We amount to more than "superimposed human silhouettes"

A city planner criticizes a Minneapolis improvement project totaling $50 million due to scant attention it gives to community-based input and democratic process. Given the recent move in the Metro Planning Department away from community-based planning toward a process sponsored by the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, he has some relevant things to say to us:

It would appear only a handful of people want this redesign, but it just so happens those handful of people are the one's with enough political connections to get the City to subsidize their want. We are witnessing the continuation of a failed top-down, 'Power Broker' system:

• Strategic political pressure is put on elected officials by influential insiders.
• The city starts the process by hiring the best outside ‘star’ consultant to tell us the things we likely already know.
• Consultant drafts renderings with the best design software money can buy that includes the finest superimposed human silhouettes unpaid interns can draft.
• Minimum public engagement requirements are hit by having people fill out online surveys while business and political insiders, not the countless thousands of daily users or small business owners, continue drive the bureaucratic process forward.

Where projects are funding from State and Federal sources, local input is limited to ensure the process goes as quickly as possible. Local political leaders go along with the process, despite it’s flaws, because it isn’t local money. It is something for nothing and, at that price, something is better than nothing.

In the planning profession, we spend a lot of time talking about the virtues of Jane Jacobs’ works but pay her little respect in practice. Our planning projects, and the leadership that supports them, still hold to modernist planning practices that have been long criticized. Our leadership, despite good intentions, continues to develop projects that accommodate those who do not live in the city all while paying lip-service to public input, diversity, and the little slices of chaos that make places great.

It begs the question: Are we still in the era of top-down modernist planning?

I don't know about Minneapolis, but Nashville is most certainly still in an era of top-down modernist planning, even with Metro being the primary funding source for many projects.

Yesterday, a person responded to my question about what he thought about proposals to change zoning and community character in order that historic buildings in Midtown give way for large hotels and mixed-use complexes, "It's the same developers who always get what they want. It's a done deal." Around the way, First Tennessee Park is being built with practically no community input, vague assurances from designers that it will reflect the local neighborhoods, and many "superimposed human silhouettes".

That's how growth happens in Nashville. Top-down, with power brokers driving planning and zoning. Metro Planning has even given up on community-based planning. Nashville Next, which pays lip-service to community input, has diluted the influence local communities can have on development by emphasizing region-wide coordination of opinions for one comprehensive vision for everyone. The Metro Planning Commission has few neighborhood-friendly, preservation-minded, affordability-touting advocates left to whom to appeal.

We are by no means nearing the end of top-down modernist planning. It chugs along unchecked in Nashville. The bulk of us are not much more than fine shadows to the power brokers.

Meet the new next, same as the old next: why some local neighbors have little faith in Metro Planning's latest gimmicks to promote their ideas of development

Back in 2013, one neighborhood leader wrote the following to an online forum:

Residents have been made to follow the historic design guidelines for a generation, guidelines they were told must be consistent in terms of the "community character." And they were led to believe that community character is defined as:

The image of a community or area defined by such factors as its built environment, natural features and open space elements, types of housing...(and) to preserve the general character of the neighborhood as characterized by its development pattern, building form, land use and associated public realm. These areas will experience some change over time but efforts should be made to retain the existing character…

Now ..., residents are being told the community character only involves the specific design elements of buildings that can been seen from the street. Nothing abut green space, the space between buildings, the alignment of buildings, or the number of residents - or anything else the residents consider as community character - may be considered, they are told.

Residents are concerned that the new high-density cottage development with a minimum of yard space will attract a different demographic - one that is not interested in yards and gardens. They are concerned of attracting a younger demographic of single persons - such as college students - with too many cars and pets and friends to comfortably fit onto a 150 by 165 foot lot along with eight cottages.

My considered suspicion of Nashville Next is often met with disbelief, defensiveness and frustration by those who enthusiastically participated in its process or those who believe it changes nothing about past community planning.

But Nashville Next has been the next stunt to lead neighbors into believing that they have influence over their community's character, when in reality they little. Planners shift paradigms and communities are thrown off balance. Market-driven developers, power-hoarding politicians and esoteric new urbanists have the strongest hold of the reigns of planning of anyone.

It was so in 2013. It is so in 2014. And it will be so in 2015.

