Downtown Asheville not so dangerous? Data: These neighborhoods have more crime, violence

ASHEVILLE - Teresa Mosely grew up in the Montford neighborhood north of downtown — but as a girl she was a regular presence in other communities, like Hillcrest and Pisgah View, where she would visit friends and family.

Now Mosely says those neighborhoods, which she calls "the projects" — apartments affordable to the city's poorest residents — have changed, morphing from friendly places, where people called out to her by name, into dangerous ones. Her son, Keith Mosely, used to play in Hillcrest as a child. Two years ago, Keith was killed after being shot 20 times while picking up his girlfriend there. He was 21 years old.

"Now you couldn’t pay me to even drive in those areas late at night," said Mosely, 57, a psychiatric clinical nurse coordinator. "What’s sad is that I grew up in those places, and it was never like that."

In downtown, a few miles away, Mosely said she feels completely safe. "I would walk around there at 3 a.m." she said.

"I'm a mental health nurse, and I serve people — many of them are downtown — and I think because people don't know them and they are homeless, people feel uncomfortable. But these are just normal people down on their luck. Whereas when you go to the projects, there is more violence ... there are killings there."

Mosely's take on downtown and nearby neighborhoods runs counter to heated public discourse in which merchants, downtown-oriented groups and media have said the city center, known and advertised nationally as a prime vacation destination, has become intolerably dangerous. One collection of nearly 40 business owners sent a letter late last summer to the City Council saying the municipal government "has fallen short in its duty and responsibility." A national Fox News story last winter, meanwhile, decried downtown as "deteriorating amid rising crime, rampant homelessness and diminishing police."

That type of pressure was followed by police sweeps of homeless residents, the addition of deputy patrols, private security guards in city parking garages and the allocation of other taxpayer resources.

But a closer look at downtown safety in a new Citizen Times investigation found a disconnect between the rhetoric and reality — and that problems with safety are not primarily downtown, which has drawn the majority of public attention and resources. Instead, the greatest dangers lie in neighborhoods that are poor, isolated and racially segregated from the rest of the city, and whose populations historically have high numbers of children. It is in those communities where gunshots ring out regularly, parents are afraid to let their children play outside and where violent crime persists.

Asked where the most dangerous places in the city are, the Asheville Police Department's new interim chief agreed with the Citizen Times analysis, saying that downtown, despite the attention it was getting, was not the area struggling the most with safety.

Which neighborhoods see most violence?

To understand which parts of the city are the most violent, the Citizen Times investigation looked at APD data on gunshots and violent crime in downtown and three affordable housing neighborhoods run by the Asheville Housing Authority. The authority manages federally subsidized housing for nearly 3,000 city residents in 11 communities: Pisgah View Apartments, Deaverview Apartments, Maple Crest Apartments, Hillcrest Apartments, Klondyke Homes, Livingston and Erskine-Walton, Aston Park Tower, Altamont Apartments, Bartlett Arms Apartments, Asheville Terrace and Woodfin Apartments.

An earlier Citizen Times analysis from 2018 to August of 2023 showed three housing authority communities had some of the city's highest incidents of violent crime, defined by law enforcement as homicide, rape, aggravated assault and robbery. Those were Pisgah View in West Asheville, Hillcrest, next to downtown and Aston Park Tower, a smaller development just south of downtown.

Children make up a much higher percentage of housing authority residents than citywide. Seventeen percent of Asheville's 93,776 people are younger than 18. In housing authority communities, 41% are younger than 18, according to 2017 figures reported by the Citizen Times. Housing Authority President Monique Pierre did not respond to requests for updated figures on the percentage of children. On Feb. 8 she emailed numbers showing 153 children living in Pisgah View, 271 in Hillcrest and none in the 162-unit Aston Park Tower. But Pierre did not give the total populations or adult populations.

The housing authority neighborhoods also have a much larger minority population — 53% of its residents are Black. Citywide, Asheville is 10% Black.

Almost all the crime numbers used by the Citizen Times did not include rapes or violent crimes involving juveniles. Those categories were missing from the public-facing APD data, a redaction made due to privacy concerns and because of state law protecting minors, a police spokesperson said.

