"Selected activists" planning the future "for everyone"

There is a 3-day workshop ending today called Future Ready Nashville. Did you know about it? Until yesterday, I did not.

This is the description of the goal:

America has reached a point where almost all problems can be solved, especially at the local level. Nashville has everything it needs to be Future Ready. This program invites selected activists to experience the DesignShop process, while launching our intentional process of making Nashville Future Ready.

This is the resort-like facility the invited, selected activists are meeting in to "design" Nashville's future:

But what really goes against every populist bone in my body is the idea that a meeting intended to design a future "for everyone" is not open to just anyone.

05 | Create a Vision

So, what is the world that you want to see for...EVERYONE?

I do not see much social change to the status quo in Nashville coming from this meeting. This is how elites in Nashville have operated for a long time: top-down and select. Open, public meetings continue to be marginalized as gauche. Future Ready Nashville seems to be more of a networking opportunity for the participants than a community-based organizing effort, but I am interested to see how they eventually try to implement their designs on our neighborhoods.

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.

Once you're with the Wizard, no one thinks you're strange

"when you wear green spectacles, why of course everything you see looks green to you. The Emerald City was built a great many years ago, for I was a young man when the balloon brought me here, and I am a very old man now. But my people have worn green glasses on their eyes so long that most of them think it really is an Emerald City"

-- "The Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum

Oh, what a pair they'll be, the Wizard and It

For approximately the 268th time in the last decade Salemtown is being declared in media as the "newest hottest spot" in Nashville. The "newest hottest" gilding gets old after a while, but something else leaped at me from the latest Realtor® hype:

When Karl Dean, the Wizard of It, announced the nearby Germantown area as the location of the new baseball park – not a stadium, a ball park – he cast a spell upon the neighborhood.

I have to concede, while shoving such overstatement aside, that Hizzoner has indeed used a fair degree of Oz-like sleight of hand during his years in the Mayor's Office. However, there are those who choose to keep their It-City spectacles firmly over their eyes. That helps the illusion, too.

The ongoing nextification of Salemtown

When this Tennessean piece appeared earlier in the summer, I lashed out at it in a blog post I did not publish. Now that there is some distance, I'm ready to reflect on its merits to my neighborhood in a more critical, composed way. On with the reflections.

Sometimes I am really glad I have been blogging for so long on Nashville, and particularly, on my part of Nashville. This blog is always a reminder of my actual experience here free from the filters and spin of people who have only recently "discovered" Salemtown. The selling of Salemtown as "new and hot" has been going on for so many years that it is an old, rehearsed refrain. I wrote blog posts in 2006 on how the news media framed our neighborhood as an attractive new option. Does new ever stop being new?

Before last year the latest in a line of coming-and-going real estate reporters at the Tennessean, Bill Lewis (who also wrote an unfortunate piece about "pioneers taking over" the neighborhood) did not even know what Salemtown was. Now he is writing about the community without interviewing long-time residents (and, no, I'm not talking about myself) who have a different point of view than the newbs-in-the-hood. The ex-president of the association whom Lewis quotes wonders why Salemtown "didn't catch on a decade ago", as if she was here a decade ago (she was not) when others of us were moving here because it was a diverse neighborhood of porches already.

Lewis interviews a newly arrived, fresh, young developer to the Salemtown scene. Since I have not met her she is just another number to me because I've crossed paths with dozens of developers since moving here. But we will not be getting off to a good start, given her developers' spin of Salemtown as once a "fringe" neighborhood that has morphed in to a community of rooftop hot tubs. Did Bill Lewis actually count the number of rooftop hot tubs in Salemtown before writing his story? How many hot tubs--rooftop or not--do we actually have in Salemtown? Do hot tubs determine quality?

