On June 13, the University of North Carolina-Asheville confirmed a rumor that had circulated for months: It plans to build a soccer stadium on the land currently occupied by 45 acres of woods south of its main campus.

The plan, developed in collaboration with the amateur soccer club Asheville City SC, calls for a 5,000-seat stadium surrounded by retail and market-rate housing, to be built over the remainder of this decade. It would be followed by an as-yet-unannounced project on university property on the other side of Broadway Street. Both properties are part of the school’s Millennial Campus holdings, a designation that allows for public-private partnerships typically outlawed on campuses in the UNC System.

Just as the plan’s announcement has answered one much-asked question — what is to become of the woods? — it has, in turn, unleashed many more, none of which the school has been keen to answer.

Who’s involved in the project? UNCA and Asheville City SC are working with a private developer, Chancellor Kimberly van Noort confirmed last week, but neither the school nor the club will identify it.

How could it affect the local economy? The school has boasted job-creation and tax-generation projections but hasn’t said how it came to those numbers.

And what does it mean for students, faculty and the surrounding community? Van Noort said the development will provide badly needed housing but she did not commit to making it affordable, and the school has said nothing about what types of events, outside school athletics and Asheville City SC matches, might take place at the stadium.

UNCA has given an estimate of what the whole project will cost: more than $200 million. Much of the price tag and risk, it says, will be taken on by the developer, which in return will get to design, build and operate the whole development, and to own the retail, housing and parking (though the state will retain ownership of the ground beneath it). But the university will be seeking public subsidies amounting to $29 million, half the projected cost of the stadium. Exactly how it will secure that money is not clear yet, either.

Chancellor presents plan to Board of Governors committee 

In the time since UNCA unveiled its plan, it has generated an array of intense responses. Community members, who have pleaded for the woods to be preserved since UNCA began exploring their development in January, viewed it as a disaster. Not only would this proposal herald the end of what they see as a natural urban haven, they said — it would dramatically change the character of north Asheville.

“This would destroy our neighborhood and our way of life, full stop, no question,” said Chris Cotteta, president of the Five Points Neighborhood Association. “People will leave. Property values will plummet. We have an incredibly strong and connected community here, and it would be torn to shreds.”

On Wednesday, van Noort presented the idea to members of the UNC System’s Board of Governors, which will have to approve the project before it moves forward. (They did not vote at the meeting, which was set solely for van Noort to go over the plan.) 

Some of them heaped unvarnished praise on the project: Kirk J. Bradley, a real estate executive and venture capitalist who serves as the chair of the board’s budget and finance committee, called it a “win-win” that would give the school a “competitive advantage.” The most pointed questions came from John Fraley, a former state House member from Mooresville, who said van Noort needed to return with more detail on myriad aspects of the plan — and pointed out that she’d made no mention of the blowback to the idea.

“There’s nothing in the presentation that really talks about the area, so to speak,” Fraley said, noting that he’d followed news coverage over the woods debate. “I think it would be appropriate for the Board of Governors to have a better understanding of that once you’ve talked to the community and all of that.”

UNCA has argued that each aspect of its plan holds promise for the school and the surrounding community. The stadium, it said, would “draw people from across the region and state” for matches and other events. The housing, proposed at 300 to 450 units, would alleviate on-campus overcrowding and bolster the city’s housing stock. Combined, the woods development and the unannounced plans for the property across Broadway would “bring in investments of over $250 million, hundreds of jobs, and substantial increases in new sales tax revenue each year.”

There is demand for a major soccer facility in Asheville, said Jan Davis, a member of the Asheville Buncombe Regional Sports Commission’s board of directors and a former city council member. An on-campus stadium, in addition to serving the school’s teams, could provide both a permanent home for Asheville City SC and a way to compete in the booming youth sports industry.

“I think it’s one of the real disappointing things with the sports commission — we don’t have enough venues to get tourism visitation to the level we should have it,” he said.

The teams that would call the stadium home have not yet shown they can reliably fill a 5,000-seat venue. Asheville City SC, which played its first season in 2017, reportedly drew more than 2,000 spectators to some matches at Memorial Stadium. In 2023, amid renovations to Memorial that changed the size of its soccer pitch, the team moved to UNC-Asheville’s Greenwood Field.

Ryan Kelley, the club’s president, declined to provide attendance figures. He said attendance had dropped since the move to Greenwood, which he attributed to the field’s infrastructure, including limited seating. 

“Our attendance figures on both the men’s and women’s sides were among the best in the country at our level when we were at Memorial with access to the capacity and facilities required to put on events of that size,” he said in an email. “A purpose-built stadium will allow our teams to move up to the next level and unlock the club’s full potential.” (Asheville City is an amateur club; its men’s team plays in USL League Two, which has 144 teams across the U.S. and is considered one of the country’s highest-level amateur leagues; its women’s team plays in the USL W League, which has 93 teams.)

Recent crowds at UNCA games have been sparse: In the handful of games played at home last season before Tropical Storm Helene sent them on the road for the rest of the year, the men drew an average of 354 per game, the women an average of 261.

Van Noort said Wednesday that the school plans for the stadium to host 90 revenue-generating events each year, not including UNCA games. Asheville City SC’s men’s and women’s teams each play about a half-dozen home games per year, leaving nearly 80 slots to fill, and UNCA has not said what types of events may take place there.

