To save soul of Asheville, don’t create technocracy

As Asheville and surrounding Buncome County crank up their efforts to recruit — with a host of incentives — startup and high-tech firms and their well-paid employees, we caution all parties involved to consider the plight of San Franscisco, where the battle for the soul of the city remains at fever pitch.

The tech boom there, involving stratospheric job growth in the nearby Silicon Valley, has been described — by those who like the old SF — as a wrecking ball, with spiraling rents and evictions forcing many residents to be priced out of their beloved city.

We think the facts would support that funky Asheville is quite comparable to San Francisco (albeit on a much smaller scale), and we would contend that our city likely will soon face the same battle to save its soul.

San Francisco was once a stomping ground for beatnik poets, bohemians, hippies and even the Black Panthers. Music and the arts flourished. It now is increasingly the capital of global digital connectivity. The tech boom is changing the very character of the now less charming West Coast city, named, ironically, for the patron saint most famous for his defense of the poor, sick and outcast.

Author Rebecca Solnit has described the soul of San Francisco as “the sense of this place as a refuge for all comers, as a place that fosters eccentricity, freedom, tolerance, alternatives and joi de vivre, as a place of environmentalists, poets, people whose lives are driven by idealism and not by greed, by a sort of biodiversity of community in class, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, interests. When only the rich survive, and even the doctors I know have trouble finding housing, all that’s clear-cut.”

Despite the stereotype of techies as money-grubbing, socially uninformed nerds without morals, we think that characterization is a bit harsh.

We are not anti-tech, just  against creating a “technocracy” that accents class polarization.