If you read me regularly, you know I had very mixed feelings about the transit plan and grave qualms about the anti-transit plan activists. I voted for the plan, but I don’t think my opinion differed much from many of the people who voted against it.
People are posting a lot of take-aways, though, that to me seem to miss some fundamental points. As much as politicians and strategists want to and are able to separate our current financial shitshow from public transit, regular people can’t. Yes, transit would have dedicated funding, but we can’t get paper in our schools without parents buying it. There is lead in our schools' water. If we have a very limited pool of money, I think most Nashvillians would rather spend it on adequate schooling in non-poisonous schools. In other words, let’s take care of our responsibilities before we spend on our wish-list items.
Also, no one understands why we’re in a financial shitshow. At first, it was all “Oh, too many people appealed their new appraisals,” which, okay, sure. Appeal. That’s your right. But why was every appeal granted? I mean, if every assessment that was appealed was found to be wrong, should we assume every assessment is wrong? In which case, are those of us who didn’t appeal dumb? Shouldn’t someone be fired?
But then Mike Reicher at The Tennessean ran this story about how it wasn’t ordinary people appealing their new appraisals. And this wasn’t Vivian Wilhoite’s fuck up. No, this happened because multi-million dollar corporations want to benefit from Nashville’s It-City status, but they don’t want to pay their way:
Opry Mills, the land and shopping center by the Cumberland River, was one of about 1,000 high-value commercial properties whose owners successfully appealed the 2017 Nashville reassessment. Those commercial properties accounted for more than 80 percent of the county’s total reduction in assessed value, according to a Tennessean analysis of assessment data.
This brings me to another point the powers-that-be in Nashville seem to not get, no matter how often people try to make it clear. No one minds pitching in for something that’s going to benefit everyone. No one even minds pitching in for something that may not benefit them if, someday, everyone will pitch in on something that does benefit them. But, like we’ve seen with flood recovery and the push for a flood wall downtown, it’s insulting to be constantly asked to put money into downtown, where all the rich people want their important stuff, when very little happens in other neighborhoods.
On top of that, it’s hard not to feel like we’re being looted. Like when some rich person wants a park and city officials try to make that happen for them — and, again, there may come a time when we’re so broke we need to sell off parkland, though, my god, I hope not — without even trying to get a fair price for the land.
I mean, we have a $20 to $25 million shortfall. We own a downtown park, which we’re about to trade to Tony Giarratana as if it’s worth $3.5 million. Other parking lots in downtown are selling for close to $25 million
I don’t think we should sell parkland at all, but, if we’re going to, we should put it on the open market and get as much as we can for it.
Nashville hasn’t had growing pains. Nashville has growing agony. So-called workforce housing often costs $1,000 a month, which is more than my house payment. You’ve got all these hipsters bragging to each other about shopping at Aldi’s, which, folks, is a Save-a-Lot for people who can’t bring themselves to shop at Save-a-Lot. I’m not knocking it. But it’s like Dollar General. If they’re flourishing in your city, it’s because people are really hurting.
A thing Nashville needs to squarely face is that non-rich Nashvillians don’t want any more “progress.” They don’t want more people moving here. They don’t want it to be easier for all the new people living in the expensive high rises to move around the city. They don’t want to finance more “public-private partnerships” where the public part is “you pay for it” and the private part is “we get to make money off it.” They don’t want rents to continue to rise and they don’t want home prices to continue to skyrocket. They don’t want party buses and pedal taverns.
This vote wasn't just about public transit. It was a referendum on the direction of the city.
There’s not a lot most regular Nashvillians can do to stop the gentrification of the city. But this was one big thing. And they did it.
It might be time for all the folks who have benefited so greatly from the boom times to propose a public-private partnership on transit where all the big corporations that want Nashville to continue to be an attractive city their employees will want to move to pay for it and we’ll all sit back and benefit from it.
Turn about is fair play, after all.