The Citizen Times obtained the 2023 numbers for rapes and juvenile incidents — without addresses or names — through a public records request to APD. The Citizen Times has made a public records request for rapes and violent juvenile-related incidents for earlier years.

The APD numbers collected and counted by the Citizen Times showed downtown (including the neighborhoods of South Slope and the Block) had 105 reports of gunshots from 2018 through 2023. That was using the police gunshot discharge data dashboard that tracks and maps residents' calls reporting gunshots. Some are reported as gunshot wounds. Because the dashboard's "neighborhood selector" did not give accurate numbers, the Citizen Times hand-counted the calls shown on online maps.

Pisgah View, which is markedly smaller than downtown with none of the thousands of hotel guests and other tourists and workers, had 258 calls about gunshots, almost one-and-a-half times more than the city center's 105.

Hillcrest, which is smaller than Pisgah View, had 152 calls, or 45% more than downtown. Some of those calls came June 9, 2019, police said, when half a dozen men engaged in a gun battle after 3 a.m. in the neighborhood that sits less than a half-mile from Isaac Dickson Elementary. At least two men were wounded, with one firing a pistol equipped with a high-capacity magazine toward an apartment building without "looking at where he was shooting," according to an APD detective's account. No bystanders were reported as injured.

Aston Park Tower had only 31 calls reporting gunfire — though in terms of housing units, downtown is 10 times bigger, making the neighborhood's experience with gunfire proportionately much greater. On July 15, 2022, a shooting at the complex wounded one man and killed Brittney Jakeline Gamez-Farjat, 20, of Hendersonville, police say. Menelik Tefari Nesanet, 21, was arrested and as of Feb. 16 remained in the Buncombe County Detention Facility under an $800,000 bond.

The Citizen Times analysis looked at the number of violent crimes as well as the number of housing units downtown and in the neighborhoods. Information was obtained from the housing authority, census and the city planning department. Population numbers for the neighborhoods including downtown could not be determined. Also not included in the violent crime rates were the large numbers of people who visit downtown and do not live there. The Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority said there are 9,097 hotel rooms throughout the county, but spokesperson Ashley Greenstein said the TDA did not break out hotel rooms for downtown.

Tourist numbers: Asheville, Buncombe Airbnb usage is up 68% since 2019 as county mulls regulations

In terms of violent crime in the city center, the number of incidents reported annually has held relatively steady over the last nine years, with the biggest rise in 2019, from 41 to 65 incidents, the data showed.

Like gunshot calls, violent crime comparisons show the housing authority neighborhoods have a bigger safety problem than the city center.

Downtown saw its highest amount of annual reported violence in the last six years in 2021 with 77 incidents. That year, Pisgah View had 24 incidents — or more than twice as many as downtown per housing unit, a rate that, again, does not take into account downtown visitors or workers.

Hillcrest, an apartment complex with only one street that loops around a few dozen tightly packed buildings, had 19 violent crimes — nearly twice as many as downtown per housing unit.

Also in 2021, Aston Park Tower with 11 violent crimes, had 47% more violent crime per housing unit than downtown.

In 2023, when downtown violent crime dropped 15%, these other neighborhoods continued to have a disproportionately high number of violent incidents, the Citizen Times analysis showed.

Life in public housing: gunshots, fear

In Hillcrest on Feb. 15 a small patch of blood was still wet on the street from the night before. A woman was shot twice in the legs and transported to the hospital wearing a tourniquet applied by a police officer, Capt. Joe Silberman said. Officers are investigating and have not yet arrested anyone, Silberman said.

Residents, some of whom live yards away from where the woman lay bleeding, said the violence is a regular occurrence. Leticia Adams, 39, has two children, though one, her 14-year-old daughter, now stays in Black Mountain with her father, she said, because the girl is afraid of the neighborhood. Adams makes her 6-year-old son play inside.

"I'm scared to let him out. They don't care about kids being out here. When they shoot, they don't care," she said.

Late last year, Adams said children were playing in a community field on a sunny day when someone started shooting at a man who was standing nearby. "Everybody was saying, 'Go grab your kids! Go grab your kids!'" she said.

