Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
More of what’s going around:
-A controversial new south Asheville apartment complex has been stalled for now, WLOS reports. A developer had proposed building 230 new apartments and 30 new townhouses on Overlook Road. But residents, led by Vijay Kapoor, a candidate for Asheville City Council, organized a petition and at a meeting last night, the group announced that the developer had pulled their application to the Buncombe County Board of Adjustment. The developer may still move ahead with a smaller project that doesn’t need Board of Adjustment approval, WLOS reports.
-The Asheville Planning and Zoning Commission meets today at 4 p.m. in a meeting room at City Hall. There are several items of business on the agenda, including a request to review a conditional zoning for “the development of a 5-story hotel with 86 rooms and a total square footage of 42,200 sf at the property located at 1500 Tunnel Road.” There’s also a request to review an amendment to a previously approved conditional zoning for changes to the conditions for development of a mixed use project at 146 Roberts St. in the River Arts District. That’s developer Harry Pilos’ RAD Loft project, which was proposed about four years ago, and is apparently moving forward.
-A construction project will bring new shops to Biltmore Village, WLOS reports. The Woodmont Company plans to build a two-story building at 19 Brook St. that will have shops on the bottom level and condominiums on the top.
-Aloft Asheville Downtown will host its June Live@Aloft event from 5-8 p.m. on Sunday, June 25, on its rooftop Air Level. The event is open to the public and a suggested $5 donation will benefit Friends of Connect Buncombe. The band is CaroMia.
-Elements juice bar, located on Liberty Avenue just north of downtown Asheville, recently closed its second location, which was open for about a week. In an Instagram post, the Elements owners explained their sudden decision, which left several employees without jobs:
For us, initially we thought that because everything is going so well at our first location, we should open up another one, and eventually have lots of locations and a southeastern juice empire but as we got closer to opening our second location, something started to change, we weren’t having any fun…. All of a sudden we had a big staff and now we needed to keep track of inventories in multiple locations and we could see immediately that the magic was disappearing and we no longer felt like this was our business. Those raw desserts that Jenni makes and all of the local sourcing we do for our juice ingredients, this all doesn’t just happen like going to the grocery store & buying a ready made meal, it takes an over the top amount of effort to keep the ethics and quality as high as we do day after day. So we had a choice to make, we could choose to ignore the voice of our souls speaking up saying, “excuse me, no no no, this is not going to make you truly happy.” Or we could choose to listen and risk being a little embarrassed for like 2 seconds and then move forward and find a solution. Thankfully we chose to listen to our souls and do what makes us happy, we really mean it when we say our products are made with love and choosing to admit we were wrong about the second location and only have 1 store was the only way to continue keeping the love and ethics as high as we need them to be. So if you are still reading, thank you and we hope this little short story explains what happened with our second location.