Previously unpublished photos of the May 2010 Nashville flood indicate urbanizing Bells Bend was and is an idea fraught with peril

Recently, Bells Bend advocate Sumter Camp sent me 2010 flood photos that he has had stored away for almost 5 years. With the 5th anniversary of the Great Nashville Flood a few months away, it is worth reconsidering the impact of the flood on various communities.

Parts of the May properties, which were originally proposed to become a "second downtown" sprawling across the Bend would have been underwater if the Planning Commission had approved the build. Given that buildings and other impervious surfaces displace flood waters, the 2010 flood waters would have likely pushed further into the Bend if May Town Center had been allowed. As Nashville Next sets new goals for infill that have the potential to drive lower income people out of city neighborhoods, we should expect increasing pressures to urbanize our vanishing agricultural villages like Scottsboro/Bells Bend. The flood is a cautionary tale instructing us to organize and to push back against such pressure.

Advocates for protecting our agricultural areas like Bells Bend share complimentary interests with urban activists who demand affordable housing and rent controls in city neighborhoods. They should be building bridges to one another for the sake of common cause.

The caption descriptions are paraphrases of Sumter's own descriptions. I am grateful to him for giving us yet another look back at the 2010 catastrophe.

Cumberland River at the bottom with the right-hand bank
just outside of the last curving row of trees.
The power lines cross the southern-most corner of the May property.

Looking the opposite direction of the preceding photo.
John Tune Airport is at upper right. Charles Bass Prison is just below it
and to the right (water in between all of the pods).

Southern end of the Bend looking west. Old Hickory Blvd runs from right to left
just above the centerline of the photo. Partially flooded I-40 lies beyond.

Whites Creek gets nextified

Education advocate Anthony Cody recently tweeted a sentiment on another subject that applies to the recently launched community plan process in Whites Creek: "the test of a democratic process is how minority voices are treated".

I attended Whites Creek's first community planning meeting last week the day after the Nashville Sounds meeting introducing their video update of the construction of downtown's First Tennessee Park. In at least one way the meetings were dramatically different. By my count Whites Creek turned out at least 3 times the number of those attending the Sounds' video promotion. The ballpark meeting had a lot of empty seats (and a lot more press coverage). It was standing room only in Whites Creek (with no news media coverage to my knowledge). The turnout reflected to me the high level of interest in having some influence over the future in Whites Creek.

However, most of the agenda (I stayed the first hour and a half of the two hour meeting) was directed towards rehash of the past three years of "Nashville Next," Metro Planning's gimmicky process to bring more people into county-wide planning for the next two decades. In fact, I would count this meeting as my first Nashville Next meeting and respond to it as that because I am not convinced it was about Whites Creek at all.

Mr. Bernhardt took questions, but not until after he finished what seemed to be a stump speech and one-size-fits-all media presentation of Nashville Next. He pitched their speaker series, their early visioning workshops, their summer "lounges" and their social media tools. He also presented the statistical analyses from which the assumptions of Nashville Next arise.

One of the future trends cited was one about how population growth would increase in the next 25 years, but that families with children would decrease. That seems to be Metro's justification for planning smaller homes in denser areas.

That will be fine if the future trends hold and there are no more baby booms in the next two decades.

However, 20th century baby booms tended to follow catastrophe and calamities that beset people. Statistical analysis about future trends cannot predict those. In the U.S. two world wars (and perhaps the Great Depression) generated baby booms in the 20th Century. The Baby Boomers (births 1946-1964) were a generation that blew "future trends" out of the statistical water. My problem with strong reliance on statistical analysis of future trends is precisely this: they can only predict what will happen if all things remain equal and cultural and environmental shockwaves are not factors on population levels.

Anything can happen over the next 25 years that could cause another boom in population. If Nashville puts all of its eggs in the basket of ramping down housing options so that individuals and empty-nesters are the largest populations served, it is setting itself up for inability to handle future crises and unexpected changes in the trends.

Also bugging me about this component of Nashville Next is the appearance of the tail wagging the dog. Planners are placing an emphasis on Millennials (which is definitely a generation that has to influence current policy) and their current preferences for smaller living spaces, robust public transit and childless lifestyles. Some developers stereotype Millennials as lifestyle tourists who want urban homes to be places that they can chill with their posses before heading out to restaurants and bars. They base the stereotype on the same statistical trends that planners use to promote nextification. If that stereotype is true, is the clubbing motive anything to build long-term, diversity-focused community plans on?

