By Jay Walljasper
Asheville traveled pretty far down the same path as most American cities in the 1970s and 80s with a dwindling downtown and booming suburbs. All the boarded up buildings gave rise to a proposal to tear down eleven square blocks downtown and construct a state-of-the-art shopping mall. Plans fell through and the mall was build elsewhere, hurting downtown even more in the short run but setting the state for a remarkable revival.
Downtown Asheville today - with its wealth of restored art deco architecture and an almost absence of chain stores - rivals the Blue Ridge Mountains and Biltmore mansion as a tourist draw, says Robin Cape of the Asheville Buncombe Sustainable Community Inititative and former city council member. The historical buildings foster lively streetlife, plentiful small businesses and a flourishing arts scene. An old Woolworth store has been repurposed as Woolworth Walk - a collection of galleries featuring photography, paintings, jewelry and music. You can visit artists' studios in the nearby River Arts District.
The congeniality and energy of this relatively small city (population: 85,000) explains why it lands near the top of many lists of the best places to live. That's why New Belgium (the iconic brand behind Fat Tire Ale) is building a new brewery here and the Moog Music technology company relocated from New York. Asheville also hosts a cluster of businesses in a field that is unfortunately certain to grow in the coming years: climate change. The federal National Climate Data Center - the world's largest depository of weather information - has been here for decades and is now joined by the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and The Collider Center for Climate and Resilience, which Robin Cape describes as a hub for scientists, entrepreneurs and artists working on solutions and adaptions to climate change.
With all that going for it, Asheville might seem to be the rare city that doesn't need a cluster group to work on creative solutions to its problems across many sectors.
Not so fast, says Vice Mayor Marc Hunt. The average median earnings here are $25,000 and rising real estate prices mean many of the artists who give the city its identity worry about being priced out of town. "Average job growth and capital investment as well as wages are relatively weak here," he says.
"What our CEOs for Cities Cluster is working on is how to leverage our unique, strong assets to grow and attract employers who pay higher wages. This is helping our civic leadership see how we can collaborate really well on this, and involve younger people who have not been at the table yet."
Stay tuned for updates on Asheville's efforts to tackle low wages and gentrification...
This blog is an excerpt from our recent report "The Connected City: Stories and Lessons from The Connected City." Check out the full report here.