Here it comes; we better be ready

“Both the median sales price ($325,000) and the average sales price ($379,003) rose 26.5 percent and 20.3 percent year-over-year respectively [in Haywood County], while the average list price rose 21.4 percent compared to last year, to $429,042.”

We are at one of those tipping points in the mountain region, a time when locals, recent transplants, parttime residents and those looking to move here are all looking around and trying to comprehend the seemingly rapid growth, the escalating prices, and how this is going to affect their own lives and this place we call home.

We wrote a story last week about Wall Street Books, which has been a Waynesville mainstay for 28 years. The building it calls home has recently been sold, and so the bookstore owners have been told they need to pack up their 50,000 books and find a new home over the next few months.

To call that news unsettling for the bookstore owners is an understatement, but it’s the same feeling many who live and work around Western North Carolina are feeling. And it’s not just rents that are going up.

The paragraph at the beginning of this column is from the multiple listing service used by all real estate professionals in Haywood County. Average home prices have risen more than 21 percent in just a single year. That kind of increase prices more and more people out of a market that two years ago was already in the midst of an affordable housing crisis.

In Waynesville alone, there are plans for about 800 new single-family homes, townhouses, condos and apartments to be built over the next couple of years. That doesn’t account for the custom building one sees as they drive around town. It also doesn’t include all the building occurring throughout the rest of Haywood County and the entire region. Every county in this newspaper’s distribution area — Haywood, Jackson, Macon, Swain and Buncombe — had record tourism numbers in 2020, a trend that has continued in 2021. As the pandemic turned people away from large cities, WNC became a wonderful alternative. As we who call this place home know all too well, often those vacations to these mountains turn into a love affair and a desire to eventually move here.

For those of us already here, it’s obvious why folks are coming: if you want to escape the storm-ravaged coastal areas, the infernos burning out West or the drought-stricken stretches of the Great Plains, well, Western North Carolina and its four distinct seasons, mountains, and relatively mild weather looks like a pretty damn good alternative.

All this activity is pumping a lot of money into the economy, that’s for sure. But it’s also leading many to worry that the very reason they love mountain communities like Waynesville — its charm, small-town feel, unique personality — will be lost in the frenzy of development.

I just don’t think that’s going to happen. Waynesville has strong development ordinances to guide the coming growth. Developers of all the homes and apartments must follow these rules, and town staff is doing its part to make sure this happens.

Way back in 2007, when that real estate boom was happening, we heard many of the same sentiments. Towns and counties throughout the region, for the most part, bit the bullet and established strong guidelines. Here’s a quote from a column I wrote in August of that year: “Last week Jackson County commissioners passed what is being called the strongest set of development regulations in North Carolina. They’ve set a standard for other counties to follow, and we think they’ve accomplished this in a manner that won’t hurt the home-building industry that has become so important to Western North Carolina.”

We need housing in the region west of Asheville. The rental market has always been tight and places hard to find. None of this new development directly addresses the affordable housing crisis, but that’s an important issue our communities can’t ignore forever.

The reality is we can’t pull up the ladder or lock the gate and keep people from coming to the mountains. No, the best we can hope for is an engaged citizenry, thoughtful elected leaders and rules and regulations that encourage smart growth that avoids sprawl and all the problems associated with it. (Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com.)

Scott McLeod Editor

Don’t let ‘conservatives’ destroy our ideals

To the Editor:

This is in regards to Sen. Thom Tillis email of 3:10 a.m. Saturday morning, Dec 4, “Preventing $450,000 payments to illegal immigrants.”

The former “president” did untold damage to America with his tax cuts and his pandemic response, as well as his actions at our borders. Those who thinks it’s OK to separate parents from their children as was done by his regime, have even less heart than him.

I am a constituent, 73, a USAF Vietnam veteran, seven years in the service.

The email, and the proposed legislation, is the most perfect example of fake news, perfected by the disgraced, dishonorable, disgusting 45th “president” who continues to lie and divide us, thanks to the likes of Sen. Tillis.

The former “president” and all the other planners/leaders of the January 6 attack on Washington, D.C., should be behind bars. That he remains free to lie, divide and incite, is totally the result of senators who, fearful of his rabble-rousing, failed in their duty to the Constitution and their oath of office.

Republican “conservatives” have absolutely no problem descending to the depths of divisive anti-American rhetoric in order to fire up their racist, extremist, radical white supremacist base. It worked for 45, right? It worked once.

People of good will had no idea how many confederate-minded traitors to the ideals of our founders existed in today’s America. They must not prevail, despite all of their efforts to bias our voting processes in every way that might seem possible by people who have no regard for our country and its forward progress.

William Aylor Bryson City

LETTERS

American democracy is backsliding

To the Editor:

By now most Americans (and people around the globe) will have learned that the United States (for the very first time) has been added to the list of “backsliding democracies” by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. America has fallen victim to “authoritarian tendencies,” the Institute stated in its Global State of Democracy 2021 report. We have been “knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” a direct result of former President Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 elections and his efforts to pressure state election officials into changing vote totals and, lest we forget, the January 6th insurrection that evidence clearly shows, Donald Trump provoked and inflamed.

The report added there were “spillover effects” around the world, an “anti-democratic model followed by political actors in Brazil, Mexico, Myanmar and Peru,” to name a few. It should come as no surprise that the destruction of our democracy will have a deleterious domino effect throughout the free world. Talk about giving “aid and comfort to the enemy,” we’ve done this to ourselves, no help needed from foreign adversarial powers, the leaders of which are dancing in the streets while we suffer, struggle and bleed democracy

with every passing day.

It is imperative, absolutely essential, that our leaders immediately acknowledge and respond to the most direct and dangerous threat to our republic since WWII. If they don’t, the loss of our independence, our sovereignty and our democracy, beyond a shadow of a doubt, will trigger worldwide repercussions and consequences.

Make no mistake, Americans can no longer trust or take anything for granted. Donald Trump (endorsed and aided by the Republican leadership and Party majority) has rendered a previously functional democratic government - impotent. Approximately two and a half centuries after declaring our independence we have finally witnessed an American citizen proving himself (thus far at least) immune to and above the law. Law and order (as we conceived it) is essentially an illusion; “checks and balances,” a figment of our collective imaginations; “representative government;” a pipe dream; and our Constitution, simply meaningless dialogue from a bygone era. If we, the American people, cannot convince our leaders to honor and respect their oath, to put our nation’s well-being and prosperity above party politics and their own self-interest and do the jobs they were elected to do, right now this very day, then we aren’t going to have much of a country left worth defending and the American experiment, that countless numbers of men and women have sacrificed so much blood and treasure for, will be lost forever.