AronG

Urban NES customers drastically subsidize construction and maintenance of the enormous, inefficient network of power lines necessary to serve sprawling suburban subdivisions all over Davidson Co. Seems like it's not unreasonable to ask them to front the money to get these things buried. With appropriate design I'd also imagine buried lines are cheaper to maintain, since they're sheltered from the elements, you don't need a cherry picker to inspect a line, and nobody can fly a kite into them.

Huge fan of updating the base zoning in and around Five Points. I hope that conversation can be structured around what we want the neighborhood to look like instead of just serving as a forum for grouchy people to air their grievances about the new Nashville. Mixed-uses is such a key to maintaining and rebuilding the pedestrian district that makes the neighborhood special, it would be a huge blow to take a step backwards. We need to be moving forwards. And if we don't open up a bigger footprint to townhome/courtyard/fourplex-style homes, our lack of price point diversity is just going to keep getting more and more exaggerated. I saw a tear-down/rebuild in Edgefield listed for $1.2 million the other day (922a Russell). Our current restrictions are channeling all the development interest into buying out existing owners for high-end renovation/rebuilds, instead of building more housing to address all the demand. Our kids aren't going to be able to afford anything within miles.

It's an interesting counterfactual. A lot of the history of interstates in Nashville is tied up with the way desegregation played out here. The interstates were used to engineer an arrangement where much of the white middle and upper classes could flee to the surrounding counties and set up separate school districts, but still drive to work downtown. If we'd never built them would they have stayed in Nashville and dealt with the schools, or would they have left anyway, letting the jobs go unfilled and driving the city into an even worse decline? My money's on the former, but who knows? The economic effects of interstates as the backbone of transportation systems are more clear. When traffic is aggregated onto massive trunk lines, old-style downtowns and Main streets don't make sense any more and become blighted. You need big parking lots and economies of scale. You get giant cookie-cutter retail areas (Nashville West, Mt Juliet, etc.) , separated from residential areas. Instead of having an ecosystem of neighborhood-footprint small business owners, you have a few local managers for mega-retailers (Walmart, Target, etc.), and most of the profits go back to corporate entities. People live further away from where they work in single-use subdivisions, accessible only by car. In East Nashville you can see the border of development from before and after the interstate era, even miles away from the interstate. The neighborhoods on opposite sides of Shelby golf course might as well be in different cities. When you combine that with the negative effects of the physical separation of a neighborhood like Mcferrin Park, cut off by giant road projects, it just seems like we had it right the first time. When I see the old maps before 440, or Ellington was built, I see a more resilient, connected fabric. To me those patterns were worth sticking with even if Nashville had to shrink a little bit more during the peak decades of suburban flight.

To me the knock on interstate work is that it's just a black hole. Any improvement you make gets immediately swamped by a few more people living 30 miles out and adding to the traffic/parking problem. Traffic quickly returns to the equilibrium based on whatever is awful enough to force people to live closer in, and you're back where you started. This compares to a bus line, which can scale up by an order of magnitude more per space required, and doesn't necessitate a bunch of parking on the other end. If they throw money at this spaghetti intersection, I can only hope they take the opportunity to try to fix the way it carves up and separates these neighborhoods. The East bank and McFerrin Park are basically completely isolated by giant interstates, with terrible pedestrian/bike connections to eachother and the rest of east nashville, not to mention downtown. I saw some interesting ideas thrown around with the River North plans. Here's hoping.

I hear that the church at 10th and Fatherland is closing, and is about to sell the rest of their property for $2.8MM to the same developer that bought the parcel at 10th & Russell and built detached townhomes.

Never forget.

Really looking forward to this. Was the vibe mostly supportive?

