Stalled Ramada Inn project deepens Asheville housing frustration

The former Ramada Inn on 148 River Ford Parkway still stands empty, with boarded windows, graffiti on the top floor and a locked metal fence cutting it off from East Asheville. Nearly two years after a California-based developer announced plans to revive the long-endorsed housing project, construction has still not started.

That unfinished site has become a blunt symbol of Asheville’s housing frustration. City leaders had already put public money and political capital into the parcel, including nearly $80,000 in waived closing costs during an earlier transfer and $1.5 million approved to pay for the first three years of supportive services under the 2022 plan. Instead of opening doors for people who need stable housing, the property has become a highly visible vacancy on a major corridor.

The project’s path has been anything but smooth. On December 20, 2022, Asheville officials congratulated Shangri-La Industries and Step Up on Second Street on a groundbreaking for a proposal that called for 113 studio apartments, with half reserved for unhoused veterans and half for the broader unhoused community. In January 2024, reporting said Shangri-La had defaulted and lost the property to foreclosure.

By May 2024, Asheville’s Housing and Community Development Committee was asking for an expedited process to deal with the Ramada site. In August 2024, Asheville’s Homelessness Board narrowly recommended a new proposal. By September, the plan had shifted to 50 units of supportive housing for homeless veterans and 50 affordable apartments, backed by a 50-year deed restriction. In December 2024, Friendship for Affordable Housing said it had closed on the site and said the project would become 50 units of permanent supportive housing for previously homeless veterans and 50 affordable apartments.

Even with that succession of approvals and revisions, the building remains closed off and vandalized. WLOS reported on May 22 that the parcel was still vacant, boarded and fenced, a reminder that Asheville has been unable to turn a prominent hotel shell into the housing it promised.

The Ramada site had first entered the city’s homelessness conversation in a 2021 report that considered it as a possible high-access emergency shelter using federal American Rescue Plan funds before the concept changed. Since then, the parcel has moved through multiple housing ideas, multiple developers and multiple rounds of public approval. What it has not produced is the housing East Asheville was told to expect.