Case Study 1: Asheville's Transformation — From Sanatorium Town to Tourism Boomtown

The City That Keeps Reinventing Itself

Asheville, North Carolina, has reinvented itself more times than any city in Appalachia. Cherokee sacred site. Frontier outpost. Railroad hub. Tuberculosis sanatorium town. Art Deco showpiece. Economic backwater. Craft revival center. Tourism boomtown. Remote work destination. Each reinvention has layered new identities onto the old ones, and each has brought both opportunity and loss. Asheville's story is, in miniature, the story of the "new Appalachia" — with all its promise and all its contradictions.

The Sanatorium Era

Asheville's modern identity began with its air. In the late nineteenth century, physicians believed that the dry mountain air of western North Carolina was therapeutic for tuberculosis — the "white plague" that was the leading cause of death in America. Patients from across the eastern seaboard traveled to Asheville for treatment, and a network of sanatoriums (treatment facilities) grew up around the town. The tuberculosis economy brought investment, medical professionals, and a population of wealthy invalids whose presence supported hotels, restaurants, and service businesses.

The sanatorium era also brought George Washington Vanderbilt, the grandson of railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built the Biltmore Estate — a 250-room chateau on 8,000 acres south of Asheville — between 1889 and 1895. The Biltmore was the largest privately owned house in America, and its construction employed hundreds of local workers. More significantly, Vanderbilt hired the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to design the estate's grounds and the forester Gifford Pinchot to manage its forests — establishing one of the first scientifically managed forests in America and providing a model for the national forest system.

The combination of the sanatorium economy and the Vanderbilt presence made Asheville one of the wealthiest small cities in the South by the 1920s. The city built an extraordinary collection of Art Deco architecture — the City Building, the S&W Building, the Basilica of St. Lawrence — that survives today as one of the most intact collections of Art Deco design in the southeastern United States.

The Crash and the Long Decline

The Great Depression hit Asheville harder than almost any city in America. The city government had taken on enormous debt to fund infrastructure projects during the boom years, and when the economy collapsed in 1929, Asheville was the most indebted city per capita in the United States. It took the city nearly fifty years — until 1976 — to pay off its Depression-era debt. That crushing debt burden meant that Asheville could not afford to tear down its older buildings and replace them with modern ones, a constraint that would prove to be an accidental blessing: the Art Deco buildings survived because the city could not afford to demolish them.

Through the mid-twentieth century, Asheville was a quiet mountain city — economically depressed, physically beautiful, and largely ignored by the broader world. The construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which passes through the Asheville area, brought some tourist traffic, but the city did not have the infrastructure or the reputation to capitalize on it. Young people left for Charlotte, Atlanta, or the northeastern cities. The population stagnated.

The Craft Revival and the Seeds of Reinvention

The seeds of Asheville's current identity were planted in the 1970s and 1980s, when a combination of factors — cheap rents, beautiful architecture, proximity to the mountains, and the legacy of the Appalachian craft tradition — began attracting artists, craftspeople, and musicians to the city. The Southern Highland Craft Guild, founded in 1930 and based in Asheville, had maintained a connection between the city and the Appalachian craft tradition throughout the lean decades. The Black Mountain College — a legendary experimental arts school that operated in nearby Black Mountain from 1933 to 1957, attracting artists like Josef Albers, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Buckminster Fuller — had established a precedent for creative community in the region.

By the 1990s, Asheville had developed a critical mass of artists, musicians, breweries, restaurants, and cultural institutions that gave the city a distinctive character. The craft brewery movement took particular hold — by 2020, Asheville had more breweries per capita than any city in America. The city's combination of mountain setting, architectural beauty, arts culture, and culinary scene made it a magnet for a particular kind of visitor: educated, affluent, culturally adventurous, and willing to spend money.

The Tourism Boom

Tourism in Asheville accelerated dramatically in the 2000s and 2010s. National media coverage — "best places to visit" lists, food and beer publications, travel magazines — amplified the city's reputation. The Biltmore Estate alone drew more than 1.5 million visitors annually. The city's restaurants, galleries, and music venues attracted visitors who stayed for days rather than hours. Hotel construction boomed. Restaurant openings made national news.