Council has a new point system for communicating priority of city projects to the mayor. Every CM gets 100 points to assign to projects, which are then ranked high to low. The results are pretty interesting: https://www.nashvillepublicradio.org/sites/wpln/files/CIB_FY20_Ranked.pdf

I dunno, my impression was always that the hard reality was that FO in it's current form wasn't going to survive this project if it happened. On some level I guess I agree with the mob on that one. It just wasn't a big revenue generator, and the back yard and the old house back there were key to the vibe, but they took up a lot of valuable space. Personally, I don't look at this outcome as a disaster at all, although I do wish they could've followed through with those micro residential units. All the struggling musicians are moving to Madison because all the cheap apartments are disappearing. And it's preposterous that we have so few areas with semi-dense townhome-style development on the east side.

Yeah that was the outcome, but I don't think there were a lot of people that were consciously making that tradeoff (correct me if I'm wrong). Especially with the celebrity involvement and the high emotions on the last round. The people I know that were against it were like raging against development and change. Which I understand - FO was cool. The angst around losing it certainly didn't lead to much rational thought about what density people wanted where. I wonder how it would've played out if they'd just gone ahead and done the demo first, waited about a year, then started the conversation about what to put there.

I don't feel too strongly about this particular plan, but getting modern parking meters and spreading them out more widely will be good for the city. People spend a LOT of time driving around looking for a free parking spot. I do it. You do it. If there are clearly marked, enforced meters everywhere, you can (A) give up on finding a free spot, (B) use the app to find the nearest available spot, and (C) stop circling the block 24 times and get off the road. If you don't want to pay to park, use one of the other options (walk, bus, uber, scooter). Parking rates should rise with demand. All those acres of space spread along the streets in highly valuable areas is worth a lot of money. It makes no sense to give it away for free or at bargain basement prices. The part of this that metro needs to be careful is to not get boxed in by this contract if we want to get rid of street parking and widen sidewalks, add bike lanes etc. So far it sounds like we're OK on that, but it's hard to tell exactly how this will affect the process.

Given that land around there is selling for close to $10MM/acre, seems like you could finance a significant part of this by selling development rights on some of it. Maybe the whole thing if you sell bonds and repay with the new property tax stream. It really is astonishing how much land we dedicate to urban interstates without questioning it. At a rough pass the inner loop and associated cloverleafs occupy somewhere around 400 acres. That amount of improved land would easily generate hundreds of millions of dollars per year in property tax if it was developed even to medium density. As I recall the inner loop averages just over 100,000 cars/day, meaning we're foregoing thousands of dollars each year in revenue to distribute each one of those outer county residents around downtown.

That's fascinating. I had no idea they were also doing the thing where they facilitate residents airbnb'ing their units (or "hotelling" them, as they call it). It's amazing how much of an impact airbnb has had on Nashville.

Does loading traffic just mean the way they use the street parking to unload trucks for restaurants etc.? Like, yeah, I assume 3rd is going to continue to be a mess at Molloy while they build the Centric, straighten Molloy etc.,, but it doesn't seem like there are that many buildings that don't have some kind of place they could park a box truck for a half-hour and cart their stuff inside. The truth is any restaurant or shop along 3rd should be ecstatic about this. Every example from other cities shows that it's a lot easier to monetize a stream of bike lane traffic going by your front door because they don't have to find a parking garage before they walk in. If the mayor will get this over the hump the businesses will love it within a year. Of course, the same thing would be true about widening the sidewalks on Broadway and so far that's proceeding at an incredibly glacial pace.

I emailed the mayor's office a couple of weeks ago to support the new/proposed downtown bikeway project and they finally got back: "It has become clear that there are operational and right-of-way challenges that necessitate further engagement prior to implementing a demonstration project. Therefore, the May delivery time frame will be pushed back to ensure this period of due diligence occurs to address mobility goals, as well as operational and safety issues." They're asking people to fill out this survey and/or email feedback to [email protected].

Here's hoping this is the first of other developments between 5th St and the river to reconnect east nashville to downtown. I bike down Woodland sometimes and there's so much potential to make it a nice human-friendly route from 5 points to downtown, but this stretch is (A) a wasteland, and (B) somewhat terrifying on a bike because people speed through boring areas.

