The Nashville Business Journal’s Adam Sichko was tweeting about The Pearl, the new development near Watkins Park.
%{[ data-embed-type="oembed" data-embed-id="https://twitter.com/NSHBIZSichko/status/928657616208912385" data-embed-element="aside">
And I laughed, because it’s yet another sleight of hand that people who care about affordable housing in Nashville need to watch. Out here in the real world, when we hear the term “workforce housing,” we think “this must be housing for service workers — waitstaff, hotel workers, the people you need to keep the city up and running, but who notoriously don’t make a lot.”
The problem of the server is easy to understand. For a server job to be attractive, the server must make enough at her job to cover her bills and pay her rent and leave her some left over for fun. If she can make, say, $30,000 a year being a server downtown, but she has to pay $12,000 in rent, then a job out in, say, Dickson, where she might make only $26,000 a year, but only has to pay $6,000 a year in rent leaves her ahead.
If service industry people can’t afford to live in Nashville, they can get jobs where they live. And I think this goes without saying, but I’ll say it — with as many chips as we as a city have placed on the tourism industry, losing our service workers would be catastrophic. And we already see hints that this is a looming problem — job fairs going unattended, big "Help Wanted" signs out front of hotels, etc. Service workers literally cannot afford long commutes, and with our thriving suburbs, they don’t have to.
But the “workforce housing” trend isn’t focused on those people. They all use phrases like “teachers” and “firefighters,” and it’s true that Nashville’s pay rates for those professions would allow them to spend $1,000 a month on rent. But those salaries also allow them to go out to Mt. Juliet or Gallatin and get a house for that and commute in.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are teachers who would love to live in town if they could afford it, and we should find ways to make that happen.
But the sleight of hand I’m talking about is pitching these feel-good projects as if they are helping the whole of our workforce, when, really, they’re designed to help a minority of the workforce. And no one’s stepping in to help find housing for the people who make less than them.
