School Board Rejects Land Sale for Urgently Needed Affordable Housing Project
Board members cited the district-owned parcel's continued use by the Brevard High School agricultural program. Residents also worried about traffic and flooding.
BREVARD — Transylvania County School Board members had all said they opposed selling a district-owned parcel near Brevard High School for use as a planned affordable housing project.
They had all announced at Monday’s meeting that they were unwilling to take the deal’s first step, declaring the property “surplus” to the needs of the district — effectively killing plans for an 84-unit apartment complex that would have housed a range of low-income and working residents.
But Board member Kimsey Jackson wanted to make sure.
He introduced a motion stating “we find this property is not surplus, and therefore we terminate this discussion.”
It passed unanimously, drawing cheers and whoops of approval from the overflow crowd at the meeting.
The deciding factor: The 7.7-acre property, across N. Country Club Road from the high school, is used by its agricultural program to grow hay and provide a “hands-on learning opportunity” for 300 students, said Sarah Clayton, one of the school’s two agriculture teachers and the first of more than a dozen speakers who opposed the development.
Losing the field, she said, “would be a big detriment to what we can do with our program.”
The project’s developer, Workforce Homestead Inc., had offered to pay the district $650,000 for the property, which had previously been imagined as the site of student-built housing for teachers.
In an earlier discussion of the offer, the School Board had requested an independent appraisal, which came in at $644,000, School Superintendent Jeff McDaris said at the meeting.
Though the parcel’s continued use was cited by Board members as the reason for their vote, speakers who identified themselves as nearby residents also brought up concerns that the project would cause flooding on nearby land and pump cars onto N. Country Club.
“Traffic is a nightmare,” said Ann Franklin, who lives on Gillespie Circle, just north of the parcel. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to cancel appointments because I can’t get out of my own street and onto a road that is already congested and apparently poorly maintained.”
But like many other speakers and Board members, she recognized the pressing need for affordable housing in a county where the median price of a single-family home, $403,000, recently surpassed that of Buncombe County.
“It is with some trepidation that I address this, because . . . I want to live in a community where there is affordable housing,” she said.
Brevard Realtor Amy Fisher, who represented Workforce Homestead at the meeting, said the company had searched the city for properties that would allow the project to qualify for federal programs needed to finance it.
“That was the only site in the city,” Fisher said after the vote. “That was it.”
The project would have offered one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments to residents earning between 40 and 80 percent of the county’s median annual income — or between about $17,000 for an individual to as much as $47,280 for a family of four, according to a document Workforce Homestead sent to the district. That would include some teachers, especially those with large families and no other household revenue, Fisher said.
Board Vice Chair Ron Kiviniemi wasn’t convinced. Though he said he was “initially intrigued” by the proposal, the more he studied it, the more he realized that the apartments would be available to “few to none” of the district’s teachers.
But the document from Workforce Homestead listed many other workers who could have rented at the complex, including housekeepers, van drivers, librarians and deputies.
The project’s range of accessibility, the document said, would “enable affordability to a wide swath of households working in various sectors of the local economy.”
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