Armacing

Just saw your response. No, a libertarian is opposed to the government-funded convention center. The state was asleep-at-the-wheel when they allowed the city to use public funds to build the convention center, they should have passed a law in the state legislature preventing that. But I have to assume they didn't because they are just as corrupt as the metro government. So it's red team v/s blue team but both are equally corrupt as far as I can tell. There is nothing about libertarianism that elevates local governments to a moral high-ground above state or national governments. There is only freedom, and I will cheer for any entity that is protecting individual liberty regardless of the partisan politics involved. Ha! I welcome your personal attacks because it means you are utterly defeated on the issue at hand. Keep it coming As I mentioned above, I place no importance on the federal/state/local government involved in a particular issue. I evaluate every issue on its merits when it comes to increasing or decreasing personal liberty. Since you're out of the discussion now though, can I at least get an anonymous BNABreaker laughing emoji on this post? If you respect them so much, why not join them and become a Libertarian? Team Yellow! In all seriousness though, I take it as a point of pride that my opinion on any issue prompts you to contemplate the merits of a freedom-focused political affiliation, regardless of how you interpret that concept. If we have now reached the point in the argument where we are debating who loves freedom more, then we are on the right track. You are arguing against the Republican position on this issue... That's not me. I don't believe in publicly funded roads. They should all be private roads, and most of the highways would be toll roads in that scenario. I believe in privately owned rail. Keep in mind, it was the government that built all these massive highways and encouraged suburbanization. Government policies that pushed people out into the suburbs whether via zoning or taxes or schools. Remember the Nashville Streetcars? Those were all private companies driven out of business by a corrupt government that was funding roads and attempting to control the electrical infrastructure (NES is a government-backed monopoly). The term "Rural Communities" is code for "Rural Government" in your dialogue. I prefer to focus on Rural Residents... Let's talk about what they have. Do they generate trash? Yes, they haul it to the dump. Do they generate sewage? Yes, it goes into the sceptic tank. Do they have city water? No, they get it from a well. When it comes to electricity, just about every rural residence is connected to the electrical grid, but some new "off-grid" residences are designed to use solar or wind power, so even that is not as universal as it once was. These rural residents have decided they don't need their government to provide any of those services, and they like it that way because they don't have to pay taxes for those services. Everyone takes care of their own needs - - true individual freedom in that regard. Wrong! The "rural lifestyle" is not dependent upon government price regulations. The affordability is actually due to the lack of government regulation because it allows people the freedom to live how they want and in the cheapest way possible, without anyone else having an ability to stop them because they disagree with their manner of living. Many people in Tennessee like to live on large tracts of land that put ample distance between them and their neighbors. That physical distance keeps everyone out of everyone else's business, and so a wonderous variety of cheap living styles flourish back in the boondocks - - many of which would be illegal in a city like Nashville. That is a classic socialist argument against the free market. Here is how it usually goes: "We can't have a bunch of private companies providing services to the people! It will be mass chaos! Better to have one company building the houses, one company making the cars, and one company baking the bread. And it avoids the wasted expense of advertising that all these companies spend to compete with each other!" Of course, we all know that the benefit of multiple companies is that they do not work together most of the time, but rather, they compete and try to drive the other out of business by offering the best product at the lowest price. So the consumer benefits, blah, blah, blah. The story is no different with any utility service. I wish you would have gone into it because I have no idea what you're talking about. What agencies? And how do they affect the climate? Sounds to me like you agree with my idea of making all those highways toll roads so they are self-sustaining entities. That way all the resources can stay in the urban areas. Let's get the state out of the business of road building and leave that to the road building companies. Heck, you might even come to love the libertarian economy where most people live close to the city and ride privately-owned street cars to avoid the expense of tolls and car ownership, which will help pay for the private schools their kids attend. I haven't read much about that political convention you guys keep mentioning (I did see something about in in an article covering the airport authority), so I'll just state this as plainly as possible: The state should not be involved in hosting any events, or lobbying for any events, or funding any events, or funding the construction of any event venues. If the people of Tennessee and the companies located here want to host an event - Great! Let them organize it and put on a fancy show. That sort of business endeavor is not a legitimate function of government.

They should bring back the ability to see who is laughing, and also they should bring back the downvote with a name attached to it. I'm also a huge believer in putting names next to reactions and also allowing negative reactions.

The funny thing about that list is how Clarksville, TN is near the bottom of the list but Duluth, MN is ranked higher than Clarksville!