Building exclusively toward specific interpretations of future trends will drive people out of the city. If homes are built strictly for empty-nest, lifestyle Millennials, other generations, other configurations of families will be forced out of the urban core. Out to places like Whites Creek (a rural rarity since it is very close to the urban core), which will then lose its character and become one among many suburbs. The assumptions that Nashville Next planners carry with them, even where based on statistics can have profound repercussions across the county.

When Mr. Bernhardt eventually got around to Whites Creek proper, he challenged the audience to answer a single question as they continue in future meetings about their community plan: "What is rural?" He warned them that there is a tendency for neighbors to identify what they don't want in their community instead of declaring what they do want. Hence, his challenge to define rural seemed to be his attempt to hedge against falling into a "not in my backyard" posture.

Outside of being lumped in with people who are looked down on as NIMBY, those attending were encouraged by another speaker to leave their "knives" and "bullet-proof vests" at this meeting and not to bring them to future meetings. During my entire time there I saw no threat of proverbial weaponry used against planners.

These kinds of insinuations about community leaders attending these meetings strike me as cynical and jaded. Meeting organizers should be inviting robust, vigorous debate, which includes dissent so that all views are out on the table. As long as no one is verbally threatening or harassing someone else, civil debate should foster disagreement so that consensus can be reached. In the south we seem to confuse being civil with deferring rather than demurring. Forcing people to act genteel can create resentment, lead to passive aggressiveness and block authentic resolution of conflicts.

Openness and criticism are just as vital to the planning process as are closure and consensus. Any plan for Whites Creek (or for anywhere else in Nashville), should include an invitation to people to honestly share their thoughts: good, bad or indifferent. It will not always be smooth and harmonious, but open debate free from aspersions (like seeing NIMBY motives where there is no evidence of such) will make for better planning.

One final issue arising from last week's meeting has to do with the process of Nashville Next, which is unapologetically striving to replace the community planning process with a more county-wide vision for the neighborhoods. I thought that Mr. Bernhardt was clear in his remarks that Nashville Next is more about shaping planning county-wide over moving from community to community to do so. If that truly is the case, then will the views expressed by Whites Creek residents eventually yield to countywide wishes once the "lounges" close, community meetings end and the planners sift through all of the data?

If Davidson County believes that rural areas like Whites Creek ought to lose its self-determined character for the sake of flipping it into a bedroom community for a downtown workforce, why should the community yield? Simply because the interests of the many outweigh the interests of the few? Not in a liberal democracy. And yet, for all of its branding this is what the organizing principle of Nashville Next seems to be in a nutshell: giving the county more credibility than neighborhoods in dealing with housing issues that directly impact those neighborhoods.

The test of this planning process is how it ends up treating minority voices. You may doll up the planning process all you want with lounges, hipster idiom and social media campaigns, but if it does not treat the people of Whites Creek in inclusive ways when the final decisions are made then it will not be democratic or worthy of our support.


UPDATE: The social media person at Nashville Next responded to the comments on this post below on Sunday. Here is the tweet:

If this clarification of the process is supposed to give me faith in Nashville Next and put my concerns to rest, it fails. The question remains, how can we trust that future growth and zoning will reflect the character of the Whites Creek community and will adhere to the idea of community-based planning if future outcomes are predetermined by 15,000 responses by people, most of whom do not likely come from Whites Creek?

Here's another question: what makes planning at a county level (which itself predetermines and limits the influence neighborhoods will have) better than community-based planning? The concerns are entirely different. But this is an arbitrary move. By the same logic, would not regional planning be better than county planning? Would not state-level planning be better than all of the rest?

While Metro Planning trains neighborhood leaders, in other places neighborhood leaders do the training

For all of its hype, Metro Planning's attempt at developing a community-influenced county-wide plan, called "NashvilleNext", has always felt like a do-over to me. Years ago when we worked producing community plans (like North Nashville's) it seemed like Planning Director Rick Bernhardt was attempting to involve the community. I have never understood the reason for leaving behind the community plans that many of us gave a great deal of time and energy to develop.