The numbers were staggering. By 2019, Buncombe County (which contains Asheville) was receiving more than 11 million visitors per year, generating more than $4 billion in visitor spending and supporting tens of thousands of jobs. Tourism was not just the largest industry in the local economy. It was, for many purposes, the economy.

The tourism boom brought genuine benefits. It created jobs in a region that had been losing them for decades. It supported a vibrant arts and food culture that enriched the lives of residents and visitors alike. It provided tax revenue that funded public services. And it gave Asheville a national identity that, unlike the hillbilly stereotype described in Chapter 35, was actually positive — Asheville was the cool mountain town, the place where you could get a great meal and hear great music and hike great trails, all in the same weekend.

The Costs

But the boom also brought costs that were borne unevenly, and the distribution of those costs reveals the familiar Appalachian pattern of benefits flowing out while burdens stay home.

Housing: Median home prices in Asheville nearly doubled between 2015 and 2023. Rents increased even faster. The combination of rising prices and the conversion of long-term rental housing to short-term vacation rentals created a housing crisis that displaced thousands of longtime residents. By 2023, a full-time worker earning the median wage in Asheville could not afford the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment without spending more than 40 percent of their income on housing.

The service economy trap: Tourism jobs are predominantly service jobs — waiters, bartenders, hotel housekeepers, retail clerks. These jobs tend to be low-wage, part-time, and lacking in benefits. The workers who serve the tourists often cannot afford to live in the city they serve. They commute from outlying communities, spending time and money on transportation that further erodes their already thin margins. The tourism economy creates wealth, but it concentrates that wealth among property owners, business owners, and visitors, while the workers who make it possible remain economically precarious.

Displacement of Black Asheville: The gentrification of Asheville has had a particularly devastating impact on the city's Black communities. The historically Black neighborhoods of East Asheville — neighborhoods that had been home to vibrant Black communities since the nineteenth century — were among the first areas targeted by developers because of their proximity to downtown and their relatively low property values. As property values rose and developers moved in, Black residents were displaced. The proportion of Black residents in some historically Black census tracts declined sharply. The cultural institutions — the churches, the barbershops, the community organizations — that had sustained Black community life for generations lost their geographic anchor.

The Airbnb effect: The rise of short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and VRBO transformed Asheville's housing market. Property owners discovered that they could earn more money renting a house to tourists for a few nights a week than renting it to a local tenant for a month. The economic logic was irresistible — a property that might generate $1,200 per month in long-term rental income could generate $3,000 or more as a short-term vacation rental. The result was a rapid conversion of rental housing from long-term to short-term use, which reduced the supply of housing available to permanent residents while increasing demand (and prices) for the remaining inventory.

The Response

Asheville has attempted to address the housing crisis through a variety of policy mechanisms — affordable housing bonds, inclusionary zoning proposals, short-term rental regulations, and community land trust initiatives. These efforts have been genuine but insufficient relative to the scale of the problem. The market forces driving housing costs are powerful, and the policy tools available to a mid-sized city are limited.

The deeper question — whether the tourism-dependent economy model is sustainable for the community as a whole, or whether it creates a prosperity that benefits visitors and property owners while impoverishing workers and longtime residents — remains unresolved. Asheville's experience suggests that tourism can be a genuine economic driver, but only if accompanied by policies that distribute its benefits broadly and protect the community from its excesses.

Discussion Questions

1. The reinvention question. Asheville has reinvented itself multiple times — from sanatorium town to Art Deco showpiece to craft revival center to tourism boomtown. What are the advantages and disadvantages of economic reinvention based on tourism? How does a tourism economy differ from a manufacturing economy or an extractive economy in its effects on the community?

2. The displacement question. The gentrification of Black Asheville represents a particularly painful dimension of the tourism boom. How does racial displacement in Asheville connect to the broader history of Black Appalachians described in Chapters 6, 12, and 19? What obligations does a community have to its historically marginalized populations when economic change threatens to displace them?

3. The Airbnb question. Should communities have the right to regulate short-term rental platforms like Airbnb? What are the competing interests — property owners' rights, community housing needs, tourist accommodation demand — and how should they be balanced?

4. The sustainability question. Asheville's economy depends on visitors continuing to visit. What happens if tourism declines — because of economic recession, pandemic, natural disaster, or simply changing tastes? Is a tourism-dependent economy more or less resilient than a coal-dependent economy? What would a more diversified economic model look like for Asheville?