Today’s round of questions, my smart-aleck replies and the real answers:

Question: What are the unoccupied motor homes doing in the grassy field across from Revol Church on Beaverdam Road? This is the second batch of such motor vehicles. They seem to sit there for months. Thanks for looking into this mystery.

My answer: What are they doing there? Waiting for someone to offer $3,500 a month to rent them.

Real answer: These homes are part of the mission of the Asheville Dream Center, a nonprofit that offers a variety of services and programs to those in need, including providing temporary homes and rebuilding houses for victims of Tropical Storm Helene. The Dream Center is a separate entity from Revol Church, but the church has allowed the Dream Center to store homes there post-Helene.

“The church has been gracious to us, and we partner with about 27 churches in the city,” said Paul Benjamin, a Dream Center board member. “And we’re constantly doing things to impact the community. We find a need and try to fill it.”

After Helene, that was badly needed housing.

“Over the past ten months, the Asheville Dream Center has had the privilege of supporting 22 families with temporary housing after they lost everything in the hurricane,” the Dream Center said in a media statement. “As part of our emergency response, the Asheville Dream Center utilized RVs as a practical solution to provide shelter for displaced families in our region.”

Six recreational vehicles remained parked on the field next to the church, as of early August.

“These units are not in active use at this time but remain on-site as part of our extended Hurricane Helene relief operations,” the center stated. “Revol Church, owner of the property, has been in close communication with the City of Asheville, which has granted permission for these RVs to remain in place until October 2025, in alignment with the city’s extended disaster relief timeline.”

The Dream Center is currently working on three homes in the Barnardsville community, and it has helped complete four home rebuilds in western North Carolina. The nonprofit has helped “clean, clear, and muck out or landscape a dozen homes and properties,” according to its statement.

Benjamin said the organization provides the homes for free to families in need.

“They’re just used until they get housing, and the units come back to us,” Benjamin said. “So these units were already being used, and now we’re just looking for the next families that have a need.”

Benjamin and the Dream Center say they understand that neighbors may have concerns about empty homes being on or near the church site. 

“We can understand the concerns of our neighbors in the community who are seeing these RVs parked on the Revol property,” the group’s statement said. “Every effort is being made to quickly place these units with deserving families.”

Question: For the second week in a row, I’ve found piles of cardboard at the Curbie cardboard recycle center in Woodfin. All of it is saturated with rain. That means it isn’t recyclable now, right? There was a bulldozer waiting for me to finish adding my layer to the heap. I had driven around for a week with a load of cardboard hoping the two absent Dumpsters would return but found they had not by this morning. What’s up?

My answer: I’ve got to think that nonstop driving for a week with a load of cardboard probably wasn’t great for the environment, either, but I do appreciate your determination.

Real answer: This is a situation that looks worse than it is.

“Our truck that normally empties these Dumpsters has been down and in the shop being fixed,” Abe Lawson, president of Curbside Management, the area’s primary recycling entity, told me via email. “We have a sign up for residents to drop cardboard between the Dumpsters on the ground.”

While the piled-up, soggy cardboard looks bad, it’s still usable.

“Being in the elements does not mean that the cardboard is not recyclable,” Lawson said. “In fact, we ask residents who have too much cardboard to fit into their 96 gallon cart to stack it neatly (outside) next to the cart.”

Cardboard can take a pretty decent soaking.

“The wetness only becomes an issue if it is saturated for a prolonged period of time and it starts to break down,” Lawson said Tuesday. “We are/have been collecting the cardboard multiple times a day to keep the piles contained and hope to have the truck back up and running very soon.”

Asheville Watchdog welcomes thoughtful reader comments on this story, which has been republished on our Facebook page. Please submit your comments there.

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Got a question? Send it to John Boyle at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org or 828-337-0941. His Answer Man columns appear each Tuesday and Friday. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/

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[Editor’s note: This story, originally published at 4:03 p.m., has been updated to include additional context and background as well as reaction.]

The University of North Carolina Asheville will halt negotiations on its plans, announced just two months ago, to build a soccer stadium and surrounding development on campus, the school announced Thursday.

Instead, UNCA said, it will form a commission to take public input and consider other ideas for 45 wooded acres south of the main campus.

