Nashville enjoys "livability" ranking based on a narrow definition of "livability"

You see it everywhere. The increasing divide between matters of sustainability and environmentalism on the one hand and wealth/poverty polarization on the other. Both sides concern questions of what make communities livable, but the divide seems to grow, especially as those progressives concerned with the environment start from class-specific points on livability without considering economic disparity as a brake on livability.

The world's largest car sharing club recently commissioned a study of 36 cities and ranked them for the urban policies that contribute to livability based on the criteria of innovation, sustainability, vibrancy, safety, efficiency, and optimism. Take lists with a grain of salt to begin with, because they generally suit our proclivities to order and list more than they reveal immutable truths about things, but Nashville came out with a relatively high overall ranking of 16.

However, before we go patting ourselves on the back for a score, we should consider the factors that the data published failed to include in the study. Any ranking of cities based on the question of livability policy matters cannot be reliable if they do not factor in delivery of social services, levels of diversity, and opportunities for livable wages. Zipcar's data is limited and biased from that side. So, would Nashville's high ranking stand up to broader studies that crossed the class-based divide between progressives' views on livability?

Music City Center financier among the "10 Most Hated Companies in America"

Despite their rank reputation for ill-gotten gains at the expense of ordinary people, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean no doubt sees Goldman as golden:

Goldman Sachs’ ... poor reputation was cemented when the government sued it for fraud in 2010. The firm settled with the government for $550 million, but this was viewed as little more than a slap on the wrist because of the bank’s immense wealth. And the fraud accusations have not stopped — they have actually accelerated. Goldman faces a set of suits over mortgage instruments it sold worth a total of $15.8 billion. The Federal Housing Finance Agency in September accused Goldman of misrepresenting the quality of $11.1 billion worth of residential mortgage-backed securities. In the cases in which Goldman has settled claims, the press has not always been favorable. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Goldman agreed to forgive 25% of principal balances on 143 mortgage loans to borrowers in New York, or $13 million of a total principal balance of $52 million. The $13 million is less than a senior banker at Goldman might make in a year. Perhaps those homeowners are part of the Occupy Wall Street protests against big banks, for which Goldman is the poster boy.

Nashville not ranked among most charitable cities

I take "rankings of cities" lists with an appropriate grain of salt, but local news media and city marketers inflate their importance when Nashville gets highly ranked and they ignore them when Nashville fails. So, it is important to point out news that you probably will not see in the local news media: Nashville did not make the list of "most charitable US cities," either in 2011 or 2010 (the year of our 1,000-year flood).

What is significant for me about our city failing to make the list in 2011, is that this year the news media marked the first anniversary of our flood with narratives about exemplary ways our city responded to the catastrophe. The celebration of local voluntarism does not bother me. What does is the comparative tone the media gives Nashville's volunteers, as if other communities are not as impressive or as strong.

Last May, for instance, WPLN reporter Blake Farmer speculated that Nashville serves as inspiration for rescue/relief response to tornadic catastrophe in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. I responded thusly:

If anything, our experience of coming out the other side of the hells of destruction that other people are in or just entering ought to give us pause, the humility to figure out what we can do to support them, not promote ourselves. And using New Orleans again as our own personal foil is both ignoble and revolting. We should expect more from ourselves and demand better from local journalists.

Likewise, for these national rankings of most charitable cities: the fact that we do not make them ought to give us a sense of modesty, perhaps a sense of shame that our journalists and PR flacks overestimated our comparative worth in the charitable world in the name of commemorating our response to the flood of 2010.

Just like we continue to believe that our volunteer and donor spirit has worth beyond these year-end rankings that do not include Nashville, so do we need to accept that the same spirit does not need to inspire other cities (and distract attention from their response) to have worth.

Nashville's ranking is suited to donut suburbia outside Nashville

The reason the news media keeps heaping various rankings on our brains is that they get promoted. Whether it's due to the innate human penchant for ordering and serializing or because of some ingrained competitive need we have for comparing and contrasting self to others, the demand for "best of" and "worst of" lists is real. Thus, the media keeps up the onslaught. And large segments of their audience pass it on as gospel truth, even when warned about taking rankings with a grain of salt.

Hence, the latest rankings putting Nashville high on the list of the "next big boom towns" is getting a lot of play in the local news media and with the candidates running for office:

Another Top Towns List Nashville Failed to Make

Top 5 college towns in North America does not include Nashville.

One of the requirements was great public transportation.

'Nuff said.

Nashville Is Not Among Top 10 U.S. Cities to Find A Job

Fail.

Canadian and European Cities Outpace American Cities on Quality of Life

With New York City set as the baseline, American cities lag in quality of life in an international comparison.

