AronG

The original drawings for this looked really tasteful to me, in an understated way, but so far it's turning out a lot chintzier than I had imagined. They value-engineered out the classy window arches, and the cladding above the bricks just looks bad.

That's the funniest thing about the whole Cooper/neighborhood schtick. People really do somehow believe that the downtown area, the economic engine of the region, with tens of thousands of expensive residences and hundreds of thousands of high-end jobs, is mooching off of the areas of the county with like 2 houses per acre. Brilliant. It would be wonderful if an adult could explain to them that metro has to spend way more to support them than they generate; that a city block downtown generates more property tax than an exurb subdivision, with a fraction of the road/power/water/infrastructure and much easier connection to existing grids and municipal services, etc. People love it though. It jives perfectly with anti-new-Nashville-ism, and got him elected in a landslide, so you have to hand it to him. The funniest part of all is going to be watching him work to maintain this fiction over the next few years.

Hi Brett. Just grousing about the crosswalk at 10th & Main, which feels like frogger only you might die. Cars come flying down Gallatin and/or shoot through the extremely soft turns on and off 10th. The way metro makes the entire sidewalk corner ramp down to street level (instead of ramps for the crosswalks with a curb between them at the actual corner), I've even see cars cutting the corner *onto* the sidewalk, which is a nice feeling when you were just standing there. There are lots of ways they could improve it. I'd add a median, decrease the turn radius on the corners, maybe raise the crosswalk just an inch to encourage traffic to slow down... I know funding's limited, I just wish we could get some kind of improvement along with a redevelopment like this one. With Cooper in, I assume transit isn't going anywhere for a while, but maybe we can at least encourage a few more of our airbnb'ers to get around on foot instead of gumming up the place with traffic. That's hilarious about the light poles. That's one Cooper might actually come up with money to fix, just so he can get on the local news pounding MDHA again.

Looking forward to trying out the new restaurants, although Gallatin dearly needs better crosswalks at 10th to make this more accessible from 5 points. The one just north of the library is somewhat better, although it needs a concrete median instead of the little plastic poles that constantly get knocked down.

It's incredible. Imagine how many more projects would pencil out if we could start the actual buildings at ground level. Like if there were some way to move people around that didn't require storing their vehicle everywhere they went. If you ponder it for too long it's surreal. Every time I look at the row of buildings along KVB, all built on top of 7+ story parking garages, I just can't quite tune it out, creative screening notwithstanding. If an alien sized up the situation they might assume the cars were running the show. They get all the bottom floors (with a service entrance for humans) and the people get whatever can be perched on top. They get 60 feet of street width for travel and/or parking lanes. People get 5 foot strips along the sides.

Any retail component?

If you look at these as pure engineering decisions, with a zero sum allocation of resources and people as automatons, of course stuff like this is never going to make sense. If you look at the city as a collection of places for people to live their lives in, neighborhoods that can be invested in and cultivated into pleasant human environments, you're likely to see things differently. That's true on an intuitive level, and ironically it ends up making financial sense as well. Cities full of soulless streetscapes optimized for car traffic (like our current Demonbreun, 8th, etc.) don't achieve the full potential of vibrant urban areas, neither for the people that live there nor for the city via the resulting property taxes. In this case, it seems obvious that proposals like the Station District will play out very differently with and without this infrastructure investment to channel the focus of the surrounding developments. With it, they'll likely move faster, be taller/denser, and result in better human street environments. Without it they'll likely take longer to come to fruition, balance their design more towards garage access for commuters and/or the assumption that occupants will uber everywhere, and have a streetscape that demonstrates those priorities.

Yup, every 10 years after the census. Last one had around 17,900 people per district, will be interesting to see how they shift the borders to re-equalize. https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2019/08/02/nashville-council-redistricting-nashville-mayors-race-census/1880542001/ Apparently a similar process has been followed since 1970. Does anyone know where you can find the old council maps? I'd be interested to see how they've shifted over time.

Probly unwise to comment on this, but it's frankly ridiculous when cable tv political entertainment show memes get dragged into the real world and treated like they're serious. Violence in Portland isn't a real actual concern for anyone serious. Their violent crime and property crime rates, inclusive of these sideshows, is a fraction of the rate in, say, Nashville. The fringe events that are so heavily covered in some quarters have not placed them on the precipice of some kind of bad reputation that threatens their future. Their city is very successful, is growing rapidly, and is so far positioning itself to handle that growth much more gracefully than we are.