The proposal, announced in June, called for a development featuring market-rate housing, shopping and parking lots, anchored by a 5,000-seat multi-use soccer stadium. Under that plan, the stadium would be home to Asheville City Soccer Club and to UNCA’s soccer teams in addition to hosting dozens of other events every year.

But the idea elicited widespread blowback — from architects and planners who said the design made little technical sense; from observers who noted that sports, historically, have not been central to the liberal arts school’s brand; from neighbors who feared the stadium would dramatically change the area’s character; and especially from students, faculty and community members who had long used the woods for research and recreation alike.

“We have heard clearly from members of our campus and the broader Asheville community that they want more opportunities to engage in a structured, transparent conversation about Millennial Campus development options,” UNCA Chancellor Kimberly van Noort said in a news release Thursday, referring to a designation that allows some areas of university land to be used for revenue-generating public-private partnerships. “While this is not a moment for reflexive opposition to any particular idea, nor for blanket assertions that UNC Asheville should forgo development altogether, we do want to ensure the strongest possible process, the clearest possible information, and the broadest possible support while considering the best interest of the University, the UNC System, and the region.”

Asheville City SC did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Even more pilloried than the merits of the proposal was the university’s tight-lipped approach to development, beginning with the unannounced arrival, in January, of heavy machinery in the woods. Though UNCA promised, amid outcry, that no decisions had been made, van Noort confirmed in March that the university would seek to develop the woods.

By April, when UNCA held a series of community-input meetings, rumors of a soccer stadium had taken shape, though the university declined to comment on them. Two months later, its announcement of the proposed development — mostly footed by developers, with the school planning to seek $29 million in public subsidies — seemed to confirm those rumors while raising more questions. At the time, the school withheld both the identity of the developer and any studies it had produced to support the economic-impact numbers it brandished.

Last month, a presentation to UNCA’s Board of Trustees revealed the identity of the developer, a company managed by an Ohio-based sports real-estate consultant. Asheville Watchdog reported that the company, Asheville Stadium District Real Estate Project, registered to do business in North Carolina on Nov. 27, about six weeks before UNCA’s property assessment began. (UNCA did not comment on that revelation at the time, and van Noort later told WLOS that she only learned of the developer’s registration date when the Watchdog reported it.)

In a meeting of the UNC System’s Board of Governors last month, members largely registered support for the project — but some also chastised van Noort for the apparent disconnect between UNCA’s leadership and the community. 

As of Thursday, nearly 15,000 people had signed a petition against development in the woods. Though state law concerning on-campus development means local governments have no say in the stadium proposal, advocates for the woods have been urging them to take a stand on the project, with some success: Buncombe County commissioners Drew Ball and Parker Sloan wrote to the Board of Governors last month to urge a pause on the project, and County Commission chairperson Amanda Edwards recently told woods advocates that the commission would discuss the topic at its meeting next Tuesday.

“I think that (UNCA) saw the writing on the wall,” said Heather Rayburn, a pro-woods organizer.

Van Noort and Board of Trustees chairperson Roger Aiken will appoint the members of the new commission, according to the news release. It was not immediately clear how many members the commission would have. Its work could continue into January “at the latest,” according to the school.

The university described the Asheville City SC plan as “the most refined Millennial Campus proposal to date” but said it “must continue vetting this proposal and, at the same time, secure broader stakeholder input.”

“This is something we’ve been asking for since February, maybe January,” said Chris Cotteta, president of the nearby Five Points Neighborhood Association. “It’s about eight months late, but nonetheless meaningful.”

Cotteta noted that efforts to imagine other approaches to university land have already been underway, albeit without UNCA’s participation, including an independently organized “community visioning workshop” taking place this weekend.

“We have been lied to, we’ve not been included, we’ve not been respected,” Rayburn said of UNCA’s process thus far. “What they’re saying is, ‘We’re going to finally listen to you and include this community in this huge decision, in this huge thing.’ So, OK. We’ll see.”

Asheville Watchdog welcomes thoughtful reader comments about this story, which has been republished on our Facebook page. Please submit your comments there.

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Jack Evans is an investigative reporter who previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times. You can reach him via email at jevans@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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