When the planner in the NashvilleNext video below talks about how she and others have worked the past year with community meetings to bring us to the current NashvilleNext plan, I'm left with the sense that if they can so easily replace our community plans with NashvilleNext blueprints based on gimmicks like post-it notes and spinning wheels, why can't they just abandon the NashvilleNext plan behind once it is written? Sticky notes are easily misplaced.

And what troubles me deeply about video on the NashvilleNext plan is that community leaders have to be trained to be "better engaged". Leaders are already by definition plugged in, aren't they? Rather than finding out from leaders what they need, it seems like Bernhardt's department is doing a total about face.

 

Compare Metro's classroom-style treatment of neighborhood leaders to a neighborhoods conference recently held in Oregon, where neighborhood leaders trained other neighborhood leaders.

The risk of simply allowing Metro government officials to "train" Nashville's neighborhood leaders is that the expectations of the latter may not be effectively communicated to the former. The power equation causes government leaders to manage the expectations of neighborhoods rather than respond to them with good service. Neighbors are more than trainees, and planners should approach them with their own open, teachable hearts.


UPDATE: The Nashville Civic Design Center did not mean to say only what appeared in their Twitter stream about Metro Planning's intentions in NashvilleNext "trainings," but part of the problem of feeding Twitter their messages from other social media applications is that the 140 character tweet truncates and distorts the message. The casual observer scanning their Twitter feed might be left with the impression that, again, planners are educating the community about themselves:

While a purely innocent in intention, the tweet does communicate a flawed message.

Do Nashville Next now or else: Tuesday next you will have much less influence over what Nashville will be like in 2040

Planning with post-it notes

A number of well-intentioned, honest people I know are participating in Nashville Next. I respect their participation but after years of participating in the processes that Metro Planning has said they used to maximize community input to determine growth and development for our neighborhoods, I do not have faith that the new process is anything but a glossy distraction to authentic democratic processes that I can actually believe in.

I also question whether all of the past participation by community leaders is now rendered moot by what looks like a gimmick with post-it notes, giveaways and a spinning wheel. From the outside looking in, it looks like a sideshow with barkers pulling people in with promises of influence with little in the past to warrant validity of their word. If you keep one eye on community plans and the other on the machinery of Metro government, you know that the former is consistently compromised by the exceptions developers and property owners plead for themselves.

More post-it notes

When planners market Nashville Next by saying thousands have given feedback and influenced the process, I have to wonder what it was about the past community planning processes that I participated in that no longer applies. I understand that community plans last 10 years whereas Nashville Next is supposed to last 25 years. I understand that planners are attempting to shoot for a countywide context to frame future neighborhood development discussions.

However, after watching so many compromises made by the Planning Commission and by the Metro Council to the integrity of past community plans, I have to wonder whether a larger plan with a farther horizon is even more susceptible to death by a thousand exceptions in favor of developers who have money and lawyers on their side. I also am not sold on the proposition that supplanting an organic neighborhood context for sustained growth with a countywide context is warranted. Regional growth is happening and residents have and will have little control over it. We are more realistically going to exercise influence in our neighborhoods than we are in Davidson County or in the Middle Tennessee region.

I received an email this week from a Nashville Next proponent suggesting that participating in Nashville Next means thinking like a planner or developer. While I do share some of the values of planners and developers to a greater or lesser degree, I do not think like planners or developers when I consider quality-of-life issues in my city. And why should I? Isn't learning about our different priorities why we talk to one another in community meetings on growth? Why should I not come to these meetings thinking as a resident or as a neighborhood leader or as a member of particular communities would? Nashville Next claims to be interested in diversity, so why can't I come as I am? More importantly, why should not planners and developers be required to think in terms of the values of my affinity groups if we are all equal players in this game that Nashville Next has afoot?

The nexting wheel

Asking me to think like a planner and developer seems to be setting me up later when planners and developers want to make changes to the plan that the community supposedly influenced that curb the policies more closely to their priorities. Developers in particular have financial and political muscle to make that happen. Within a regional context, the power of neighborhoods to resist them is dissipated and diffused.

And does it strike anyone else as premature that the cut-off date for community input on priorities a 25-year plan is September 30, 2013? Why put a deadline on a 25-year plan? Do you think developers are going to adhere to this deadline and not try and influence Nashville Next in the future? Nashville Next was kicked off in mid-February. Is it even realistic to place my faith in a 7-month process to chart the next 25 years?