Across the French Broad River, in Pisgah View, resident Glisa Ponder, 42, told the Citizen Times that she hears gunshots "all the time."

Not far from Ponder's apartment a man and a woman were shot at 3:38 p.m. March 30, 2022, a Wednesday. The 33-year-old woman, whose name was withheld by police, survived. Simone Marquette Burnette, 49 died. DeMarcus Antonio Royal was charged with murder and assault with attempt to kill. Royal was jailed but on April 6, before his trial, died of pneumonia.

"I really try not to allow my kids to go outside," said Ponder, who was hanging her laundry on a sunny Saturday in February while her 7- and 8-year-old boys were inside their small apartment.

Ponder, who has lived in the complex for five and a half years, noted the pieces of hypodermic needles not far from her feet, saying hard drug use had increased, and she was hoping to move away with her children.

"It's its own world. Pisgah View doesn't even seem to be part of Asheville. It's bad," she said.

Violent crimes, gunshots

Downtown 1,668 housing units (includes South Slope and the Block)

Gunshots 2018-2023:  105

Violent crimes*

2018: 41

2019: 65

2020: 66

2021: 77

2022: 61

2023: 53

Pisgah View 256 family housing units (West Asheville)

Gunshots 2018-2023:  258

Violent Crimes

2018: 28

2019: 33

2020: 27

2021: 24

2022: 24

2023: 18

Hillcrest 228 family housing units (west of downtown)

Gunshots 2018-2023:  152

Violent Crimes

2018: 13

2019: 10

2020: 23

2021: 19

2022: 17

2023: 16

Aston Park Tower 162 single housing units (south of downtown)

Gunshots 2018-2023:  31

Violent Crimes

2018: 26

2019: 6

2020: 19

2021: 11

2022: 24

2023: 5

*Violent crimes are homicides, rapes, aggravated assaults and robberies. Asheville Police Department data on transparency dashboards does not include rapes or juvenile incidents. The Citizen Times has made a public records request for the numbers and neighborhood location of the rapes and juvenile incidents.

Sources: Asheville Police Department, Asheville Housing Authority, U.S. Census Bureau, Asheville City Planning Department.

Pisgah View resident, Blade Johnson, 55, speaking on the same sunny Saturday, Feb. 3, said he allowed his grandchildren to play on the small stretch of sidewalk in front of his apartment. Three of them, two elementary school-aged children and one preschooler, roller skated back and forth.

Asked about gunshots, Johnson, who moved to Pisgah View from Atlanta five years ago, said, "Oh, yeah. I hear them. It's calmed down a little bit now, but everything will start happening in spring and summertime."

"Sometimes they'll be shooting fireworks, and you can't tell if it's gunshots or fireworks," he said.

Johnson said he and friends went downtown Feb. 2 and saw the patrols of sheriff's deputies that had been added after calls from owners of downtown restaurants and hotels.

"They need to have them right here," Johnson said of Pisgah View.

Pierre, who took over as housing authority president in May 2023, did not respond to requests for comment about the analysis showing the high violent crime rate and gunshot frequency in the neighborhoods.

APD chief: 'The places we're missing out on'

Problems downtown are real, said interim APD Chief Mike Lamb, but they were worse in the neighborhoods highlighted by the Citizen Times.

Lamb, a 26-year APD veteran appointed after Chief David Zack's resignation in December, spoke to the Citizen Times in a Jan. 24 interview. He said downtown had been a hotspot for aggravated assaults, which by definition involve a serious injury or use of a deadly weapon.

In one of those attacks a man was hospitalized after being stabbed in the neck by Faith Denise Cox on March 18, 2022, according to police. Cox was arrested and jailed but died of pneumonia before her trial.

"We saw a spike, especially in 2021 and 2022," Lamb said. "What drove downtown violent crime up so high during those two years was specifically those aggravated assaults."

"But when you look at our violent crime hot spots it's typically within the bigger public housing developments," Lamb said.

After the interview, APD on Feb. 9 sent the Citizen Times its own analysis for 2023. It showed that despite the city center's square footage being 50% larger than all the housing authority neighborhoods combined, the neighborhoods had 43 more violent crimes.

