What Eric Stands For…

The pressures from short-term rentals, vacation rentals, and rent-by-the-bedroom schemes, as well as a general myopia in long-term planning for new housing for anyone other than college students and wealthy folks, have put many of Boone’s working families at great risk. Many who work in Boone can no longer afford to LIVE in Boone. While tourism and the presence of a major university can be beneficial for our community as a whole and provide jobs for locals, the rapidly increasing demand for services that these industries produce is putting access to those services—including affordable healthcare, dining, and shopping options, and a broad swath of community services—increasingly out of reach for working families. THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE. My goal as a member of Town Council is to reverse those trends and make Boone “livable” again for the working families that our community depends upon.

If we fail to address this issue immediately, we will see a cascade of disastrous consequences unfold in the next ten years, from which it will be very difficult to recover. Meanwhile, we are already in a climate crisis, and Boone needs to take direct action to keep our energy and water resources affordable and sustainable for our citizens as the global climate crisis worsens in the next few decades. The housing and climate issues are related; as the climate crisis worsens, Boone will be a high-priority destination for climate refugees, further amplifying our housing issues. It is no longer a question of IF or even WHEN; direct action to address these crises is needed NOW.

Solving these problems will require cooperative, integrity-based action by the Town, the County, and the University—something that has been sorely lacking for the past decade. It will mean leveraging the Town’s existing real estate assets into housing opportunities and creating new zoning classifications that incentivize the building of workforce housing, while also creating powerful disincentives to rent-by-the-bedroom, vacation rental, and short-term rental arrangements. It will also mean coming up with different approaches to revenue generation without balancing additional tax burdens on the backs of working families and small, locally owned businesses. While challenging, a complete re-imagining of how we fund local services and facilities is absolutely necessary, and I look forward to being part of that process.