Asheville Council to review rezoning of Asheville Mall, Tunnel Road sites
Asheville Mall could lose its Urban Place label as council weighs a July 28 hearing. The change could ripple to SteinMart and Innsbruck Mall on Tunnel Road.
Asheville City Council will consider whether Asheville Mall should lose its Urban Place designation, a move that could reset how the city treats one of Tunnel Road’s biggest commercial sites. The public hearing is set for July 28, and the rezoning would make the mall fit its “actual use and surrounding conditions.”
The proposal matters because Asheville Mall is not being discussed in isolation. The same zoning logic could reach other nearby properties, including SteinMart and Innsbruck Mall, putting a stretch of Tunnel Road on the edge of a broader land-use shift. If council approves the change, the mall would no longer sit in the city’s Urban Place category, a label tied to Asheville’s push for denser development in places built around large-scale redevelopment potential.
That push has been building since 2021. In an Oct. 6, 2021 story, Asheville Mall was identified as the next property up in the city’s urban zoning effort, and the current review shows how long the debate over this part of the corridor has lingered. The Tunnel Road area has also been working through the fallout from the city’s 2021 initiative and a 2024 settlement with some of its largest commercial property owners, keeping the corridor at the center of Asheville’s planning fights.
For residents, the practical stakes are less about zoning terminology than about what could come next on a corridor dominated by aging retail space and big parking lots. A rezoning that aligns the mall with its existing use could also set the stage for future redevelopment proposals, including denser projects that bring more housing, more activity and a different street-level feel than the current mall footprint.
The city’s Planning and Zoning Commission is part of that process, and the Asheville City Council serves as the policy-making body in Asheville’s council-manager government. City planning materials and commission agendas place the mall decision inside Asheville’s larger zoning and development machinery, where one property change can quickly become the template for the next. If Asheville Mall shifts first, the city may soon face the same question at the neighboring commercial sites that define Tunnel Road today.
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