I would say that I'm about as rooted as it gets... My family has been in Western North Carolina since before the United States, the state of North Carolina, Buncombe or Henderson counties, or the cities of Asheville and Hendersonville all formally existed. The oldest date I've been able to find on the tombstones in the graveyard where my family is buried is from 1772. There may be older ones, but the dates have worn off of those.
That being said, I've long been a huge booster of my city, as I imagine some of the old-school forumers here can recall. That being said, I'm really just kind of sick of what my city is becoming and what all the signs indicate it will become. The thought of ever having to leave my city used to make me heartsick, but now my fiance and I are actively considering it and thinking out our options. I can't speak for him, but I'm tired of all the hotels downtown, because every new hotel is another reason for the locals not to bother going downtown. I'm tired of the breweries because I cannot so much as force myself to give a shit about alcohol in any form, and so every new brewery is a reason for me personally not to go downtown. I'm tired of the self-storage facilities and drab McPartment complexes that are alighting everywhere else in town like swarms of bees. I'm tired of homeowners in all the historic neighborhoods demanding the right to basically turn entire swaths of those neighborhoods into open-air Airbnb resorts -- to the tune of fully 3% of the housing stock in the city had been turned into short-term rentals before the city banned whole-home rentals. That's the highest percentage of such in the country. And speaking of, I'm tired of venues like the Altamont Theatre being thrown out so its building's owners could convert it into Airbnb rentals, I'm tired of formerly scruffy and interesting enclaves like the graffiti art show that was Carolina Lane downtown being scrubbed and sanitized and turned into a row of Airbnb rentals, and I'm tired of entire new condo buildings and complexes going up downtown that are planned exclusively as short-term rental complexes. They're just more hotels by another name. For a long time now, the message from the business community here has been clear that Asheville is not for the locals. The city has become a backdrop and a set piece, and all the things that we used to do authentically, like the drum circle, have been commodified for the tourists. Every move we make, every idea we have now, is carefully scrutinized by someone in the Tourism Development Authority office to see if it can be sold to tourists. If not, it has no value and the way the city operates makes that abundantly clear. Never mind if your idea might save the world -- if it won't attract tourists it's worthless. We're no longer Asheville, the city. We are Asheville: The Experience™, and anymore the city barely feels real some days. Of course, we tell ourselves still that we're nothing like some tourist trap like Myrtle Beach or Pigeon Forge, heavens no, but at least those places are open about it. Asheville, in the end, is a whore like they are, but just a better class of whore.
And the real tragedy? About twenty years ago, not only was Asheville a more authentic place, but it went beyond authentic. It was genuinely joyful, genuinely weird, and genuinely spooky... You often got the feeling that if ghosts and magic were real anywhere in the world, they'd be real here. We really lost a lot when we traded the real city for the movie set on which all the tourists' little dramas play out.
With that in mind, we're giving some serious thought to bailing out. We'd like a place that exists for itself and has nothing to prove to anyone. It does what it does, does it well, and if the tourists happen to like it enough to visit that's great but that isn't the end goal of everything. He'll be graduating in May, 2020 as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and I have my BSW and might start working on an MSW after he gets done. We're trying to see what might give us the same experience that Asheville used to give people about twenty years ago. So far the frontrunner is Greenville, SC. It's a manageable size, has good restaurants and amenities, and it has a better airport and performing arts center, and a zoo. It does what it does and offers what it offers because it's for the people who live and work there, and the fact that things like the waterfall park and the greenway system also attract tourists is a side benefit. Best of all, it's only an hour away so I'm still close to family, and our friends -- like everyone else in Asheville -- go to Greenville to see shows and attend festivals anyway.
Still though... I wouldn't be the first in my family to move out of state -- I had a cousin who worked construction in Seattle for a while and another cousin and her family already live in South Carolina, but it's a bitter commentary that a place that has nurtured my family since the 1770's can become so alien that you'd want to get out.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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