Nearby Atlanta shows up in the top 50 cities with respect to infrastructure (electricity, water availability, telephone, mail, public transport, traffic congestion and airport).

HT: The Monkey Cage

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Metro Services in 2008

Because of the limits that following the TVA disaster has placed on my disposable research and writing time, I am not able in 2008 to pour the usual amount of effort into Enclave's Annual Best and Worst of Metro Services. So, I am going with a concise format of what I found to be the good, the bad and the ugly in Metropolitan Nashville governance. If you are a devoted Deaniac, you should stop reading here because if I were doing the regular format, the things I hit on below would have sunk the Mayor's Office to the bottom of the worst Metro services this year (even though Mayor Dean did make a laudable effort to fight English Only).

• January
  • The good: Metro Police caught the thief of the Metro Election Commission laptops and located the hard drives at "rave-type" coffee bar, effectively dispelling a Wachenhut-contracted security guard's claims that the computers were stolen before he was on Christmas Eve duty.
  • The bad: Mayor Karl Dean singled out Metro ITS for the heist of Election Commission and promised security changes without any reference to culpability in either his office or former Mayor Bill Purcell's regarding a building alarm and camera system that was turned off on Christmas Eve 2007.
  • The ugly: Metro Legal lead with a wrist slap on Wachenhut. CM Charlie Tygard intended to go where Buck Dozier failed to go before: LEDland. Metro's computer chief had laptop stolen from his own car during Metro's IT security audit.
• February
  • The good: Metro Parks says Morgan Park will get a playground by summer.
  • The bad: Court Clerk Vic Lineweaver wanted Metro to buy him a new car! CM Tygard's LED bill passes first reading with no debate, thanks to Vice Mayor Diane Neighbors' new iron-fist of order.
  • The ugly: CM Tygard blamed former Mayor Bill Purcell for Metro's budget problems a year after the council was spending discretionary funds furiously on pet non-profits.
• March
  • The good: Council members paid attention to flood of neighborhood emails opposing Tygard's LED bill. Metro Public Works responded to traffic complaints in Salemtown.
  • The bad: Zoning Administrator Sonny West ignored popular opposition to the LED bill.
  • The ugly: government haters kept angling for Metro government jobs.
• April
  • The good: CM Megan Barry called upon Vice Mayor to appoint a representative LED task force to study the LED proposal.
  • The bad: Tygard appointed his own task force to rubber stamp LED recommendations.
  • The ugly: Mayor Karl Dean appointed pro-development darling of the conservative Nashville Business Coalition, Chris Whitson, to Metro's Board of Zoning Appeals.
• May
  • The good: CM Mike Jameson showed himself to be the only CM with the backbone to stand up and counter-punch the Dean administration's pro-development leanings.
  • The bad: Metro Police called to Salemtown to deal with drunken party brawls and indecent exposures across various properties only to excuse the law-breakers as part of a "Meharry Medical graduation party."
  • The ugly: Mayor Karl Dean rumored to eliminate pro-neighborhood Metro leaders on behalf of developers.
• June
  • The good: Metro Planning Commission disapproved 7th & Garfield development and asked developer to get all of his ducks in a row before coming back.
  • The bad: Metro Council meeting again turned into a bash-Purcell-fest, and yet, usually iron-fisted Vice Mayor Neighbors did not lift a finger to rule it out of order.
  • The ugly: Metro Council followed "Developers Playbook" and scheduled planning and rezoning public hearings just before a major travel holiday.
• July
  • The good: CM Emily Evans challenged fabrications of the May Town Center developers.
  • The bad: Metro Planning Department moved May Town Center proposal to the Planning Commission for a vote on the strength of the developers' studies because they lacked the funds to conduct their own economic impact study.
  • The ugly: Mayor Karl Dean allowed without objection the local media to write his role as Metro Legal chief out of the narrative on why the Bush Justice Department was investigating a council rezoning issue.
• August
  • The good: Metro Parks met with Sylvan Park neighbors of Richland Park to consider expansion, including an amphitheatre.
  • The bad: summer ended without Metro Parks fulfilling its February promise to install a playground at Morgan Park.
  • The ugly: I received an icy monologue from Sylvan Park CM Jason Holleman comparing the property values in Sylvan Park to Morgan Park Place condos rather than to anything in Salemtown, which also borders on Morgan Park and which has never even asked for an amphitheatre.
• September
  • The good: at least we did not have to live with Williamson Co. Republicans.
  • The bad: because of snafus, Metro Police and Metro Youth Services delayed sending detectives to Salemtown to investigate a teenage shooting, failing to support Mayor Karl Dean's central campaign promise to deal effectively with youth crime.
  • The ugly: based on the narrative of Tennessean reporter Janell Ross, Metro Police Chief Ronal Serpas asserted that "all too often" suspicious person calls are racist calls.
• October
  • The good: you fill in the blank ____________.
  • The bad: Metro Youth Services Detectives still had not followed up with the teen victim of a Salemtown shooting.
  • The ugly: CM Jim Gotto resurrected the perennial empty patriotic gesture of introducing a memorializing resolution to put cheap yellow ribbons on poles at the Courthouse Square because he got a nod that the Dean Administration would make Parks follow through this time.
• November
  • The good: somewhere Tony Orlando is smiling.
  • The bad: Metro Police were clearly the only ones responding to crime in after hours bars.
  • The ugly: while the press pounced on Metro Council attempts to deal with after hours crime, Mayor Karl Dean, who had run for office on the promise of dealing with youth and gang crime did nothing.
• December
  • The good: the war on Christmas nonsense seemed to stay away from Metro this year.
  • The bad: Metro Public works was "unresponsive" to Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors and CM Keith Durbin.
  • The ugly: Mayor Dean promised CM Erica Gilmore that installation Morgan Park playground equipment is still going to happen.

