At the end of a recent interview with the Nashville Business Journal, Lower Broad bar impresario Steve Smith tells reporter Julia Masters: “I’m a God-fearing man, and I believe in karma. Treat people the way you want to be treated and do anything wrong, it will come back to haunt you three times. And your word is sometimes the only thing you have.”
And listen, while I’m sure Christians, Hindus and Wiccans could have a field day picking apart that quote trying to suss out which part was cribbed from each of those belief systems, it is a fine philosophy to live by. It has the carrot (treat others how you want to be treated) and the stick (or else shit’s going to go badly for you).
It does cast the interview in a very strange light, however, if Smith does actually believe this — because he spends the whole interview up until then setting some weird precedents for how he wants to be treated, if we can use how he treats others as a guide.
Personally, I find the adult-Disney-fication of our downtown pretty galling. Tourists behaving like frat boys out of their parents’ sight for the first time are super annoying. I, personally, would rather they were not here. They make going downtown a nightmare, even as they’re making Smith richer and more successful.
But here in real life, I just avoid going downtown. It’s not for me, but people like it. Carry on the woo-ing without me.
But if I take Smith at his word, that he’s treating people how he wants to be treated, then can I talk about him the way he talks about people experiencing homelessness? He callously refers to “bums living in the streets and harassing our tourists,” and says “these bums are down there with vulgar signs, horrible stuff … you got them urinating in the streets.” So is it fair game to criticize him for building an empire of tourists who make downtown basically unusable for locals? Can we point out that everyone — tourist and “bum” alike — is peeing in the streets, in part because of the tightly packed bars with few bathrooms that he owns, which make their money by pouring liquid down people’s throats?
I have to tell you that my observations of Smith over the years do not lead me to conclude that he’s someone who would actually accept, with any kind of grace, being treated how he treats others.
Ah, well, we’re all hypocrites to some extent.
The part that sticks in my craw is him complaining about the historic overlay downtown:
As far as developing goes, the historical overlay should not be downtown anymore. … East Nashville with all the old houses, Germantown, I get that. But downtown Nashville, nothing that’s down there anymore is really historical except for a few buildings, and Tootsies has to be one of them — and I’d never do anything to change Tootsies.
[…]
I’d like to see more new buildings. Tearing down some of these old buildings down there and replacing them with newer, safer buildings is really the right way to go.
Not to point out the obvious, but the historic overlay is the mechanism by which the city decides which buildings are “really historical.” But also, imagine complaining about a few historical buildings when there’s still so much space in the city for him to start with a blank slate. There’s still so much between I-40 and the hospitals that could be developed. Development along Dickerson Pike is already happening and Oracle isn’t even here yet. Smith could get in on the ground floor over there and build whatever buildings he likes. Great swaths of Trinity Lane are literally empty. There are close-in areas of our city that, right now, still feel very suburban, but we know they're going to need to be city neighborhoods in the next decade. Hell, right now, people who are going to stuff at Nissan Stadium have to cross the river or go up to Five Points to find a place to have a drink before the event. Smith doesn’t see any opportunity there?
This city has a long history of treating rich people as if they have those riches because they are smarter or more insightful than the rest of us. Then we stand around like, “Oh shit, we lost this beloved building,” or, “I can’t afford to live in the neighborhood I grew up in,” or, “tourists are kicking homeless people into the river, what the fuck?” because of decisions rich people have made.
The thing is, I actually do think that Steve Smith is smart and insightful. Not the smartest or most insightful man in town, but clearly he knows how to do what he does well. But we, as a city, can’t afford to keep assuming that rich and successful people know more about how to lead Nashville than the rest of us. After all, as much as Smith’s story is that of a man who made himself an empire, it’s also the story of a man who was in the right place at the right time. In other words, who got lucky.
Being lucky does not make you more qualified to have opinions on the shape of our city than anyone else.