When looked at numbers as a rate — violent crimes per 100,000 square feet — housing authority communities had a violent crime rate of 1, while downtown had 0.5, the APD chart said.

In terms of property crime, downtown had a higher rate. Per 100,000 square feet, downtown had 3 incidents to the neighborhoods' 1. With calls for service, downtown had a rate of 64 to the neighborhoods' 37.

APD used square feet because population data for downtown and the neighborhoods isn't available, police spokesperson Samantha Booth said, and "operationally, we perform proactive efforts in spaces, not against people."

The biggest crime category in the APD chart was "other" — a catchall covering everything from vagrancy to simple assaults, meaning altercations with no serious injuries or weapons. For that, the neighborhoods had a rate of 4 to downtown's 6.

Facing persistent police turnover, APD has made a series of cuts, including the downtown patrol unit in 2020 and a public housing authority unit in 2022.

After outcry over downtown conditions, sheriff's deputies were assigned to patrol the city center, replacing a portion of the time when the downtown patrol would have operated. The housing unit positions, however, remain vacant. Those positions were important, Lamb said, because officers established relationships with residents, making it easier to prevent and solve crimes.

Asked by the Citizen Times if there should be more focus on the housing authority communities with large populations of children and high concentrations of violence, Lamb said "yes," and that with more staffing it would happen.

"Those are places we're currently missing out on right now," he said.

The Citizen Times sent a follow-up question asking why resources could not now be shifted from downtown or other places to the neighborhoods. In her response, Booth, the spokesperson, did not answer the question, but said APD is trying to fill the gaps with "data driven strategies."

Downtown business outcry

Debate over downtown safety came to a head in 2023. By that time it had drawn in APD, the sheriff, City Council, Buncombe County commissioners, the region's member of Congress, homeless advocates and local and national media.

In March, April and July of 2023, Fox News ran multiple stories on downtown, featured for years by national media as a top place to visit but that Fox characterized in a March 6 story as having a sharp increase in "lawless behavior."

"Multiple people who work in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, bemoaned the condition of the city and pinpointed a lack of police presence to its decline," the story said.

Fox referenced a 12-part series by Asheville Watchdog about what the local news outlet called a "deteriorating" downtown. Inspiration for the project came after a reporter's experiences dining downtown at a favorite restaurant and seeing the problems, according to a Watchdog story on the origin and impact of the series.

In that article, Watchdog wrote how deputy patrols were added downtown "and elected leaders credited The Watchdog’s reporting with spurring action."

“I definitely want to give credit where credit is due,” Mayor Esther Manheimer was quoted as saying.

Though the series spotlighted the city center, Watchdog noted in its second story how City Manager Debra Campbell said Asheville's violent crime was highest in housing authority neighborhoods, a place from which a dedicated police unit was cut.

The Citizen Times asked Watchdog — whose website says its stories lead to "indictments, legislative action and positive change" — about its choice to highlight downtown instead of housing authority neighborhoods as well as its role in affecting where resources were sent.

"We had the traditional journalist role in bringing important and previously under-reported issues — downtown crimes, homelessness, drugs, lack of affordable housing, broken criminal justice system, etc. — to the public’s attention," Executive Editor Peter Lewis said Feb. 16. "We had no role in the decision by city officials on how or where they deploy their law enforcement officers."

Officials respond to criticism

Facing continued criticism about downtown, city leaders responded in an April 24, 2023, story by Fox, saying they were taking targeted steps.

"There are complex circumstances contributing to the safety issues that Asheville is currently seeing downtown, and it will take a community response to address these complexities," the statement said. "Multiple city departments are coordinating a city government response, and we also need participation from community leaders and partners to address all the factors contributing to the rise in crime."

Four months later, five of seven council members sent an Aug. 10 open letter to the media and public, saying municipal government would make a 60-day Downtown Safety Initiative a permanent city program.