Another good article detailing how rich & powerful forces use zoning laws to keep poor people impoverished. It's good to read within the article how interests from both sides of the aisle are uniting to eliminate the unjust oppression that is zoning laws. Hopefully this trend continues to extend the right to freely use one's land to everyone in America, even if they don't have the wealth & power to influence corrupt bureaucrats who have stolen everyone's property rights. Enjoy the context! https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-rich-blue-suburbs-keep-the-poor-away/ar-AA1eenwm

Don't get me wrong, there is a market for high-end hotels, but I'm just saying that there are limitations to how much high-end the hotel market can support in Nashville. Personally I think the location for the Ritz was wrong. It needs to be either closer to Lower Broadway or closer Vanderbilt. I think Nashville is an obvious expansion city for Ritz, but other cities that should have one also don't have one like Austin, Salt Lake (Park City), Houston, or Jackson Hole. On the other hand, there are some cities with a Ritz that surprise me like Cleveland and St.Louis. So who knows?

My take on the high-rise market is this: 1) Commercial real estate is in decline and vacancies will continue to prevent most new office towers from coming to fruition. This is due to the lingering effects of work-from-home and hybrid covid-era changes that have now (for many companies) become normalized. We also have declining profit margins in many industries, so they are cutting back on office spending. The falling demand for office space is also being reinforced by the higher interest rates, which makes it harder for employees to justify a move to a new city, so remote employees are the only employees available now. 2) Corporate relocations are down due to general economic uncertainty and also the interest rate problem for moving employees mentioned above. In the era of work-from-home, does it really matter where a headquarters is located when a significant number of employees work and live elsewhere? I think we are still in the midst of "the great scattering" where everything is being decentralized. I think we will see more instances where large satellite offices are set up, but the actual headquarters remains where it is. But even then, why set up a satellite office when everyone really wants to work from home? 3) A decade ago there was a compelling argument for living downtown according to the live-work-play urban lifestyle. However, as office work turns remote, we are already seeing younger people choose to buy a house in the suburbs rather than rent downtown. The residential high-rise boom is still happening in Nashville for now, but it's instructive to realize it's not happening in all cities for various reasons related to quality of life. Nashville is a bit of a special case, it seems, but the value proposition of living downtown becomes more tenuous without the need to be close to an office. Indeed, the ability to work remotely is seen as a status symbol for many. I question the durability of the downtown housing boom without a corresponding office boom to anchor those residents in place. 4) In contrast to office and residential, I think the near and long term outlooks for hotels are strong and getting stronger based on Nashville's position as a close/cheap tourist destination. The only down side to this is that tourism is highly discretionary and subject to boom/bust (ask Las Vegas about this). However the location of Nashville is almost counter-cyclical in that the poorer people are, the less likely they are to visit Las Vegas or Cancun and the more likely they are to settle for a modest weekender to Nashville. I think the Ritz Carlton failed to materialize for a reason: That is not the demographic visiting Nashville except during conventions, which are not frequent enough to support a brand like that. In summary, I think Nashville is coasting on the declining tail end of trends that started several years ago and I fear that many of the non-residential/non hotel proposals will not come to fruition, especially the live-work-play mega developments like Reed and Beaman. I think existing office tenants will either scale back or at most hold-steady since most of their new hires will be remote. I don't think we will see many corporate relo's and may eventually be disappointed by the numbers we see from Amazon and Oracle. I think hotel construction will continue to skew towards value as the high-end market reaches total saturation. I think residential will struggle to maintain momentum unless it is oriented towards Vanderbilt, so I place higher odds on mid-town focused residential developments versus downtown residential.

According to this article, Memphis has the worst drivers in the US: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4100486-heres-where-americas-worst-drivers-are-found-study/ Perhaps an argument in favor of more mass transit for the citizens of Memphis?

Ritz Carlton, perhaps?

Here are my guesses for the first 8 cities: 1) Nashville, TN 2) Charleston, SC 3) Raleigh-Durham, NC 4) Fort Myers, FL 5) Oklahoma City, OK 6) Omaha, NE 7) Boise, ID 8 ) Spokane, WA

What the heck? Are they actually going to leave the Tempo Yucca in that same spot when the building is finished? I just thought they were leaving it there temporarily until they can re-locate it to another spot, but it looks like they poured concrete around it.

