In the 2019 election, Nashville sent a clear message that the city wanted change in the Mayor's Office. John Cooper the candidate promised he would "do the math and negotiate good deals for this city." Faced with more-of-the-same versus change, voters chose change even if they weren't sure where that would lead. As we enter 2022, I think we can say that "better deals" is not a vision that will sustain our city.

In the 1990s and through the Dean administration, reinventing downtown was a clearly understood primary civic goal. Not everyone loved it all the time, but there was broad consensus that Nashville was working toward a bigger, better downtown. People were consistently told that rebuilding downtown would help us pay for the things we need.

Fast forward to today: downtown is rebuilt. We have a gazillion tourists to prove it. But now what? John Cooper convinced voters in 2019 that the next round of deals should be "good deals." He said that he would "make sure developments benefit taxpayers." Many now question whether there are guiding principles, a vision, about what this means.

A January 1, 2022, story in the New York Times by Rick Rojas and former Tennessean reporter Jamie McGee described the tension between the obvious success of downtown and who we aspire to be as a city:

City officials and developers have ambitions of turning downtown into more of a neighborhood, a hub of commerce but also a place where a community can flourish. Yet that vision has sometimes been stymied by a more complicated reality: The raucous hordes of revelers and daily parade of party vehicles might be a sign of one way downtown is thriving. But they are also a source of exasperation for people who live and work in the city.

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Nashville is grappling with challenges familiar to cities that have been remolded by growth: Economic disparities widen. The limits of infrastructure are tested. The character at the root of its appeal becomes strained by the demands of development, a tension evident in persisting worries over the condition of Nashville’s soul.

A few days earlier, in a Los Angeles Times article on December 28, 2021, Nashville's Tequila Johnson talked about this tension more bluntly:

Nashville’s growth is “very top-down,” she said, arguing that much of the city’s expansion has happened without considering its current residents.

“It’s a two-edged sword. How do you maintain the culture?” she said. “And how do you hold government accountable to the people to make sure that as they are going out recruiting companies, and they are trying to build an economic infrastructure for Nashville to become a bigger city, that they’re also making sure to include the people who already live here?”

It is little comfort to know that coastal newspapers have noticed what's happening here. On the ground, in real time, we have kids going to class in portable trailers, hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance in Metro schools, a suspended recycling service, snarled intersections, and other day-to-day municipal headaches. And, as a Southern U.S. city, we have a layer of historic racism baked into many of our challenges. Do Nashvillians believe that the city government is doing better for them today than it was 20 years ago? Do they believe it will be doing any better 20 years from now?

Having better deal terms is not enough for Nashville. Not every deal is a good deal just because the numbers pencil out. We need a shared vision as a yardstick to measure development options against.

Vision for the future

Coming up with a shared vision for the next generation shouldn't be difficult. Stop by most any community meeting in Nashville and you could get a pretty good version in a few hours of conversation. Keeping in mind that demographers tell us Nashville will be a majority minority city by 2040, I think most people envision Nashville as an inclusive, diverse group of interconnected live-learn-work-play neighborhoods.

Some may dismiss this as too simple or too trite. I would ask them to talk to the community. This is what people want. Also, being simple doesn't mean it's wrong, or easy to accomplish. Also, if you disagree, let's talk about it. Dialogue to improve a proposed path forward is better than no discussion at all.

The hard part about building a better mouse trap is that you have to actually build the better mouse trap. Applied to Nashville, this means our guiding principles must actually be to have inclusive, diverse, complete neighborhoods that are interconnected throughout the county. We have to focus on that and invest in that.

We should be aware of our past without trying to recreate it. We are going forward, not backward. The appearance of progress should never mean chasing lower income neighbors out of the city. We have to figure out what it costs to succeed and build that budget instead of being irrationally tied to budget numbers that sound good.

Some may claim that the city is already working toward this vision. In response, I would ask you to consider a time when you walked into your favorite fast-food chain while traveling, and knew instantly that it would be disappointing. Maybe the floor was sticky, or the bathroom was a mess, or employees ignored you – you could just tell it wasn't going to be good. It doesn't matter how catchy the chain's jingle is if the feel of the experience tells you something is wrong.

In Nashville, there's a reason for the confusion about where we are headed. People eventually see through press releases. Their lived experience tells them that the city government struggles to keep up with the needs of regular people despite the drum beat of great news about downtown. Once you get outside of the tourist districts, you can just tell that running the city to improve the lives of all Nashvillians is not consistently the number one vision for the future.

