Get ready for a WNC housing explosion

Like confetti in Times Square on New Year's Eve, the new houses are going to begin raining down on WNC one day. And we are not ready.

All of the signs, mostly dollar signs, are around us. These assembly-line houses are backed up in the pipeline fed by giant corporations whose sole business is cramming as much house into as little space as they can get away with.

They are anxiously waiting for the day when the White House finally lands a knockout punch to the Federal Reserve and takes control of the nation's interest rates.

Not in our little old countryside, you say? Yes. We're a cheap date for the likes of national corporations that build houses.

The signs are there as these deep-pocketed companies zero in on towns that are vulnerable, and they apparently will dice our onion in more ways than a good chef could ever imagine.

This week in Asheville, the City Council held a public hearing on a proposal to build three dozen homes. That doesn't sound like much until you look closer. The proposing company wants to put 35 houses on 5.8 acres. That would mean a single lot would be about 3,000 square feet, considerably smaller than a McDonald's. That's the entire lot, not the house. In the proposal, the houses would be 12 feet apart.

In that case, I guess if you wanted to talk to your neighbor, you could do it from the kitchen window.

It will be worth following what's happening before the Asheville City Council to see if it will approve this, but we do know that as more and more people move to Western North Carolina, more housing is needed. There already is a significant demand for affordable housing that isn't being met.

When we retired and moved to WNC, we bought 40 acres in Rutherford County near the Polk County line and built from the ground up an organic blueberry farm with dairy goats, chickens, turkeys, guineas, honeybees, horses and pastures. We weren't the only folks around, but if I had fired a shot off my front porch, no one would have been harmed.

That was in 2011. Today, there are houses on all four corners of that farm, and the nearby once small and struggling Boiling Springs, S.C., the place we often drove to for food and supplies, has gone through rapid growth as Spartanburg and Greenville exploded with people in search of a place to live that was affordable and provided a tolerable commute. Boiling Springs now has a bona fide rush hour. It's not a pretty sight.

I hope we can count on our elected and appointed officials who bear the responsibility for the future of our immediate surrounding homeland to keep their eyes and minds focused on what we have going for us, because it needs to be protected.

More housing isn't a bad thing. It's how it's done that matters.

Larry McDermott is a local retired farmer/journalist. Reach him at [email protected]