Homeless dudes aside, a stroll across a pedestrian bridge would be infinitely more pleasant than hoofing it on Demonbreun or 8th/Gleaves. The vibe on both of those sidewalks is decidedly pedestrian hostile. Narrow sidewalks with cars whizzing by inches away, etc. Investing in pedestrian infrastructure like this (which is funded using the property taxes from the areas around it) makes sense for plenty of reasons other than shaving 3 minutes off a particular route.

There were definitely some detrimental influences on the 2018 vote, but I think the baseline for transit support starts with the environment people live in. Right now, I feel like more than half of the residential stock in Davidson Co is built out in pure car-oriented patterns. A lot more voters live in winding cul-de-sac areas than in street grid neighborhoods. And that makes a huge difference in how you perceive the whole thing. Basically, if you can walk (on sidewalks) to a park, a coffee shop, to vote, to your neighborhood elementary school, etc., you intuitively get the value in investing in public infrastructure. You're used to having at least some accommodation for modes other than driving, and you can imagine benefiting from better transit. If, on the other hand, you live in a single-use subdivision where the nearest commercial establishment is miles away, and the closest bus stop is on the 40+ mph access highway outside your subdivision, you probably drive everywhere you go. You're sick of sitting in traffic every day and hunting for a parking place everywhere you go, and you know transit isn't going to improve either of those. That being the case, you're pretty likely to pick one of the reasons to be against it. The difficult truth is that there is no way to fix traffic and parking in a growing city our size. It's too bad it gets lost in all the politics and pandering, but every growing city in American history is there to learn from: traffic only gets worse, ever. Cars don't fit in urban environments. And sadly, regardless of creative efforts here and elsewhere, there's no way to design mass transit that serves suburbanized areas. Transit can move way more people around than interstates, but it has to start with at least a semi-urbanized environment where there is (A) enough people living within a quarter mile of a given spot to plant a bus stop, and (B) a pleasant enough pedestrian environment for them to walk there. Transit could do a lot for our urbanized and semi-urbanized neighborhoods, but it's not going to solve any problems for subdivision commuters. Their problems are actually unsolvable, but of course that's not a very inspiring message. So a lot of this boils down to the ratio of residential stock between urban/semi-urban areas and suburban areas. And to @ruraljuror's point, I'd love to understand more about how that's trending. We've clearly had a lot of residential growth downtown and in the inner ring neighborhoods, but there are also some surprising counter trends. In East Nashville there are extremely high-demand areas that are trending down in population because zoning blocks new development and the people that can afford to live there have smaller families than the people they're displacing. And on the other side of the equation, how much outer-ring growth is going on? How much farmland and forest are we converting to garden-style apartments and big-lot subdivisions? I guess the upcoming council redistricting will shed some light on this, since the districts have to be roughly equivalent in population. It's an unfortunate chicken and egg problem, and it's trapped a lot more cities than just us. For this and other reasons, Metro should be doing everything possible to incentivize real, multi-modal-friendly developments.

Hi Brett. Appreciate your efforts as always, but I couldn't disagree more on the idea that it makes sense for us (or any city) to leave zoning restrictions in place from decades ago and wait for property owners to push one-by-one through the arduous and uncertain process of getting it changed. That's a process that's been shown over and over to be dominated by the enthusiast, anti-development crowd, and the whole arrangement has a very predictable result - it drastically impedes new housing from being added to the neighborhood, drives up prices due to artificial scarcity, and slowly raises the bar on who can afford to live here. Goodbye teachers, police officers, and musicians, hello executives and lawyers. We've succeeded so well at blocking housing from being built that any living space is solid gold if it's rented out as an STR. While we're arguing how to block that too, developers are "renovating" old shotgun houses into million-dollar 4,000 sqft "historic" homes. 5 points, which could be one of the most amazing neighborhood centers in the country is stuck in the '80s configuration, all parking lots and one-story buildings. The family dollar, the old car lot across from the library, the Treehouse and the adjacent lots, Bill Martin... Few would make the case that they're going to their highest and best use. This is an amazing neighborhood that people are beating the door down to live in, and instead of allowing it to evolve and enabling more families to participate, we're incentivizing developers to renovate, go higher-end, raise prices. So that's what they're doing. You do a great job representing D6 (big fan of what's going at Cayce), and I know there's a limit to what you can do, but every time NPR does another story about how Lockeland Elementary is 98% white or whatever, and people start hollering at each other about school choice or bussing or charters or whatever, I have to shake my head on the fact that we're talking around the real reason - the bottom of the market for family housing is like $400K and climbing. Single-family homes on big lots are never going to be affordable again, but our sickly market for townhomes and flats is most definitely a self-inflicted wound.

