Until 2007, the historical documents resided in the basement of the old Altamont hotel in downtown Asheville, where then-UNC Asheville student Reed Fornoff located and retrieved them as part of his internship with Mountain Housing Opportunities. Those files are now housed in UNC Asheville’s Special Collections and University Archives, where UNC Asheville faculty and students are diligently working to systematically organize and analyze that information, with the goal of making their data and analyses accessible to the public, as the City of Asheville moves towards its reparations goals.
One of the first steps is understanding urban renewal, which took place in cities across the United States as part of the Housing Act of 1949, a federal initiative aimed to clear “blighted areas,” which were almost always predominately Black neighborhoods. Homeowners, renters, and businessowners in these neighborhoods were forced to sell their properties to the city and to leave—a process that uprooted hundreds of households in Asheville alone.
“The stated goal was to improve neighborhoods, and to improve these areas for the populations that lived there, to make people better off and also to make the city of Asheville better off,” said Kathleen Lawlor, associate professor of economics and Breman Professor of Social Relations at UNC Asheville. “These urban renewal plans really intersected with Asheville’s larger goals of becoming a tourist destination…. What we see is that Asheville was really successful in making the City a tourist destination, but the City did so at the expense of Black communities in Asheville.”
“I had a summer internship, one of my projects dealt with finding economic barriers for entrepreneurs of color and seeing how systematic everything was that they were facing. It was interesting to see how that tied into urban renewal, to see if those economic barriers were long lasting, and what patterns developed from them, because there were also some businesses that were impacted by urban renewal.”
-Kiana Washburn '22, management major
Lawlor and her team are not the first at UNC Asheville to examine these archives to try and tell the story of urban renewal in Asheville. Important precedents to the current project include the urban renewal scholarship of Sarah Judson, professor of history, as well as undergraduate research projects led by Ellen Holmes Pearson, professor of history and Roy Carroll Professor of Arts and Sciences, and Patrick Bahls, professor of mathematics. Lawlor’s current project builds on this prior work to systematically convert the archival information into a comprehensive database that quantifies and describes all the properties that were seized by the City during urban renewal.
Building on that work, Lawlor and her team of students have spent countless hours poring over appraisal documents, letters, and handwritten notes that, when pieced together, tell the story of urban renewal in Asheville. But the work doesn’t end there.
“The next phase is going to involve analysis of this data to try and estimate the economic losses to the Black community that occurred as a result of urban renewal,” Lawlor said. “We’re going to be analyzing this data to see what was the wealth that was lost when homes, vacant lots and businesses were seized.”
For Lawlor’s students, whose majors range from History to Economics to Music Technology to Atmospheric Sciences, the project is an opportunity to learn more about the recent history of their City and that history’s impact on current affairs, as well as a chance to take their knowledge from the classroom and put it into a real-world application.
“I found it to be really good opportunity as an econ major to get out of the theory world and into something more applied. It’s something that can be more helpful than doing supply-and-demand graphs all the time,” said May 2022 graduate Jaylin Meyer. “It’s one thing to do to make an actual contribution using the skills that I've managed to learn in the econ department.”
“I think exposing the history and giving people a better understanding of Asheville’s reality is so important; but another aspect of that is how recent this was. A lot of people look at these projects, or they hear about urban renewal, and they think about it's something that happened a very long time ago in the distant past, so it doesn't matter. But some of these projects were incredibly recent, and even the ones that weren't still directly impact the way that Asheville is today.”
-El Woolard, history major
As part of his research, Meyer compared the current prices of homes in the areas impacted by urban renewal to the amount homeowners received as compensation for their properties from the City of Asheville during the urban renewal process.
“A lot of these homes got sold to the city for 20 grand if they were lucky, and now they're selling for $500,000, or $600,000,” Meyer said. “It’s jarring.”
“Asheville is like two different cities,” said Miles Peay, who graduated in May 2022 with majors in both economics and ethics and social institutions, and volunteers with My Daddy Taught Me That, a nonprofit serving Black youth in Asheville. “There’s the tourist, rich people, hippie Asheville, and then there’s the Black people in Asheville, and it’s two different worlds because of how they’ve set up the city.”
For Kiana Washburn, a management major who also graduated in May 2022, part of the problem is the Black community’s lack of visibility: “None of the information that we’re finding is out in the public as much as it should be.”
But that’s about to change.
“The third piece of this project is to make all of this information public,” Lawlor said. Part of that includes creating an interactive GIS StoryMap in collaboration with a professor and students at NC Central University. “We want to make all of our analyses public with the hope that it can inform public policy processes in this city, so that it can be a tool for citizen action and evidence-based public policy.”
“I work in economic development and venture capital, so I know in Asheville where the economy is growing, and who are the people benefiting from this really fast-growing economy. And so, when I look into the urban renewal aspects here, I’m more interested in where the resources have been taken out so much earlier than they began to grow. It’s like pulling the seeds out of a garden before it started to bloom, and there are droughts now because those seeds were taken out.”
-Ron Dumas '22, ethics and social institutions major
Creating that public policy is an ongoing process in Asheville, with the Asheville City Council passing a resolution supporting community reparations for Black Asheville on July 14, 2020, and recently approving five seat appointments for the Community Reparations Commission representing the five impact focus areas of criminal justice, economic development, education, health care and housing. Dwight Mullen, UNC Asheville Professor Emeritus of Political Science, will serve as the commission’s chair of economic development.
For Lawlor, engaging her own work and her students’ work in this project is a perfect fit.
“I think it's important for students to be engaged in work that can positively impact the community,” Lawlor said. “I think it's important for those of us in academia to produce information that can help the community, that serves the community, and that is in the interests of the community.”
UNC Asheville Professor of Mathematics Patrick Bahls discusses the “Dollar-A-Lot” program, though which the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville attempted to return some of the land in Asheville’s South Slope to residents displaced by urban renewal. Did it work?
UNC Asheville professors Marcus Harvey and Darin Waters explore the relationship between reparations for African Americans and racial justice in their podcast, “The Waters and Harvey Show.” This show, a virtual roundtable with civic leaders in Asheville, responds to the Asheville City Council’s passage of a reparations measure for African American residents, which included an apology for the city’s historic involvement in slavery.
Additional members of the research team include:
Drew Griffiths (Atmospheric Sciences), Brenna Johnson '21 (Environmental Studies and Economics), Emily Cadmus '21 (History), Alex Corona-Perez '22 (Economics), Whitney Hanson (Sociology), Kameron Henson (music technology)
© 2026 UNC Asheville
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