I do not question the intentions of the many folks who want to have faith in the process. I question what is going to happen to their priorities once their window of participation closes. I am concerned about what happens to Nashville Next after it moves out of the forum stage to the back rooms of the policy makers and politicos who take it upon themselves to interpret the priorities of the community. And as they interpret the priorities, to whom are they accountable? The public that has been informing community plans for decades? The elected officials running government and Nashville's corporate elites who finance those officials' campaigns for office?

Nashville Next organizers are fond of saying that anyone who cares about Nashville is invited to attend and to discuss. (We all know that access to influencing policy is not that easy, and it gets particularly harder the lower in the class structure one goes.) I care about Nashville. But I do not care to join in a planning process that has yet to earn my trust. There are many priorities in community plans that are still unrealized, and now I am faced with Nashville Next, which further marginalizes neighborhood plans with a focus on regional priorities. The next step is a step too far for me.

It's all-hands-on-deck for the Mayor's "Neighborhood Challenge" today, but how "environmentally conscious" does Karl Dean really want us to be?

With Mayor Karl Dean waltzing his big-ticket Metro budget items past the passive Metro Council once again, today he turns to the perennial afterthought in his 6-year administration: neighborhoods.

Keeping neighborhoods in their place: a subsection to the CEO

The official invitation to the Mayors Neighborhood Challenge Kickoff Event promises prizes for the best performance by volunteers:

Join Mayor Karl Dean, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods, Metro departments and other community groups at the Music City Center to kick off the Mayor’s Neighborhood Challenge! Similar to the Mayor’s Workplace Challenge, this is an opportunity to evaluate how green, healthy and involved your neighborhood or community group already is, learn how to improve, and earn points for both as you compete with other neighborhoods. There will be prizes for first place in each category.

How green is your landfill?

How "green, healthy and involved" we are in the neighborhoods? I do not know whether my neighborhood association is participating in this, but it would be ironic if they are since the Dean administration is about to finish a landfill of carcinogens and fuel contaminants on our doorstep. Yet, the Mayor's Challenge is promoted as an event to make us more "environmentally conscious",  even as the Mayor ignores calls to stop polluting the environment around Metro Water Services outside Salemtown. My message to Karl Dean: "I am sufficiently environmentally conscious, Mr. Mayor, and I expect you to end the dumping here in North Nashville and haul the debris out."

In my opinion the Mayor wants us to focus on volunteering to pick up some trash or to report codes-violating neighbors (through the NOTICE program) in order to give us false hope and to ignore real environmental problems like Metro Water burying toxic debris 300 yards from the Cumberland River. That landfill happened without any feedback from the community. We cannot even report Metro Water to Codes through the NOTICE program, because Codes approved the dump without taking the community into consideration. In that context, reporting neighbors to Codes for their violations looks like small-potatoes and divide-and-conquer. How can dumping old tires or garbage on private vacant lots be worse than burying heavy metals below the water table on public land?

How healthy is Metro's toxic dump?

Mayor Dean has been banging the drum of about how we should be living our personal lives (his enduring focus on us getting healthy is a prime example), and ignoring our reservations about his policies, programs, and practices inconsistent with healthy living. But wait. Today he is buying more of our voluntarism with promises of prizes for the neighborhood that shows out the best. How voluntary can it be if people are prompted by prizes? Can healthy living be sustained on the promise of swag and block parties?

Many local organizations inside and outside Metro government, beyond neighborhood groups, are responding to the Mayor's call for all-hands-on-deck. The Neighborhoods Resource Center, which claims to "organize residents to obtain more power" (even when it seems to run silent on Metro polices that discourage popular power) is a "tool" in the Mayor's "kit". I am not kidding: the Mayor lists organizations, including the NRC in his "toolkit". Other organizations are promoting the Mayor through social media:

When organizations choose to stand with a powerful municipal executive, they will not stand with communities when the latter are casualties of municipal policies that are anything but "green, healthy and involved in the neighborhoods". No wonder Hizzoner needs to give away prizes in order to entice average citizens to this event.

UPDATE: Head of Mayor Dean's campaign war room Office of Neighborhoods, Courtney Wheeler, added a tweet to the stream on the Mayor's Neighborhood Challenge:

In related news, I received an email saying that Salemtown Neighbors Neighborhood Association indeed plans to accept Hizzoner's challenge.