I applaud your conviction to decamp to another part of the country that matches your politics. If only more people in all states would follow your example and sort themselves geographically by political ideology we could have some true "pure-play" examples of which policies work and which don't. We kind of have that with California, but there are still too many conservatives in CA to call it a pure-play socialist experiment. For example, the proposal to provide free universal healthcare was defeated by conservatives in CA, and I lament that defeat. It would have been awesome to see CA try to implement that and then go bankrupt, but there is still hope they will do it. Maybe you can go to CA and while you're over there convince some free-market conservatives to leave and move to TN? That would be super helpful. You need to get out of Nashville more because this is not the case. And don't go lumping the "surrounding counties" into your bright spot claim. The surrounding counties are red counties, so their economic success stands as a counter-point to blue Davidson county. Let's look at blue Shelby county... How is their economy doing? I disagree with expelling elected officials, but your statement above is deluded. You want to know who doesn't care about the lives of school children? The people running that religious school, and all of the people running all of the schools in Nashville and Tennessee, for that matter. The whole country is deluded in that they refuse to recognize the need for robust school security at every school. Guns are not going anywhere, so quit pretending we are just one more mass-shooting away from guns getting banned, and start demanding meaningful security measures be implemented at every school - if you care about the "lives of school children". Here is an example of a school that actually gets it: https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/school-hires-combat-vets-with-rifles-to-put-down-active-shooters/ News Flash: The companies coming here are doing so because of the free-market politics, not in spite of them. If they were looking for socialist politics they would have located in California.

There is no such thing as "blight". One man's blight is another man's utopia. There is only property ownership, and all the rest is irrelevant opinions from loud-mouthed busy-bodies who can't afford to buy and control the land they are complaining about.... And if a city ever enacts laws that give real power to those nimby's via a government-sponsored blight-fee gestapo that goes around town punishing land owners, then at that point their opinions WILL become relevant, but the city itself will quickly become irrelevant because investors will run for the hills. Major cities all over the US are filled to the brim with people who think their city is so special that they can impose any number of regulations on investors/businesses and they just have to pay it because they have to be in that city. I would argue that the past 50 years of history has very clearly proven that is not the case.

If you're looking for a quick way to shut down development in Nashville and drive all new office construction to Cool Springs, please implement one of the above mentioned strategies.

It does feel like we are entering a period of high risk that could be the impetus behind many wait-and-see strategies for the projects that have not started yet. I just hope Tony's YMCA tower is not a casualty of this downturn. All the rest can stall and cancel for all I care, but I don't know if I could handle another instance of Tony proposing to build a new tallest only to be stymied by an economic/banking crisis.

That bank had gold in the vault, so you should take that for what it's worth.

I think those declining ridership stats posted above indicate that, absent some major disruption in society, we won't be seeing any rail-based mass transit in Nashville within our lifetimes. If you want to know why this is the case, just ask yourself this question: Why have so many recent corporate relocations to the Nashville region chosen to put their offices in Cool Springs instead of downtown Nashville? When you have the answer to that question, then you will know why Nashville will never achieve the density and/or tax base to support rail transit.

The government controlled banking system in the US is a complete scam. The inflation rate is above the interest rate - BY DESIGN! They never target inflation below the interest rate, only above. When inflation is 8%, interest is 5%. When inflation is 3%, interest is 1%. Always. This means anyone saving money in the bank is perpetually loosing buying-power to inflation. As an asset, the US dollar is guaranteed to go down in value - by design!

LP ended up relocating to the 3-story "creative building" that sits between the two towers of Broadwest.... Definitely not enough to be an anchor tenant of Circle South.

Can you tell if the blasting permit relates to the entire site, or just the YMCA portion? Hopefully they are going to excavate the whole thing at once.

Ha! Something something Context something something!

I noticed that Tempo was conspicuously absent from the renderings. They are probably jealous of the Yucca.

Memphis is #25 overall, but if you look at the individual category rankings it is #14 for "Living Conditions" and #11 for "Infrastructure". Again, not saying this is accurate, but I wanted to clarify where my numbers came from in the original post.

I see this an an absolute win. I hope I get to see the day when someone levels such criticism against a skyscraper in Nashville!

Here is an interesting ranking of cities (albeit one of questionable scientific rigor) that places Memphis at #14 dirtiest for living conditions and gives Murfreesboro the #1 worst spot for "dirty infrastructure" - whatever that means: https://www.lawnstarter.com/blog/studies/dirtiest-cities-in-united-states/#rankings

I don't get why people act like they are entitled to make a left just because there is a turn lane. Personally I plan my route so I can make only right turns. It's very frustrating when people block the exits to businesses in a futile effort to turn left when it would be much faster for them to turn right and make a left further down the road.