A Requiem for the River Arts District
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on the author’s substack onHousing. It is shared here with permission. All images were provided by the author.
The River Arts District in Asheville after Hurricane Helene.
If you identified as an artist and sought to surround yourself with like-minded individuals, there was only one place in North Carolina to go: the River Arts District in Asheville.
I was in the mountains on September 27th, 2024, immediately after Hurricane Helene hit. Few areas were hit harder than River Arts. Much of the district was under 25 feet of water, with the lowest terraces completely wiped out. Despite what was described as a 500-year flood, it appears that the historic row buildings — which anchor the district — survived, but with significant water damage. I pray that they are salvageable, as they are the DNA from which any hope of restoration will flow.
One of the reasons River Arts is worth studying is the third-fiddle role the district played in Asheville. It is lesser known than the city’s two main attractions: the grand Biltmore Estate, marked with wineries and baron-worthy architecture, and the lively downtown, filled with James Beard Award-winning restaurants and world-class breweries. The River Arts District represented an organic alternative localism — undercapitalized, scrappy and alive — all things I persistently advocate for under the broad-brush brand of incrementalism.
What Is Incrementalism, and Why Does It Matter?
Despite decades of advocacy from Jane Jacobs and groups like New Urbanists, as well as the Incremental Development Alliance, incrementalism is still largely misunderstood.
Most people think of incrementalism as small buildings and small businesses — built locally, one at a time, without scale. They are messy, generally have undercapitalized builders, are often developed by nonprofessionals, and are subject to all sorts of crazy stories of partnership stress, entitlement snafus, loan shortfalls, etc.
Incrementalism is also where 100% of a city’s placemaking happens.
The places that matter — the places that people identify with and think of as their own, the places where people go on first dates and fall in love — are almost exclusively incremental. You don’t take a date to a corporate Chili’s; you take them to Katie Button’s Curate.
Incrementalism is largely synonymous with localism. Wall Street has never built a James Beard Award-winning restaurant. And they never will. They can’t because, at Wall Street’s scale of financialization, risk aversion is the name of the game, pushing all development into an unambitious, predictable, mushy, mediocre middle.
The antithesis to this financialized mediocrity is localism. The one-and-only cure for runaway machine-like corporatism is a fierce and unbending commitment to localism.
Few cities practice localism better than Asheville, and few places in Asheville practiced incrementalism better than the River Arts District. In a sense, River Arts was North Carolina’s micro-version of the Californian Dream which, for a time, was the climax condition of the American Dream.
Completely submerged art galleries in the River Arts District. These buildings housed the work and studios of hundreds of artists.
The Happiness Explosion
That dream is best defined by what writer Tom Wolfe called a "Happiness Explosion." In his piece by the same name, Wolfe equates quality of life with small, hyperfocused communities.
Wolfe identifies Los Angeles as the apex of these status groups, which we might today call an identity movement:
Southern California, I found, was a veritable paradise of statuspheres; Beyond the customizers and drag racers, there were surfers, cruisers, teenyboppers, beboppers, strippers, bikers, beats, heads, and, of course, hippies. Each sphere started off self-contained but increasingly encroached on, and influenced, the wider world.
In other words, no matter what weird thing you were into, no matter how out-there you might be, in California, you could find your people. You could find your community. And you could belong. And because others were doing the same, you could easily experience adjacent microcommunities, cross-pollinate ideas, and bring joy, understanding and meaning to a broader section of humanity.
L.A.’s hippie surfers and Asheville’s microbrewing metal artists are both by-products of Wolfe’s definition of community development.
I don’t know of any city in the South that captured the "Happiness Explosion" thesis better than Asheville. If you were a fancy wine drinker and horseback rider, Asheville had your people. If you were a mountain-biking beer snob, Asheville had your people. If you were starstruck by celebrity chefs, Asheville had your people. If you were an artist, Asheville had your people.
None of these communities were as incremental or geographically defined as the River Arts District. In many ways, it was the beating heart of the intentional community movement in the South — and one of the best 21st-century examples in the country.
Before Hurricane Helene.
After Hurricane Helene.
Why We Must Rebuild
In my design work, I constantly work with clients who want to build better, including microcommunities. At the extremes, these ambitious developments are an exercise in both the physical form (which we call “the hardware”) and community programming (which we call “the software”).
Hardware-wise, River Arts was anchored by a row of historic buildings but also had lots of unremarkable infill around it and was adjacent to a loud and imposing interstate. The point is that great places are often developed on flawed corridors, and Class A architecture is an unnecessary prerequisite for building high-quality communities.
At the end of the day, building community is a software problem — it’s about event programming, brand, pride, vision, member empowerment and self-actualization.
The term “software” then, in this sense, is misleading because it implies you can control these things quantitatively. Communities, though, are inherently organic, idiosyncratic and unpredictable. I have many friends (primarily Bay Area-based) who still believe you can literally “program” communities with self-learning software algorithms that create human connections.
I’ll short any such business.
Placemaking cannot be done via an app. Technology can help, but at the end of the day, placemaking is done over coffee and drinks — and unbending local developers who'll sign nontraditional leases with undercapitalized tenants whom Greystar wouldn’t lease to in a million years. There’s no playbook for this game. You can’t learn how to do this at business school.
The River Arts District played this scrappy game better than any other. The community took decades to build and, by all accounts, it was still growing.
It will be difficult for River Arts to restore itself. The buildings can be cleaned and repaired, but many businesses are gone. New leaders will need to be identified — and not just any leaders, but the kinds of people who are willing to commit 20, 30 or 40 years to curate a single place. That’s rare.
Sixty-year-old artists, who operated in the district for decades, now face the decision to fight on or close shop, and no one would blame them for choosing the latter.
Who is willing to do the thankless and exhausting tasks of begging for money and special permissions in an environment where thousands of others in Helene's path will do the same? Do River Arts’ leaders have time for politics? River Arts-style incrementalism is small and agile. Policy and subsidy are inherently big and dumb. The problems and solutions appear to be misaligned.
Much more will be known in the coming months. At the moment, I feel like I am at a funeral.
The loss feels more spiritual than physical. While the sheer scale of the trauma in Appalachia is overwhelming, symbols of community matter because they become the reason to build back — the reason to fight on. The anchors of any place are civic buildings and civic districts, which serve the existential function of getting people to care enough to fight.
That’s why it is so crucial that the River Arts District is built back. For Western North Carolina, and the movement of incrementalism, it’s too important not to.
Ways to help Western North Carolina, suggested by Local Conversations in the area:
Aaron Lubeck is a award-winning restoration contractor specializing in historic restorations, as well as a faculty member with the Incremental Development Alliance, where he specializes in zoning reforms. He is the author of a children’s book on accessory dwellings entitled “Heather Has Two Dwellings,” as well as “Green Restorations: Sustainable Building and Historic Homes.”
Most recently, Aaron is the founder and development director for Southern Urbanism, a Durham-based nonprofit committed to building better cities in the South. He writes at Southern Urbanism Quarterly and on his personal blog, “onHousing.” He tweets at @aaron_lubeck.