"In only 60 days this collaboration between city departments, the sheriff's department and community groups resolved 41 unsafe lighting issues, investigated 57 noise complaints, hosted eight volunteer clean-ups, cleaned 348 miles of sidewalk, removed 4,000 graffiti tags, provided 115 proactive wellness checks and issued 463 police verbal warnings, 56 citations and 94 arrests. We are exploring options for replicating these successes in more neighborhoods," said the letter signed by Manheimer, Vice Mayor Sandra Kilgore and council members Sheneika Smith, Sage Turner and Maggie Ullman.

Council members Kim Roney and Antanette Mosley did not sign the letter. Mosely said she was traveling when the letter was sent to her and was unable to review it.

Roney criticized the letter, saying in her own Aug. 15 memo that it failed to mention "gun violence, violence among our youth and intimate partner violence."

Despite those stated efforts and with the main fall tourist season approaching, nearly 40 downtown restaurant and hotel owners sent a Sept. 14 statement to the mayor and other top city officials, calling for changes including the "removal of vagrants" and more resources for "citizens experiencing chronic homelessness, mental illness and/or drug addiction." Among the signatories were owners of local high-end and prominent restaurants.

"Today we are reaching out as a united voice of concerned citizens, employers and business owners, to discuss and address the short-term need for additional public safety in our City of Asheville," said the letter, signed by Market Place restaurant owner William Dissen, Aimee Diaz of the Diaz Restaurant Group and others. "Once again, as fall approaches, Asheville is confronted with the inadequacy of our efforts to address the issues of violent crime, open drug use, public harassment and the safety of our citizens and customers in our community."

Jen White, who along with her mother has owned Lost and Found, a small downtown clothing shop on the corner of College Street and North Lexington Avenue since 2018, was not among the signatories. But the store, she said, has experienced escalating problems.

That has included what she called petty vandalism, such as spray paint on their store. Then in 2020 someone shot out a large plate glass window with a BB gun. The following year another window was smashed by a brick, said White, 45, a newly single mother of two living in Swannanoa. The damage for each incident cost thousands of dollars.

Earlier this year, on the night of Jan. 20, a window was broken again, this time by what police said was a 9 mm bullet shot from the street. It lodged in a bin of Halloween decorations. The same night, farther west on College Street, someone shot into the Yacht Club bar. No one was injured but a window there was also broken.

White said police have responded and were helpful, but she feels incidents like these can happen when there's not a regular law enforcement presence.

"It's crazy because I never thought of Asheville as a place with a lot of crime," White said. "I mean, I moved here from New Orleans. We moved here because we have kids and it's safer."

Shift the focus: advocate, survivor

Keynon Lake and staff of the nonprofit he founded, My Daddy Taught Me That, provide support and mentoring to what he estimates are "hundreds" of adolescent boys living in neighborhoods such as Pisgah View and Hillcrest.

One young man they worked with was shot to death near the end of 2023, he said. While Lake declined to give details, police in a news release identified 19-year-old Najeah Prest Porter as the victim of a Dec. 24 shooting in a neighborhood south of downtown. A juvenile was charged with his murder.

Downtown's role as the center of a multi-billion-dollar tourism industry is what puts the attention there — but that should change, said Lake, a 47-year-old Asheville native. Violence, he said, "should be eradicated in all places."

"We're talking about stopping violence everywhere, not just downtown. We're talking about being able to support those who truly are most vulnerable to violence, the ones who live in violence every day, the ones who are dealing with death and things that we can't even imagine, day in and day out," he said.

"We need to have that same focus in our under-served communities where the most vulnerable marginalized people live."

Mosely, the nurse who lost her son to gun violence in Hillcrest in 2022, led a Feb. 2 anti-violence prayer vigil in front of City Hall. "Jesus, I don't want another mother to have to go through what I went through," she said.

Like, Lake, she said public attention needed to shift to areas where residents were most susceptible to violence. Children, she said, have no choice in where they live.

"These low-income areas, that is where the kids are, and that is where the focus should be," she said.

Joel Burgess has lived in WNC for more than 20 years, covering politics, government and other news. He's written award-winning stories on topics ranging from gerrymandering to police use of force. Got a tip? Contact Burgess at jburgess@citizentimes.com, 828-713-1095 or on Twitter @AVLreporter. Please help support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Downtown Asheville safe? Data: crime, violence worse in neighborhoods