction. I finally saved enough for a deposit on a crappy small apartment. I wondered how it could be that I was working so hard and yet still found it difficult to meet my basic needs. That led me to get involved in politics. Now I’ve gone from homeless to homeowner. I plan to get married and raise children here. I bring a different perspective of lived experience, and that’s why I want to serve as Asheville’s first openly gay elected official.
Do you support expanding the tourism industry, or should we focus on other areas of economic development? Or do you think government shouldn’t play a role?
Tourism has always been a part of Asheville and WNC, and it’s an important piece of our economic puzzle. But the industry pays many in it less than a living wage. The economic balance is off right now. The city and county get very little back from the hotel occupancy tax to help us meet the increased demands tourism places on our fire and police services, roads and parking. We need to attract and grow truly living-wage jobs for the long haul, and we need to keep our money in this community.
A recent study showed that Buncombe County had lower growth in middle-class jobs than other areas. What can the city do to address this?
The city needs to find ways to provide concierge-style service for entrepreneurs. We should focus on growing the economy by supporting businesses already here, especially minority-owned businesses. We can look at increasing our partnerships with Mountain BizWorks and Self-Help Credit Union.
With Asheville growing so fast and several new hotels being built downtown, how do you plan to address the inevitable traffic problems on city streets and I-240?
The best way of dealing with traffic is encouraging multimodal transportation and alternate forms of transit. Surveys show that 85 percent of our current bus riders are people who have no other choice. Only 15 percent of our ridership is actively choosing that form of transportation The better our bus system is, the more people will ride it. We also need to look at increasing parking fees downtown to incentivize ride-sharing and transit use, generate revenue for the city and reduce traffic.
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