Yeah, drive-in tourism is a great strength of Nashville. That's great, but if 2 people show up to rent 500 sqft hotel rooms and one of them needs an additional 300 sqft of built space to store a car, it doesn't make sense for them to split the price of the parking. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man on this topic, but it's actually pretty expensive, and it's only fair that the people that use it should be the ones to pay for it. If we start making that change, I'll wager we'd find a few more % of people ubering or scooting or whatever, and we might not need quite as many giant garages everywhere.

Agree all the parking is absurd. We've almost got entire city blocks now that are basically 7 stories of concrete with buildings built on top. And the truly absurd thing is MDHA still subsidizing it, either by directly paying for it, or via bonus height. What a crock, and a misuse of that incentive. Why are we actively paying money to hide this expense and encourage people to drive and choke up the roads instead of exploring other alternatives? Their policies are 20 years out of date and they need to be updated yesterday, along with getting rid of our mandated parking minimums. If we can't do the right thing and discourage driving because of all the negative externalities, at least let the market put an appropriate price on it.

Thanks for your work on this Brett. Agree that activating South 5th could be huge for that area, and I'm hoping somebody starts to see potential in those properties all the way down to Davidson, which could be a great corridor someday. One big impediment is that big mulch yard, which gets pretty rank in the summer. The new apartment buildings going up right behind there are going to get the full force of it. Have they every considered moving on? Is there some kind of ordinance around stinking up the surrounding area?

Good lord, that stage is huge.

Incredible angle on the city. Makes it pretty clear why they chose that spot for the fort...

All valid points, those are definitely significant inconveniences. Of course, you have to weigh them against the negative consequences of mass car commuter-based development (air quality, pedestrian deaths/car crashes, more expensive development, neighborhoods carved up by multi-lane roads and interstates, social isolation, etc.). But when those consequences are baked in and we're all sharing the price tag, the vast majority of people are certainly going to drive everywhere. I'm still excited to see a few developments challenging the assumption that everybody needs a $30,000 parking space everywhere they go, and that we should all pay that price tag whether we use it or not. If we can start to wind down some of the hidden subsidies and align individual incentives with what's best for the city, people may make a different calculation about the tradeoffs. I think there's a huge unmet appetite for walkable, human-scale places that aren't built around the needs of moving and storing cars. We're a long way away from breaking out of that model, but we take a few steps every year, and this pattern is a great example.

New transportation coalition launched, endorsed by 10 CM candidates: https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2019/04/16/nashville-needs-transit-plan-puts-people-first/3488347002/ https://www.nashvilletransportation.org/ Their 6 key priorities look good to me. Wonder if they'll get any traction.

To me that's the whole promise of a dense multi-use neighborhood like the gulch. Way cheaper when they don't have to build on top of a giant parking podium, but occupants have to figure out their own car storage. Inherently more attractive to renters with higher proportions of nearby residents and/or people that can use ridesharing (or even something crazy like the bus). People that absolutely have to drive themselves have to pay the market rate for nearby parking instead of benefiting from a hidden subsidy paid by everyone. The city will benefit enormously if we get more of this pattern. It creates a reinforcing incentive to build for people instead of cars, decreases pressure for more lanes and higher speeds, and will result in much more activated streets.

This: https://www.nashvillepost.com/business/development/article/21063605/victory-hall-project-lands-curb-support says Mark McDonald is "eyeing a mixed-use project" for this site, and that he will team with Mark McGinley via M Cubed Developments. He's not disclosing specific plans yet, but says they are going to "plan and ultimately develop a property that will enhance this vibrant and growing community, while demolishing what has been a true eyesore for years." Color me relieved. Maybe we'll lose the existing blight and get something more appropriate for the neighborhood within my lifetime after all. What's funny is that 5 points is apparently still in an Opportunity Zone, meaning they get tax cuts and incentives to encourage development in low-income areas. News flash: this area is no longer low-income, or even medium-income. Full renovations in the neighborhood sell for $800K now. The only thing developers need incentives for is to overcome our outdated zoning restrictions and the neighborhood NIMBYs. Next up maybe somebody will decide to do something with the giant parking lot behind the wine store, between Woodland and Clearview. That gets my award for the next most ridiculously under-utilized space in the area.