What this means in practice

There is more than one way to accomplish the vision of an inclusive, diverse set of interconnected live-learn-work-play neighborhoods. We could commit to catch up on all the capital needs for our schools, libraries, and parks. We could commit to upgrading our worst traffic jam intersections, especially on formerly rural roads toward the edge of the county. We could commit to talk more openly about the ways that racism was imbedded into how Nashville works – from land use to policing to procurement – and then fix it. We could commit to a real, workable transit connection from the airport to downtown with the intention of extending along our major corridors. We could commit to maintain fair pay for all of the city's public servants. None of these could be accomplished in a single mayoral administration or Council term. They would take an ongoing commitment for a decade or more – just like Nashville's commitment a generation ago to rebuild downtown.

Having an agreed vision for where we are sailing our ship of state would inform us whether potential development is not only a good deal financially, but also moves the city toward our shared goals. Let's talk about three examples.

The Mayor has talked recently about striking a deal to bring NASCAR back to the Fairgrounds. My sense is that the administration's main focus is to make sure Nashville doesn't lose money on the deal. I appreciate that. I really do. Compared to the baseball stadium deal a decade ago that was tens of millions of dollars over budget, has no capital reserve whatsoever, and continues to suck property tax dollars from downtown projects like the AT&T Building, not losing money on a deal is an improvement. But would having a revenue neutral modern racing facility with no known traffic or parking plan that doesn't pay property tax and has all of its sales tax revenue used to pay bond debt help with any part of a shared vision for the future? I suppose we may answer that question in 2022.

Reinvention of the East Bank and Nissan Stadium area is coming soon too. The press releases talk about it being Nashville's next great neighborhood. The Tennessean reports that it is being loosely modeled after Wrigleyville in Chicago. The media reports and Planning Department meetings indicate that, while planning is in the early stages, the idea is to have a dense, mixed use area that is more neighborhood than tourist attraction with affordable housing, thoughtful transit, and many walk/bike options. To me, if the financial terms are satisfactory, this project matches up better with a long-term vision. More people will be moving to Nashville whether we like it or not. Having higher density and close in options for where people can live and work is a strong plus. But we’ll have to see whether building the East Bank will break the bank, and we’ll all be cautious about believing there is a genuine desire to tilt it toward neighborhood and not tourism. (As I am wrapping up a last edit, I see a new Tennessean article where tourism leaders are talking excitedly about an upgraded stadium area as an extension of downtown…so it will be fair to ask how hard the city is going to try to make this a neighborhood.)

There was a lot of media coverage recently about a proposed Jefferson Street Cap over I-40 in North Nashville. The controversy over the proposal is linked to the lack of a long-term vision for the city and the immediate area. At community meetings, neighbors strongly expressed that they're not interested in the cap if it is essentially a glorified concrete bridge over the interstate. However, they were interested in continuing the conversation if the construction project could be paired with affordability and real investments in neighbors and long-time local businesses. This back-and-forth shows the need for a vision to provide guidance for this development.

Of these, my guess is that the East Bank development is the most likely to move forward. The Jefferson Street Cap might happen if the right additional community investments can be blended into the project. And the racetrack faces the most problems. Unfortunately, without a shared vision to measure projects, reading tea leaves is the best any of us can do to figure out which projects may go forward.

But COVID…

The fact that COVID and its impacts are still here is no excuse for no shared vision. If anything, growing struggles about how to spend federal COVID relief dollars are driven by the lack of an agreed upon set of goals. In the first round of federal money in 2020, spending decisions were easier. Federal guidelines required the money to be used for limited COVID-specific purposes. With the current round of relief, federal guidelines are more permissive. Recently, when pushing to spend federal COVID money on 128 new police SUVs and new tasers, the Mayor’s office was quick to note that federal guidelines allow this use. Honestly, with all of Nashville’s needs, I can’t understand how an administration could get close to deciding that federal COVID money should be spent on police equipment that will last only a handful of years. Council Member Freddie O’Connell rattled off a list of better ideas on Twitter a few days ago. As Freddie said, “It’s time to talk about vision.“

Why talk about this now?

For too long, the city government was fixated on accomplishing the goals of the last generation and not really thinking about where to go next. Voters figured that out in 2019 and made a change. They'll also figure out that a new vision is needed and demand it from city leaders.

Now is the time to complete the transition from old plans to new dreams. Now is the time to pick the place on the horizon where we want to be a generation from now and make it happen.