It is worth noting that Lewis used the same formula two years ago to market what realtors randomly started calling "Historic West Town" (a neighborhood widely known as "The Nations"), sans hot-tub branding. According to one source, The Nations may not even be "Historic". Apparently, the next, big thing is not to deviate from the "hot" potential of transitional (or is that "emerging"?) neighborhoods by using a maelstrom of floating signifiers. (The Lewis hotness coefficient was also applied to the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood last May).

As for Salemtown, the notion of being called "fringe" by a developer sticks in the craw of my preference for diversity. When I hear developers rationalize their benign neglect (perhaps even a collective, de facto red-lining?) of certain North Nashville neighborhoods with terms like "fringe", I wonder if it is code. I ask myself whether "fringe" is just code for "Salemtown is not yet enough of a eroded, homogenized, white-washed lifestyle draw on which we might build". Money-makers shake with or without diversity.

Our family moved here from Historic Edgefield in East Nashville almost 10 years ago. At the time Edgefield had a much higher crime rate (and less diversity) than Salemtown did, and yet, it was hardly considered "fringe" by developers, who were pushing prices to unreasonable heights before it all came crashing down with housing bubble. In my book that shows just how arbitrary and capricious marketing signifiers are.

Another Nashville journo, J.R. Lind, coined the terms "nexting" and "nextification" to represent and to criticize our city's dogged obsession with the next, big thing. Outside of Lind, though, prominent voices in the news media, especially the ones who report on real estate, embrace the nextification of neighborhoods like ours without a second thought. That is the most troubling aspect of growth: not merely that developers try to rewrite who we are, but that papers like the Tennessean give the fictions implicit facticity to an audience who may not know any better. Thanks to them, Salemtown never stops emerging and nexting.

Reporter asks grown-up questions about the proposed ballpark and its impact on the Germantown neighborhood

In America we worship the novel. We bow to the next, big thing. The new bauble that captures our attention and curiosity. And what is true about America is triply true of Nashville. The culture here will wipe the old completely away in a mad dash to get to that next, big thing (and sometimes make the new look old to rationalize the obliteration).

So, naturally, when the Mayor dangles a new ballpark in front of us, we're smitten. And the news media no less.

Except that the Nashville Post's sports commentator, J.R. Lind is already asking questions, to his credit:

The very practical how-do-we-pay-for-it question has yet to be answered, with the mayor's office saying they aren't ready to share it, though if they truly have been talking about a Sulphur Dell site since Opening Day in April, there's reason to believe they have a pretty good idea of the funding mechanism. All anyone is saying is that the Sounds will make a significant contribution (what that means is, naturally, left vague) with the balance to be paid by...taxpayers? Local businesses in the form of some kind of fee? A TIF ["Tax Increment Financing"]? We don't know.

Generally, the idea of putting sports facilities in places where people either will go if they have a reason or already go is a good idea. The business owners on Lower Broadway are more than happy to tell you how much more robust their revenues are on nights when the Predators are at the arena. Putting the stadium on Jackson Avenue builds a bit of a bridge to Germantown with its restaurants and so forth. But Germantown is a residential area in a way downtown is not. Injecting 17,000 people into the entertainment district of Lower Broad 41 nights a year is one thing. Injecting 8,400 into a largely residential area 70-some-odd times a summer is a whole 'nother can of bananas.

Philosophically, one wonders when all the Nexting stops. Less than a week after news of the ballpark leaked, Mayor Karl Dean announced plans for further riverfront development. There was no breather, no delay. There's an $80 million Sulphur Dell project and a $30 or $40 million project on the river. How many things does downtown need? When will downtown stop needing new things?

These are important questions to which those of us who are immediately affected by a new ballpark should demand Hizzoner's answers. Those of us in Salemtown will feel the "Nexting" impact, too We have to hold the Mayor's Office responsible for handling our future responsibly and not just opportunistically.


UPDATE:  I recently spoke with a business owner in the area who expressed concern that businesses within the new ballpark campus itself could actually drain patrons away from our neighborhood businesses before, during, and after games in the summertime.