Tuesday, June 04, 2013

You are so Nashville if you give Midtown's new residents a $3,000,000 fitness center and Salemtown's new residents a cheap landfill

While we here in the North End are forced to abide a new clay-capped carcinogenic landfill via Metro Water, look what more affluent Midtown gets to enjoy: an expensive new fitness center at the Sportsplex.

The fitness center project comes on the heels of several proposed projects that will bring hundreds of new residents to Midtown. Southern Land Co. is building the six-story Elliston23 apartment and retail project at 2300 Elliston Place. Developer Tony Giarratana and an equity partner recently acquired two parcels at Elliston Place and 21st Avenue with plans to build apartments.

“When the sportsplex was completed, a fitness center was an afterthought,” said Tim Netsch, planning superintendent with Metro Parks.

 “It’s always been very popular, but small. Midtown is going to continue to grow with higher density and more residential. We thought it should be a priority to provide a new facility.”


West Nashville stands to get both bus rapid transit (with not a single guarantee for the future of lines along Charlotte Pike or in North Nashville) and a new fitness center to stay healthy, as if those people cannot already afford their own transportation and physical trainers. As if this were more than throwing money at sexy signature projects that Nashville does not need.

What do we get? Something else Nashville does not need: Metro Water's waste products buried along our watershed.

I'm sure Karl Dean's apologists will insist that Metro should pay for amenities for the bold and beautiful class along West End first, so that the wealth can fan out from there and trickle down to the third-class citizenry in North Nashville. Likewise, I can hear them insist that heavy metals and fuel contaminates have to be stored somewhere, and it sure won't be next to brand new brick-and-mortar projects along our city's western border.

6 comments:

  1. Mike, I fully support your campaign against the landfill. I just needed to pop in to say I used to live in that area of Midtown, and "bold and beautiful" should probably be replaced with "young and living off of Daddy's allowance."

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  2. In fairness, the fitness center is 1.5 miles away from my apartment near Fisk. It's hardly inaccessible to North Nashville residents.

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  3. Neither decision is illogical if the full context is examined.

    At one time I followed your blog to keep up with the goings-on in Salemtown/Germantown. You've recently devolved into quite the conspiracy theorist recently, and it's detracting from the previously informative aspect of your blog. Not that you're going to be hurt by one person deciding not to read your posts (and I don't mean that in a snarky way - it's just an objective fact), but I'm rapidly moving in that direction.

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  4. Yes. The full context: having lived in west, east & now north Nashville, I believe I can say from experience that resources flow largely east-west in this city. Whatever needs to be discarded or dumped tends to be sent north. A common sense survey of the QOL in each sector supports that. It's the full context. North Nashville is simply getting another landfill, West End-Vandy is simply getting another enrichment. How is that illogical or inconsistent with context or history? (Yes, history matters as much as context). And I don't know if it's a conspiracy or not. It is fact; and I tend to prefer to be a realist about power relations in decisions about where to spend money.

    As for leaving: no worries. You're not the only dissatisfied anonymous commenter to drop from readership. Then again, this blog has never been a bulletin board or community affairs page. Just one guy's unbranded opinions and critical reflections on his community. Take it or leave it.

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  5. One thing about the Sportsplex - it gets used, and used a lot.

    I don't know where the North Nashville Community Centers are, but I'd be surprised if they haven't been updated in the last 5 years. Hopefully, they are used as much as the Sportsplex.

    Oh, and the Sportsplex fitness center is a joke. The locker rooms are worse. In that sense, those people who would naturally go to the Sportsplex are far behind those who go to more-recently updated Metro facilities.

    While I am sympathetic to some degree to the issues raised in this blog post, I don't think that they are interconnected in the way you suggest.

    brian

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  6. And, Antioch gets a couple of ice rinks. If money was unlimited, I'd say this was great. As it is, I'll say I anticipate them being used a lot.

    I post this as support of the post above, noting that community centers have been undergoing updating (and in this case being created).

    brian

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