Gotta chime in with the disappointment on this. That's a full acre of space that's gonna be dedicated to four shops and a giant parking lot. Which means it will be targeted at businesses pulling in traffic from outside the neighborhood instead of building local amenities. And it won't add anything to the residential stock in a neighborhood that already blew past the working class and is now edging past the top of the middle class. If zoning is a factor in this decision at all, it's absolute negligence on our part as a city. Houses are selling for $1.2 million down the block, the neighborhood school is re-segregating, and we're gonna keep sitting here using outdated zoning to artificially restrict efforts to meet that demand? This is a textbook example of the real decisions developers make between adding housing or just renovating and going up-market, and all the demagoguing about affordable housing (and Barnes fund blather) does nothing but obscure the real mechanisms we have to allow the market to provide supply to meet the demand. I live on Fatherland, and I always look forward to watching the neighborhood evolve. It's pretty discouraging when most of it seems to be locked up by exclusionary restrictions.

Sounds complicated, but it seems to be less restrictive than our approach of requiring full council approval, which has resulted in most of the zoning getting wildly out of date, with sporadic/random up-zoning based on which developers know how to work the polticians and how CMs read the political winds on a given day. Zoning aside, I've read that even Houston has significantly inhibited development via city-imposed regulations for things like parking minimums, although that may be changing. Here's hoping we'll follow suit one day.

Yeah, KVB isn't terrible above 1st (although it's no prize either), but the intersection with 1st is a total cluster. It's most obvious when something's going on at Ascend, but to me the worst part about it is that it basically feels like the edge of pedestrian-friendly downtown, when that vibe should be spreading way south of there. I'd advocate for all the countermeasures above. I screen-shotted the two KVB crosswalks below—they both feel like death traps. The median on the top one (west side) definitely needs to be extended so pedestrians aren't sitting there unprotected. And the east side has no refuge at all, which leaves you to play frogger across 8 (!) lanes of traffic. At some point we have to acknowledge that we've reached a point where we don't need streets with 8 lanes of vehicle throughput in downtown Nashville. The hordes of pedestrians are worth a lot more to the city than decreasing commute times for a few more outer county residents. A friend of mine just bought in City Lights. He's disappointed about the view, but pretty sure he'd be delighted if this project provides an opportunity to move KVB away from the suburban superhighway vibe. And to smeag's point about the underpass, I'll just add that metro inexplicably closes that down half the time, especially when there's an event anywhere nearby, which pushes that traffic back to the surface crossings. Would be incredible if this (plus peabody) would build some pressure on them to actually take the pedestrian throughways seriously as important routes for people to get around the city instead of categorizing them as some kind of glorified recreational path to be shut down as soon as there are a bunch of cars trying to get downtown.

Why is that? I thought the whole knock on him was that he was too developer-friendly?

Yeah, the irony behind all the Airbnb pathos is that it's ultimately a reflection of our restrictive zoning. If neighborhoods were allowed to develop based on demand (as they were before the 1950s) most of the land area within 3 miles of downtown would be filling in with townhomes and flats to meet the increasing demand. There would be thousands of airbnb units, but they would be swamped by many more residential units, which would also run the full spectrum of affordability. Instead we restrict most areas to 4-10 houses per acre or less, creating an enormous artificial scarcity, which Airbnb gives people a way to arbitrage. Pretty self-defeating, but it's not gonna change any time soon. Which is why I'm building an airbnb in my back yard.

It's kind of depressing to consider how straightforward it would be to wildly improve our transportation system if we incentivized modern "jitney" service (aka lyft line & uber pool) instead of the current death spiral (1 person per car -> traffic jams -> more roads and parking -> more traffic jams, repeat until all available space is filled by cars instead of people). Jitneys worked fine in 1915, and they're way better with the addition of the smartphone. They're currently available technology, carry people from door-to-door, and wouldn't require any big up-front government investment. We would, of course, need a little foresight and the political will to shift some key incentives and subsidies... All you'd have to do is: Dedicate a rush hour lane on the interstates and the arterials for passenger vehicles (buses and rideshare) with an annual permit that makes single-passenger rides cost-prohibitive. (Maybe auction them every year to avoid taxi medallion-style cartels.) Instead of mandating/subsidizing downtown parking, charge a small annual fee for each space. I think those two changes would be enough to gradually realign people's transportation incentives with what's best for overall quality of life. You can already flag a rideshare within minutes; with increased volume that would go down even further. Multi-passenger lanes could carry 10x more people, requiring way less infrastructure from metro per commuter. Professional drivers would be incentivized to drive per-mile costs down, and would electrify. Pollution goes down. Per capita pedestrian and car crash deaths would decline. Demand for parking craters. When downtown developers no longer have to perch their projects on top of 8-story car-storage towers (or laboriously excavate enormous bunkers in the bedrock), they're able to finance twice as many projects. We use reclaimed on-street parking to widen sidewalks and/or add bike/scooter lanes. You could stop paying for cars and insurance (average new car payment is north of $500/month) and have many thousands of extra dollars to spend. Etc, etc. Totally possible, and yet so impossible...