Happy New Year, everyone! And we still deserve a better year from Metro than we got the last one.

Tennessee Gets Separation from Alabama and Mississippi with These Numbers

Tennessee just had the 7th highest unemployment rate in the country  ("unemployment" only counts the jobless who receive government unemployment payments.  It does not count the total jobless or the underemployed who do not receive government payments). 

Recession Resistant Cities

In spite of Nashville's cushions of health care, higher education, and government systems, it did not make BusinessWeek's list of safest cities in a recession. But who wants to live in Lubbock, TX in order to avoid a recession only to choke on dust?

Single and jonesin' in Nashville? Sucks to be you.

The good news: Nashville has no where to go but up.

The bad news: Salt Lake City is more single-friendly than Music City. Mormons apparently munch on more love newtons than Southern Baptists do.

Here's the list via Monkey Cage:

1. Atlanta
2. San Francisco
3. Dallas
3. Minneapolis
5. Washington D.C.
6. Seattle
7. Boston
8. New York City
9. Orlando
10. Phoenix
11. Chicago
11. Denver-Aurora
13. Miami
14. Austin
15. San Antonio
16. Los Angeles
17. Houston
18. Charlotte
19. San Diego
20. St. Louis
21. Columbus
22. Philadelphia
23. Tampa-St. Petersburg
24. Las Vegas
25. Baltimore
26. Virginia Beach-Norfolk
27. Detroit
28. Pittsburgh
29. Portland
30. Buffalo
30. Milwaukee
32. Sacramento
33. Cincinnati
33. Memphis
33. Providence
36. Kansas City
37. Indianapolis
38. Cleveland
39. Salt Lake City
40. Jacksonville

Nashville Ranked 7th Best Metro Area for Artists

Jump to BusinessWeek's rankings. Nashville is #7 based on art establishments, population age, arts & culture index, diversity index, and cost of living. Los Angeles is #1.

MLK Among Elite

Martin Luther King, Jr. High School, which sits in northwest Nashville proximate to Fisk University, Marathon Village, and the now demolished John Henry Hale housing development, has been ranked #39 in Newsweek's top 100 poll of U.S. public high schools. Say what you will about the methodology of the rankings, this is a proud moment for one of our neighbor-hood high schools and it should be motivation for Nashvillians to find a way to adequately fund our schools and get more of them into the top 100 elite. MLK has a unique milieu where 7th through 12th graders all attend classes in the same building. According to some, this has lead to MLK being a perennial target of the Metro Nashville School Board. I don't know why board members would mess with something that's obviously working.

While MLK--a magnet college-prep school--is one of the crown jewels in north-by-northwest Nashville, it resides in a troubled and highly transitional, if not blighted neighborhood, which will hopefully change with the new developments on the John Henry Hale site. Watkins Park, which sits across 17th Av. from MLK, is clean and has attractive facilities, but there are many run-down buildings and markets near MLK and Watkins Park that seem like nests for hoodlums. I drive by one of the markets on a near-daily basis and I often see drug deals going down and rough-looking characters hanging out and drinking by the market (the more troublesome markets around north-by-northwest Nashville seem to all be painted that powder-Titans-blue). There is also no shortage of gang-related graffiti, which is another trademark of these markets.

MLK deserves a safer and better neighborhood to call home. All of us in north-by-northwest Nashville need to make a concerted effort to help make the quality of the the neighborhood match the quality of the high school. While magnet schools may not have the same organic connections to a neighborhood that non-magnet schools do, MLK is an important neighborhood center, and the neighbors need to defend it against all threat of attack whether those threats come from the school board or from the market up the street.


HT: Liz Garrigan at PiTW