Montgomery County is a known hotbed for "smart growth"—a planning style that favors dense, mixed-use developments and walkable communities built around transit hubs. Daniel first came to Asheville during grad school after reading Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. She came to truly admire the city when she visited years later, after she’d become "a major supporter of pedestrian-scaled downtown communities" and realized Asheville was turning into one.

In the short term, Daniel has her work cut out for her. She’ll be hammering out a corridor plan for Haywood Road in West Asheville and taking a lead role in implementing Asheville’s downtown master plan, the details of which got hashed out in a series of tense community meetings last year. That means wading through controversies over downtown chains and hoping for an uptick in development applications after a slow six months. "I am not afraid of growth," she says. "It’s important. It’s not that we grow—it’s how we do it. A community that gets set in stone has no room for entrepreneurship and creativity. This is a town brimming with creativity, and it needs an outlet."

One of Daniel’s personal claims to fame is that in the 1940s, Elvis Presley’s dad worked for her grandpa at a Pepsi bottling plant in Tupelo, Mississippi, where she was born. Someday when she retires, Daniel wants to join the Peace Corps, which she skipped when she was younger because she was (no kidding) afraid of bugs. "I’m freaky over bugs," she says. "I was afraid I’d wake up with bugs in my bed." After that, she intends to move to a small town and sign up for a voting position on the planning and zoning commission—mainly to heckle. "I want to be a feisty old Southern lady who causes problems," she says. Let’s hope the 57-year-old doesn’t start stirring the pot too soon.

True. Of course, that made life a little easier for me. My predecessor and the staff had been overwhelmed with development applications. It was at a fever pitch. That is very difficult. The slowdown has made it—what’s the best way to put it—it was going too fast. Now it’s going too slow. Moderate is better.

It was approved before I got here. It’s not finished yet. I can’t really say. The zoning allowed it. A lot of these buildings, it depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from…It’s a matter of perspective.

When the Battery Park Hotel was built [in 1924], it was out of scale with everything.

Sometimes you don’t know about people’s concerns—is it the actual scale? Is it the design? It can be a mix of things. I do know that when St. Paul’s Cathedral was built in London in the 1600s, there was a lot of negative reaction to it because it was out of scale with the surrounding neighborhood. People’s perceptions can change.

[Urban Outfitters] is unique in the world of chains, and they often like smaller spaces. They go into little interesting urban areas and neighborhoods. Typical Asheville, which was just wonderful, last week: [Urban Outfitters] came to the downtown commission because of the sign they want to put on the building. They want a variance for a substantially larger sign than you usually have downtown. We did not support it. They came to get some other thoughts from the downtown commission. They got a lot of strong pushback on it. They said they wanted to come here because of the wonderful ambience and uniqueness—they wanted to be a part of this. When they decided to do something against that collective protectiveness, they got a very strong reaction back.

If Urban Outfitters can accept that they are better off working with the collective design framework for downtown Asheville, I think they’ll be a good fit. They don’t do themselves any favors trying to push that envelope. They don’t need that kind of sign. People have heard of Urban Outfitters.

I think you judge whether it’s tough for developers by whether they want to come. If they want to come in the face of controversy, that means it’s a desirable market.

If there’s anything missing from downtown, it’s a wider range of residential options. With one exception, the condos that have been built are extremely upscale and very expensive—Washington, D.C. type prices…Lexington Station was well priced. It’s a nice complex, right on the edge of town, very convenient…There need to be more in those kind of price points.

Oh gosh, no… In grad school, I found out there was such a profession where you could help people make their communities into better places to live. What a wonderful way to earn a living. I think planning can be very frustrating at times when items come along that are particularly troubling to segments of the population, and there is no clear direction from the regulations.

I worked in a place where there was a big piece of land just past the edge of town. It had a beautiful creek running through it and a backdrop of mountains. [Developers] came in, assembled a bunch of property and wanted to build a big mall. The people in the surrounding area didn’t want a big mall. They didn’t want a giant megaplex, didn’t want a new town on their doorstep.

But there was absolutely nothing in the law that would preclude them from doing this. We could tweak it—we could work on the edges of it. There was a huge hue and cry and protest from people. And yet ultimately, there was nothing we could do other than improve the edges of it. The regulations allowed them to do this. [The community said], why didn’t you tell us? I said, well, I didn’t know. There was no way I could have foreseen and read all the regulations to point out to you that you should have known this. Too often we find out in retrospect the holes are there. We didn’t know they needed to be plugged.