With supporters wearing green arm bands and opponents clad in pink, a bitter Sylvan Park fight over a proposed zoning change consumed the Metro Council for more than two hours Tuesday night, eventually resulting in an indefinite deferral.
As it was nearly 10 years ago, the neighborhood has been riled up over the creation of a proposed conservation overlay district, sponsored by Councilman Jason Holleman, which would include around 700 homes, applying certain standards for new construction and require that changes to existing homes be approved by the Metro Historic Zoning Commission. While supporters say the proposal is a tool to protect historic homes and preserve the character of the neighborhood — protecting it against out-of-place "McMansions" and the increasingly bemoaned skinny houses popping up around town — opponents, who are sporting pink flamingos in their yards, are resisting the idea as an affront to their property rights that will in many cases will protect houses that are not historic, but just old, and prevent them from making reasonable additions to their homes.
The plan was disapproved by Metro Planning Commission, citing a lack of consensus in the neighborhood.
One speaker in support of the overlay lamented Nashville's "long sad history of tearing things down or letting things sit and rot so they can tear them down." An opponent, responding to claims from supporters that the opposition contained greedy developers looking to protect their ability to tear down old homes and cash in on new ones, said he and his wife are "not money hungry, we don't want a McMansion, we're just a young couple that wants to grow."
But the bitter neighborhood fight — and it has become bitter, as evidenced by several speakers on each side who were near tears as they addressed the council — goes beyond the particulars of the proposal, as they often do.
Supporters accused opponents of spreading misinformation about the effects of an overlay and bullying neighbors into opposing it. One woman choked up as she told the council that a man had recently logged onto the neighborhood social networking site Next Door and compared supporters to "international terrorists." Another speaker drew a direct line from the overlay dispute to the re-election challenge Holleman faced in 2011, saying the opposition to the proposed overlay was all political.
Opponents not only disputed those claims, but in most cases fired them right back, accusing supporters of conducting a push poll — one designed to influence participants — on the proposal, and claiming that many of the residents pushing for an overlay don't even live in the area that would be covered. They also said the process had moved too fast and that Holleman had refused requests to slow it down.
More than two hours later, Holleman was faced with a choice: force a vote on the bill, which might not go his way, or defer the bill and try to work it out in the neighborhood. After a number of conversations with various council members during the public hearing, he opted to defer the bill indefinitely.
“Members of the council, as you can see, this is a difficult issue in my neighborhood, I would ask for your patience in this," he said. "It’s something I’ve dealt with through my entire time on the council. I would also say to you that in seven years in serving in this body, in all of the bills that I’ve brought which have included some large and at times contentious re-zonings, I’ve had less than a dozen people ever, combined, come in speak against any bill that I’ve brought to you. I wish that this was in a place where you didn’t have to spend hours here tonight and so for that I apologize, but I assure you it is not because I haven’t worked on this issue.
"And I continue to work on this issue. So I ask for your patience and tonight I ask for a deferral, and I hope that the same people that spoke with passion here tonight would invest that kind of passion in meeting with their neighbors and trying to reach common ground and not just divide and conquer and draw lines in the sand. And I hope that’s going to happen and I’m going to try to get that done, and if not, then I may bring it back to you and we may just have to decide. But I hope that won’t be the case.”