Not sure why privacy isn't a concern for renters, but if that's the only hangup I'd be on board with starting by applying those requirements to car & truck rentals. The vehicles weigh thousands of pounds, move much faster than scooters, and are often driven in areas that the operator isn't familiar with. They're much more likely to injure or kill someone; why not use technology to mitigate that? We already mandate anti-lock brakes and backup cameras...

This kind of garbage street-level design on a project that metro basically had a design contest for is just inexplicable to me. Any intern in urban planning could have pointed this out early in the process, and they basically had carte blanche to tell the developer to make it better. Instead we'll have another block filled up with urban-level density that's wasted on a design conceived purely for car commuters. We'll have another pedestrian-hostile gap in the urban fabric that will continue to water down our walkability in an area that should be way over the tipping point. Metro's staff seems to be completely schizo on this—some of them are pushing in the right direction while the rest of them are just incompetent. At this point any project inside the loop should be critiqued first and foremost on how it addresses the street for everyone *except* car commuters. We need buildings that beg you to walk, bus, bike, or scoot, not ones that solicit another few hundred commuters from further out.

Hoping that as the downtown population grows, pressure will build for better public spaces for residents. Of course, right now an entire crop of political candidates is testing how far they can get with the old "downtown is getting too much of our money" canard, so it all depends on how well that works. If we get a mayor and multiple at-large CMs elected on that premise we can look forward to more privatized, segmented spaces where people only interact with their own income peers. For my money, I was in Atlanta recently, and the Beltline thing they have going there is turning into an incredible focus for development to build around. The sections that are complete are quickly getting surrounded by mid-rise residential with a lot of cool restaurants and shops, and there's a constant stream of all ages and demographics walking, jogging, biking, and scooting around. Made me super jealous for Nashville to get something similar going, because there's obviously a huge appetite, and it's an incredible improvement over the quality of life from business-as-usual development patterns.

I believe it, they seem to cost more than an uber now. The new scooter model is much better, but geez... I had to hunt down a Jump for the ride home.

I use an e-bike on the greenways (to carry my kids) all the time. It's super pleasant and I've never gotten any negative reactions from the fact that I'm getting a few hundred watts of help to get up and down the hills. I don't know the specific history of the greenway rules, but it seems obvious that restrictions around "motorized" traffic were written decades ago with internal combustion engines in mind, not tiny Class 1/2 electric motors that can't go over 20 mph and don't produce any more power than a healthy adult peddling. Half of the safe bikeways in Nashville are greenways, so it's an unfortunate side effect of the scooter wars that we're pretending like they're some kind of menace. The scooter companies have very good geo-fencing capabilities and seem to have added several "slow zones" that automatically lower the top speed, as well as several no parking zones. Maybe a constructive approach would be to use those tools on the greenways.

How bout this one:

Phones are bad but a lot of the uptick over the last 10 years is also related to the increasing prevalence and size of SUVs & giant pickup trucks. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/14/611116451/fatal-pedestrian-crashes-increasingly-involve-suvs-study-finds Pedestrians struck by cars tend to fly up onto the hood and roll off with potentially survivable injuries (depending on speed). People struck by large SUVs or trucks often end up getting run over, which is much more deadly. The latest fad seems to be these pickup trucks with giant dump truck-style grills that block the driver's visibility up to about four feet. Those things are almost perfectly designed to lead to accidents. In Europe they're pushing out mandates for increased visibility on delivery trucks, meanwhile we're going the opposite way, innovating new ways to make normal passenger cars much more dangerous. Which gets to the big difference between us and Europe. They're actually serious about bringing the death toll down. It's not rocket science; you can apply the same scientific thinking that constantly makes every other form of travel safer. But in the US there's been a relentless drive over the past 70 years to design everything around removing friction from long commutes. If new technology comes along that allows us to have our cake and eat it to (ABS, rear view cameras, etc.), we're OK with that, but anything that detracts from the speed or comfort that sprawl-y suburban commuters crave is a non-starter. So instead we just sort of wave off the fact that ~40,000 people are going to die every year as the price of doing business. In rural/suburban areas it'll mostly be in car crashes. In urban areas it will be more pedestrians & bikers. Either way it's going to keep happening until we start getting serious about engineering things differently. That means lowering speeds, narrowing lanes, removing slip lanes, ending right-turn-on-red, doing everything possible to improve driver visibility, and dozens of other details that we mostly ignore right now.