'Uncomfortable, unsafe': Asheville business owners, employees demand action from council

ASHEVILLE - Since she began working at Highland Brewing's downtown location in May 2022, taproom manager Amanda Ball said she's personally bought a knife, pepper spray and a small taser.

"I encourage all of my employees to protect themselves," Ball said. "I was scared for the safety of my employees, I was scared to come to work downtown, and we were all frightened to walk to our cars at night."

She was one of more than a dozen Asheville business owners, managers and employees who spoke before a packed room March 1, detailing their experiences with crime in downtown and other business districts.

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"I strongly believe if action is not taken, we will see more of these incidents occur in the upcoming season," Ball said. "Tourism downtown will start to diminish as ... crime rises."

Asheville City Council was invited to attend the March 1 "listening session" by members of the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority and the Asheville Chamber of Commerce, along with a cross-section of business owners and other community members, to discuss the impacts of crime in Asheville.

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City Manager Debra Campbell and other city staff, as well as Mayor Esther Manheimer, Vice Mayor Sandra Kilgore and council members Maggie Ullman, Kim Roney and Sage Turner were present, most seated in the front row as distressed employees took the stage.

“This has been an ongoing issue for downtown and other business districts for some time," Turner said as the meeting ended, people filtering from the room and back onto bustling downtown streets. She said it's not an issue that City Council can answer alone, but that she knows ignoring it is not a solution.

“There has to be a further understanding of what’s happening. How the magistrates play into this, how the (district attorney) plays into this, how we are really going to handle crime and reform in more than just words."

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'It's disheartening'

Fifty people filled a back room of Rhubarb, a downtown farm-to-table restaurant, with more turned away at the door after the room hit maximum capacity.

The meeting, which lasted about an hour, is part of an ongoing conversation in Asheville, as police staffing shortages, a recent rash of downtown break-ins and visible increases to the city's homeless population stoke community concern.

"We are hearing these stories continually, and it’s disheartening," Asheville Police Department Chief David Zack told the Citizen Times after the meeting. "We certainly understand what people are going through, and the police department is responding as well as it possibly can.”

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In what he called "constant" conversations with the city, he said they are working on strategies to recruit and train, efforts that include a a two year, $225,000 contract with a recruiting firm to assist the department with historic staffing lows.

“We can only offer, right now, the best we can do," he said. "And we’re doing our very best.”

According to APD spokesperson Samantha Booth Feb. 28, the department is down 40% of sworn officers, with only 144 out of 238 sworn officers available on a daily basis.

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Property crime numbers

Though anecdotally, story after story described spiking crime rates, with theft and burglary among the concerns voiced by business owners, Booth said property crime is down 8% since March 2022, with a 32% decrease for the year to date.

Property crime encompasses burglary, larceny and larceny of a motor vehicle. Typically, APD's crime summary dashboard is a quick resource for these numbers, but Booth said the department is "in the process of correcting dashboard numbers," and it's been taken offline, likely for the remainder of the week.

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Zack said, anecdotally, the department hears a lot of crime is going unreported, not only from small businesses, but big box retailers, as well.

“If you point at one particular data set, from one short period of time, it doesn’t tell you what’s been happening overall in the city for the last five years, with violent crime and property crime," Zack said. "There will be ebbs and flows, but again, we know there is a lot of things going unreported.”

'We're here to ask for solutions'

Though businesses and locations varied, from Kimpton Hotel Arras and Asheville Discount Pharmacy, both on Patton Avenue, to the Grand Bohemian Hotel in Biltmore Village, stories were often thematically consistent: allegations of theft, violence, a fear of leaving work to walk to their cars and employees forced to "kick out" people they identified as being homeless from restaurant bathrooms, doorways and patios.

"We're here to ask for solutions," said Nur Edwards, owner of Asheville Discount Pharmacy. "We're asking for you ensure our safety."

Several employees brought up issues of police staffing and a desire for more of a police presence downtown.

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Katie Button, Cúrate CEO, said she was seeing increased frequency of emails from her 160 employees reporting incidents of feeling "uncomfortable or unsafe" downtown.

She said they tell employees to walk in groups or call the police if they have issues, "but it's not changing anything. ... I don't know what the solution is, but we've definitely, over the last couple of years, seen the frequency ... of violent crime and uncomfortable, threatening behaviors increasing."

While much of the dialogue seemed to conflate some of these issues with the city's unhoused population, which has seen a marked increase of 21% overall from 2021 to 2022, with the unsheltered count doubled, Lucious Wilson, general manager at the Wedge Brewery, said the issue isn't homelessness, and that he knows most of the people shelter in the brewery doorway or patio by name.

"This is something that we deal with all the time, and these are people that I have no problem with," he said.

"What I have a problem with is when my bartender from the Grove Arcade is walking home from the bar across the bridge and someone jumps out of their car and accosts her physically. ... What I have a problem with is people who come to our place and start harassing our customers and begging for money. I don't equate that, personally, with homelessness. I equate that with vagrancy."

A recent report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness noted that homelessness is exacerbated by the city's staggering affordable housing crisis, compounded by the impacts of the pandemic. Asheville is more expensive than 98% of other North Carolina cities and is home to the highest rents in the state.

In closing, Zach Wallace, vice president of public policy for the Asheville Chamber of Commerce, said he hopes council will prioritize public safety, increase resources to downtown and continue to collaborate with the chamber and other stakeholders as they begin to undertake a Business Improvement Feasibility Study, the first step in forming and implementing a Business Improvement District.

Sarah Honosky is the city government reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA TODAY Network. News Tips? Email shonosky@citizentimes.com or message on Twitter at @slhonosky. Please help support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Crime in Asheville: Downtown business owners call for council action