[Narz]

I'm not sure whether I started a thread about this city or the surrounding areas but I couldn't find one within the last year.

Anyway, is anyone from there? What do you think of the viability of that part of the country?

[Ferretlover]

Don't think you started one-I would have remembered it!
Had lunch there once; my father and his third? fourth? wife lived in Hendersonville (about thirty minutes to the south). Generally, the area is mountainous and very pretty. Lots of apple orchards, and smells great when they are blossoming. People are the same as most other East Coast areas.

[hillsidedigger]

At the risk of identifying where I live (although it doesn't matter for I'm just the 'unknown comic', you know, bag over the head thing from the Steve Martin Show back in the 1970's), I'm just one county over from Buncombe County where Asheville is located.

There's some nearby national forests and national parks and a lot of the surrounding private land was once fairly wild also.

All I can say is Buncombe and the surrounding counties have grown horrendously (tripling and quadrupling) over the last 40 years with generally very consumptive and un-green people, mostly older 'halfbacks', also Latin American and Asian immigrants. Traffic is a big issue for they can't build roads fast enough in the hills. Asheville sits is a bowl which during temperature inversions during the winter results in foul air and it's not all that cool during the summer.

The area is experiencing increasing occurances of floods and landslides due to the development of the hillsides. Note - Interstate 40 just West of Asheville has been closed since this last Autumn because of a rockslide. A flood like the one that happened in 1916 would take out at least half the bridges and culverts in and around Asheville leaving hundreds of thousands stranded with no way out but by helicopter and it's bound to happen again.

Asheville is multi-cultural with a large fraction of the longtime locals being very Fundamental (think Red) but Asheville claims to now be the self-proclaimed and so-called 'New Age' mecca of America having wrestled that distinction from Sante Fe, New Mexico and also has a very vocal Wiccan community.

The economy of the area was most recently construction and service related, formerly quite industrial but many of the industries left and construction is way down. With the relatively high percentage of retirees, there are relatively high numbers of health professionals in the Asheville area.

There is and has been some agriculture in the area but it's a minor part of the local economy.

Land prices, while down a little since 2007, are still relatively high.

[Ferretlover]

Hendersonville, where the [i]Mother Earth News{/i] iwas based, has Loads of evergreen trees. MEN is now based in KS.

[hillsidedigger]

Henderson County, NC (just South of Asheville) has grown from only about 30,000 people when I was a kid to over 100,000 now. It's not quite a continuous residential subdivision with interconnecting sprawled commercial development, yet, but it's rapidly getting there except in the extensive flood plains and limited areas of public conservation lands.

The same is true of Buncombe County where Asheville is except with over 2 times the population.

The number of residents in Henderson County and several other Western North Carolina counties is sort of under-reported due to the great numbers of second homes with part-time residents located there.

[Ferretlover]

Henderson County, NC (just South of Asheville) has grown from only about 30,000 people when I was a kid to over 100,000 now. It's not quite a continuous residential subdivision with interconnecting sprawled commercial development, yet, but it's rapidly getting there except in the extensive flood plains and limited areas of public conservation lands.

Oh, that is too bad. But, I suppose more and more areas will become overrun with humans and their stuff. That area was so nice at one time...