ASHEVILLE – Gerry Mahon has owned the Mellow Mushroom in downtown Asheville for over 20 years. He’s weathered a lot of storms, but nothing like Tropical Storm Helene.
So now, he’s thinking about the future. Not just the quotidian concerns of getting his 60-person staff back to work, sourcing potable water from trucked-in totes or finding customers with tourism blunted by Helene. He’s also thinking about the future.
“Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes in some way shape or form have been damaged to an end that it will take months if not years to replace or repair. And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of houses that are completely gone,” he says. “When you start to lose that much housing in that broad of a swath, these people aren’t going to have anywhere to work, their jobs are gone, their housing’s gone, they’re going to go somewhere else and it’s going to take two or three years before we’re going to be able to find ourselves in a position to have those things again.”
Mahon’s talking about a potential “mass exodus” of people who make their living in Asheville’s food industry but may have no means, or will, to stay here. The consequences could be significant.
“If we look up and find that Asheville has irreparably changed and it doesn’t behave in the same way, then we find people don’t want to move here and don’t want to be part of the culture and that creates for a whole other different set of circumstances,” he says. “I think it’s going to be a problem.”
Due to increasing cost of living and relatively low wages, many restaurant workers were already struggling to survive here. But after property and job loss due to Helene, some are considering moving out of the area, which would have negative consequences for the fabric of the city, restaurateurs say.
“This community is made of so many service industry folks,” says Jen Hampton, co-chair of Asheville Food and Beverage United (AFBU) and housing and wages organizer at Just Economics. “They’re not just the workers, they’re also the customers. We’re seeing a massive exodus of employees.”
Can restaurants get back to pre-Helene employment levels? ‘Not for a while’
It’s well-known here that the Asheville area has a higher cost of living than most every where else in the state. Combine that with lower than average wages and a housing market that dwindled after Helene, and there’s a problem.
“That’s been an ongoing issue for at least the last two to five years,” Jay Monaghan, operations manager of Wedge Brewing Co., says of the unaffordability of Asheville. “Our hospitality workers have been pushed out farther and farther. There’s all different kinds of reasons for that, whether there’s too many Airbnbs in town or developments and rental prices, it’s a conglomeration of all that stuff.
“I’m not concerned this particular disaster is going to exacerbate it,” Monaghan adds, “because it was so exacerbated in the first place.”
Wedge lost its Foundy Street location in the storm, though it’s reopened its taproom in the Grove Arcade in downtown Asheville. Monaghan anticipates slowly bringing back employees, but losing their biggest spot for an undetermined amount of time will likely prevent them from employing the 20 or so people they had on staff before Helene.
“Will we be able to get back to pre-Helene employment? Probably not for a while,” he says.
Wedge isn’t alone. Mahon reopened Mellow Mushroom on Oct. 19 with about half of his 60-person staff. Most restaurants that have reopened are staggering shifts and bringing employees back slowly to match a lower-than-normal demand due to a curb in tourism and water restrictions that limit kitchen capabilities.
That’s a problem not just for service workers, but also for employers.
“I’ve been talking to business owners and they’re just as scared as working people,” Hampton says. “They get by month to month. This time is the busiest time of year, where tourists see the leaves change and that’s just gone. We’re coming up to the slow season and people are scared.”
The region is more dependent on hospitality and tourism services than the state and country, says Nathan Ramsey of the Land and Sky Regional Council, an economic and community development organization overseeing Western North Carolina.
Despite being one of the largest employment groups in the region, and a huge driver of revenue, food service and accommodations workers make the lowest average wages of any formal employment group: about $35,000 a year. In Asheville specifically, food preparation and serving is the highest employment sector, making up 12.2% of the work force — well over the national average (8.7%). Average wages are the lowest of any employment sector ($15.10 per hour, almost $1.50 below the national average).
In short, if this pool of workers were to diminish, there’d be a problem. And Ramsey does anticipate “this disaster will increase our unemployment rate.”
The AFBU union has been working for more equitable wages for service industry people in large part because many people have had to work multiple jobs in order to afford to live here.
“The majority of people who work in Asheville in the hospitality industry have two jobs,” says Miranda Escalante, co-chair of AFBU, a bartender at the Flatiron Hotel and a hospitality consultant. “Or they have one they’re working overtime hours at. I have bartender friends who have three jobs just to pay rent. All these people who work in the heart of the city are being pushed out of city limits.”
Like other restaurant and hospitality workers, Escalante says she and her husband have considered leaving Asheville if things don’t get back to normal soon.
“Maybe we just have hard talk in January if we can’t make it through this hump,” she says.
If aid continues for service workers and restaurateurs — in the forms of extended unemployment benefits, renewed small business loans, industry grants for workers and successful insurance claims — the hope is that enough of the labor force will stick around through the winter months until tourism picks back up again in spring.
“The leaf season is non-existent and we’re all going to have to hope that in another six weeks we can look up and maybe inspire people to be able to come to downtown Asheville and appreciate a little bit of small town America with the holidays and maybe we get something out of that because after that, you have a tremendous four-month glut of absolutely nothing,” Mahon says. “It’s the mountains in the winter. It’s cold, it’s windy. There’s nothing fun about it, and nobody comes here. That’ll be the hardest thing: for us to make it to the next earning season.”
Staving off ‘generic Everywhere, America’
Hampton worries that if businesses go under and the labor class moves away, Asheville will revert to a landscape of “boarded-up buildings like we had in the ’90s.”
“What I’ve been saying to people lately is we didn’t choose to be in this natural disaster,” Hampton says, “but we can choose not to have an economic disaster that’ll decimate our region for decades.”
Escalante adds that it feels like the service industry is “kind of being left behind,” and that the vibrant food and hospitality industry Asheville’s created, and has benefited from, will vanish without action to support service workers.
“I don’t know that the city or the state are really thinking about what’s going to happen to the economy of our town when it was just built on tourism,” Escalante says. “They’ve done so much to pump so much money to the [Tourism Development Authority] here and bring tourists here, but they’ve known for years that the water infrastructure is crap, the roads are too small and they’ve put all this money into tourism but never taken care of the people who drive that.
“As someone who has worked 18 years in the food and beverage industry in Asheville, the grief for me is heavy because I don’t know what our industry is going to look like,” she continues. “I don’t know what we’re going to have one.”
Mahon envisions another possible outcome if the service class were to be priced out of the region and if mom-and-pop shops were forced to close: suburban hell.
“I worry Asheville is going to lose whatever Asheville had before to larger interests because these things fall by the wayside and the rents can’t be met, and we suddenly look up and find ourselves being generic Everywhere, America,” he says. “Not that there’s something wrong with that; it’s just that it’s not enticing to a tourist.”
Now, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are grants available to service workers from a variety of sources, including FEMA, Southern Smoke Foundation, the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association and others.
“There are a lot of people rallying to keep people here,” Hampton says.
There’s also a will to keep service workers here. People in the hospitality industry want to stay in Asheville and want the food and service industry back and better than before, even if the route to get there is a little hazy now. Considering all the obstacles that remain — keeping employees in town, making sure they have adequate funding, rebuilding destroyed businesses and bringing back tourists (and locals) — restaurateurs are left to consider the unsavory alternative of not forging ahead.
“What’s the alternative, you know?” says Monaghan. “It’s sink or swim, so we’re going to swim until sink.”
Matt Cortina is a food writer with the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Food workers may leave ‘unaffordable’ Asheville after Helene
