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Bachelorettes, Bibles & Amazon: Is Nashville The Perfect Model For A Second-Tier City
Bachelorettes, Bibles & Amazon: Is Nashville The Perfect Model For A Second-Tier City?
16 Apr 2019
By Khushbu Shah
Read More: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...-growing-pains
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Approximately 14 million people visit the city each year, the Chamber of Commerce estimates. This year, around 100,000 are due to show up in late April alone for the National Football League (NFL) draft. In explaining its choice of city, the NFL published a list citing Nashville’s music, barbeque, and Broadway as factors making it the perfect location for 2019.
- Nashville, unequivocally, is an economic success story, and not just in recent years, when outlets like the New York Times dubbed it the “it city”. The mid-size southern city has been firmly financially rooted in a sprawling healthcare services industry and Christian book publishing since the 1980s, and has been growing for some time. With a burgeoning tourism industry laid on the foundation of its entertainment bedrock, the success of its economic development is clear amid the gentrifying neighborhoods and throngs of visitors passing shoulder-to-shoulder as they peruse the live music options while vying for bar seats.
- None of the bars downtown from the purple-painted staple Tootsie’s, to the two-storey George Jones, to the expansive Jason Aldean Rooftop bar charge a cover fee. They don’t need to: he estimates the average bachelorette and each of her friends or family members spends around $1,000 while in Nashville. --- Around 150,000 visitors dance, drink, and selfie their way through Nashville each year, this equates to about $12m in revenue. --- Tennessee’s capital is attracting more than just raucous weekend visitors. Nashville, once primarily known as the capital of country music, is now also one of America’s fastest-growing cities, and its economy is often cited as a successful model.
- Around 94 people moved here on a daily basis in 2017, according to a 2018 report from the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, and the city has added nearly 400,000 new residents in the past decade. Attracting them are 40,000 businesses, and growing, in the metropolitan area. These will soon to include Amazon when it opens a new operations centre downtown, promising 5,000 well-paid new jobs. --- Such growth inevitably creates issues, said Anne Barnett, the co-chair of Stand Up Nashville, a community labour organisation representing the rights of working people in the city. As it battles the impacts of gentrification, transport pressures and the construction boom, Nashville is trying to maintain its unique sense of identity and accessibility.
- “One of the things that makes Nashville Nashville is its rich culture of art and food, and most of that doesn’t come from the most wealthy,” Barnett said. “It comes from the folks that are middle-class and below middle-class. “As people are getting pushed out of the city, these really cherished institutions – even restaurants and music venues – are being torn down to build these mix use developments. Whole neighbourhoods are being basically wiped out and rebuilt. “The longer that is allowed to go on, Nashville is going to lose its culture, which is why people want to move to Nashville in the first place.”
- Nashville’s city council this month approved a $17.5m incentive package for Amazon, despite concerns around how well paid those jobs will turn out to be, and the wider anxieties around Big Tech coming to town that scuppered Amazon’s New York City plans. Barnett wonders how many of those jobs will go to city residents versus city transplants and, if the majority of hires fall in the latter category, what it will do to exacerbate Nashville’s economic inequality. --- The mayor’s office, according to the Tennessean newspaper, insists the approved package is a “sound investment”. The city unemployment rate is just 2.7% and it shared the top spot for job growth in the US with Orlando, Florida.
- The city’s mayor, David Briley, said: “I would describe our city as a place that still has a lot of our southern hospitality, hopefully, in the good sense of what that used to mean. We have become very diverse economically [and] racially.” --- On Amazon, speaking before the city approval of the incentive, Briley said: “One, it’s a good place for them to build, and two, 5,000 jobs was something we could incorporate into our growth and development without being overwhelmed by it.” The Amazon investment will equate to $750m a year, the mayor estimates, based on 5,000 jobs with a median salary of $150,000. He says the city will also invest $2.5m a year.
- But Barnett says: “There were a lot of cranes in the sky [in Seattle] and it really reminded me of some of the same things we’re seeing here in Nashville – a lot of new luxury apartments, a lot of new office buildings and hotels. I fear we’re going to become a city for wealthy people and not a city that lifts up everyone.” --- Nashville has been growing since the 1980s. Its sprawling healthcare sector employs more than a quarter of a million locals , a significant number in a city of 700,000 people. --- It is also the Bible-printing hub of the US. LifeWay Christian Resources, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing arm, has over 1,100 employees in Nashville, and has been a part of the city since 1891.
- A proportion of Nashville’s economic rising star can be attributed to the grassroots investment the city has made into its new and existing residents with incentives like the nonprofit Entrepreneur Center, which took shape in 2010. Currently, the center is working with 250 entrepreneurs and has over 500 alumni. “Our vision is [for Nashville] to be the best place to start a business by 2025, that’s our goal,” says the centre’s vice-president of community investment, Anne Elizabeth McIntosh. --- Nashville’s shiny image has, though, been showing one of the usual cracks of success: inequality. --- According to a 2017 Brookings report, “In Nashville, 40% of all jobs (and 26 of the top 50 occupations) do not pay enough for workers to afford fair-market rent for a one-bedroom apartment.”
- The city aiming for diversity not simply in its music and industries, but also in the community as a whole. Briley considers Atlanta and Los Angeles to be the most reasonable role models for the city’s ambition. “We’re more likely to be like LA than Atlanta,” he says, though that might be more wishful thinking than reality. --- He points to Nashville’s diversifying population with the influx of immigrants and the multitude of jobs. Still, he acknowledges the myriad issues that come with success like the soaring wealth and extreme poverty plaguing Los Angeles. He would also like to stay away from the stigma associated with Atlanta’s gentrification woes that seem to have pushed longtime residents out of the expanding city.
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