I drove through Asheville, North Carolina. This is what I saw.

Asheville, North Carolina is a cute city, but it's changing now. Some say, for the worst.

In this video, I drove through downtown Asheville. I took the highway from southern North Carolina into the southern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The charming city of Asheville is here, nestled in a valley near North Carolina’s southern border with both Georgia and South Carolina. It was a bright warm fall morning. The day was Tuesday, October 13, 2020 just before noon.

For this drive, I’m going to begin downtown, drive outside of downtown to the city’s northern fringes, then turn around and head back down. I want to give you a perspective on what the city is like from an architectural and cultural standpoint.

This was a unique time for a drive through Asheville, as it came during the global pandemic. Therefore, many area restaurants and bars were temporarily closed or at limited capacity.

Asheville is home to just about 100,000 people, and is a major tourist destination, due to its proximity to the mountains, which offer tons of waterfall hiking as well as river adventures. This time of year is the most popular, as people from all over come to the area to check out the autumn leaves. A place of hiking, hippies, beer and beautiful beers.

Also nearby are the Biltmore Hotel and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Headquarters, both which draw a lot of people. It’s a college town, home to UNC Asheville. The city has a minor league baseball team, large hospitals, too many breweries to count, boutique shopping, and is a magnet for artists. Thusly, it is a very liberal community. It’s very quirky and charming. But it’s also changing, too.

Asheville is fairly young, as a large part of the permanent population are college students, hospital workers or service professionals like bartenders and servers. But Asheville is slowing becoming less diverse and is losing its funky, original charm because of gentrification and rising housing costs. It’s mostly clean, but along some side streets in and along downtown it’s a little rough around the edges.

Many long time Asheville folks have complained that the city has lost its charm. They say it’s too liberal, too elite, too snobby, and has grown too fast. The influx of new trendy condos and hotels has made traffic worse, parking harder to find, and has strained the city’s infrastructure. Some say the new hotels and modern buildings have ruined a once perfect view of the nearby mountain ridges.

The north end of town gets pretty rural pretty fast. Just outside of town are roads to get into neighborhoods tucked into hillsides and highways deeper into the nearby mountains. I’ll turn around soon and head back into downtown.

The area of downtown we’re approaching has a large park and amphitheater nearby. It’s right in the center of downtown. This is the only real hub for homelessness here in Asheville, and a smallish crowd of vagrants and homeless gather here near the center of downtown at the park and make loud noise, litter, beg and sleep. I took this photo at night. One of the homeless individuals said he didn’t appreciate me taking his picture and demanded I give all the homeless people in the park $20. I refused.

But for the most part, outside of a three block area in the center of downtown, there isn’t much in terms of litter, open drug use and beggars. But according to many locals, the small amount of drug, homeless and criminal activity is far worse than ever. Many complain about the escalation in crime, as this population is growing.

There are all sorts of cool little neighborhoods near downtown Asheville. One is the River Arts District, on the far southwestern side of town. Here, they’ve done a great job of turning old empty industrial warehouses into a place for artists to work and live cheaply. There are dozens of such buildings which span many blocks on this side of town.

Asheville is changing fast. Locals say it’s become an overpriced tourist trap. It has a hippie vibe with a cosmopolitan face. Tourists say it’s not as charming as it once was. There isn’t a lot that remains today of what made Asheville an incredible place to live - its charm, its character, its community, and its uniqueness. It caters to the wealthy and to tourists more now than ever. And now that modern American has finally stuck its claws into this mostly peaceful community, it’s not gonna be what it once was. It’s not a quaint mountain town anymore.

#asheville #northcarolina
You can buy my music here:

iTunes: https://music.apple.com/us/album/state-songs-an-album/1523790725

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/music/album/Nick_Johnson_State_Songs_An_Album?id=Byfshzyrbjldelqferxc6vijljm&hl=en_US

Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/albums/B08D3G43VR

This channel is about America!

The best video on this topic!

Видео I drove through Asheville, North Carolina. This is what I saw. канала Nick Johnson