“We’re imagining Kenny Chesney concerts blaring out of that thing,” said Elizabeth Pritchitt, a resident of the nearby Five Points neighborhood and an advocate for preserving the woods.

Pritchitt said she was also dismayed by the university’s characterization of the woods as they stand today. Van Noort’s presentation described them as “unused land” that the university could turn “into an active portion of campus that generates economic activity. 

But as Pritchitt and others have noted, UNCA has long made use of the woods in ways that go beyond their recreational utility. One report, created by a faculty advisory committee, found that the area is “routinely used” by 18 biology and environmental science classes.

“The South Campus wooded area is not just green space,” the report declared. “It is a living laboratory, an irreplaceable resource that has supported extensive, grant-funded research critical to both our institution and the broader scientific community.”

Economic impact report remains in UNCA’s hands

More insight into how UNCA envisions the stadium being used could be contained in an economic impact report, a document typically prepared in the early stages of planning for projects involving public lands or funds. It would also explain how the university arrived at its job and tax projections. It might show what kind of jobs would be created — and whether any would transcend the short-term construction gigs and part-time stadium personnel positions that usually come with venue-building projects.

Van Noort, citing “estimates from the economic impact summary,” alluded to the existence of such a document Wednesday, and Asheville Watchdog has submitted a public records request for it, along with a slew of other documents. UNCA has not released it, nor any of the other requested records.

The school’s housing plans remain similarly opaque. In March — when UNCA announced that it would seek to develop the woods, two months after heavy equipment first arrived to survey the property — van Noort said that “affordable workforce and student housing” was on the table. 

Even the staunchest defenders of the woods have readily acknowledged a need to improve the housing stock at or near UNCA. The school filled its on-campus housing over capacity last fall, and rent increases in recent years have made living off campus more difficult for students. Demand is not likely to ease: Enrollment has started to bounce back after a long period of decline, and the school hopes to add about 800 more students by the end of the decade. Faculty members have also signaled a need for more workforce housing as Asheville’s cost of living climbs.

More than a third of UNCA students receive Pell Grants, according to the school’s website, meaning they fit the federal government’s definition of showing “exceptional financial need.” About a quarter of them are first-generation college students.

“This will be a way for us to provide good housing for students but also amenities and opportunities for them to gather socially,” van Noort said Wednesday. “The economic and community engagement impact is high.”

She described that housing as “market rate,” not affordable or workforce housing. 

“The developer has proposed that they work with local and state entities in the future to subsidize and make sure the housing is accessible for the community here,” she said.

Whether incorporating reduced-cost housing will be a requirement or not is unclear.

So is the identity of the developer.

Developer to have great power over UNCA land

Whoever develops the stadium project, should it move forward, will have a great deal of power over UNCA’s land. According to the school’s proposal, the developer would design, build, finance, own and operate the housing, the 30,000 to 50,000 square feet of retail space, and roughly 1,500 spaces worth of parking, including a thousand-spot parking deck. It would also hold most responsibility over the stadium, which would be owned by an LLC established by the school’s endowment fund.

This arrangement could also allow much of the planning for a major project on public land to be hidden from the public. Though UNCA and its endowment fund are both subject to public record disclosure laws, a private developer wouldn’t be, said Pate McMichael, director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition. Plans created by the developer would become public records as soon as they’re shared with the school, he said, but they’d be shielded until then.

“We know this is a controversial decision in the community, and I think erring on the side of sunshine here is going to be really smart for the university if there’s going to be good will,” McMichael said. “Whoever gets this contract is going to be able to make a lot of important decisions that the public won’t have tremendous access to.”

So far, though, even the identity of the developer has been closely guarded. Van Noort made it clear Wednesday that the school has someone in mind: Asked during the meeting how the presentation came together, she said Asheville City SC has “been working with a private developer.” 

She did not name the developer. The Watchdog has asked UNCA to identify the developer multiple times but has not received an answer. In an email Wednesday, Kelley, the club president, said he was “not able to comment on development partners as those discussions are ongoing.”

The first glimpse of what the project could look like comes from a drawing contained in van Noort’s presentation, attributed to Civil Design Concepts, a local engineering firm. The stadium sits in the middle of what’s now the wooded area, with housing and retail spiraling outward. New roads and roundabouts would connect the bordering streets.

The design — which seems to drop roads and buildings directly atop the undulating terrain of the urban forest — is perplexing, “a missed opportunity and somewhat depressing to look at,” said Joe Minicozzi, a certified city planner and the principal of the Asheville-based Urban3 planning group.

Minicozzi is no opponent of development on principle. He has not joined calls to save the woods, and he said he believes that UNCA could make good use of the land, particularly for housing. But he said he could scarcely make sense of the design, a loop largely closed off from its neighborhood. The arrangement, which would require prospective shoppers to drive into the development to visit stores rather than encounter them organically, would look more at home in the suburbs than it does a short drive from the city center, he said. It seemed to reflect the insular nature of UNCA’s handling of the property, he said.

“It can be good for the campus, it can be great for the neighborhood and it can be great for the community, but it doesn’t seem like there’s even an interest to have that conversation, which is weird,” he said.

He wondered if a necessarily flat soccer stadium made sense in this hilly part of town compared, say, to the banks of the French Broad River. He questioned whether stores could survive in a complex with little foot traffic outside soccer matches and other events. But he also recognized that, aside from asking questions, most people in Asheville have no power when it comes to UNCA’s land.

“They hold all the cards,” he said. “They can do whatever the hell they want.”

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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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