For The Love of Nashville

I never meant to be absent from my blog for this long. It wasn't that I had writer's block. It was more that I was unable to focus on any one topic. As this summer has bloomed, though, some trends in the local news and conversations with various friends have been percolating.

In the time since my last post, I survived unemployment and started a job that I love in January, one that challenges me and stresses me out and pushes me beyond my comfort zone and tests my mettle and stretches my creativity: it's a position in business development for a small commercial construction company working with wonderful people who build wonderful things. It has absorbed a lot of my focus while I learn about the business, follow leads, and cultivate inspiration. It's everything I wanted in a job, and it makes me want to work really, really hard.

It's part of my job to know what's happening in the Nashville market, both with commercial real estate and with business in general. Nashville is actively touting its current "boom," it's growth as a hub of entrepreneurialism, healthcare, technology, and creativity. Community leaders have been enviably successful these past few years at fostering a business-friendly environment, drawing large corporate relocations, incubating hundreds of start-ups, fostering significant development in both commercial and residential real estate, driving job growth and home sales, and even improving academic performance in the public school system. All of this growth benefits the construction industry as we build the places where people will work, live, and play.

The SunTrust building in the foreground, the Pinnacle at Symphony Place building in the far left, the Music City Center with the green guitar-shaped roof, and the Omni Hotel immediately in the center were all built after my husband and I moved here in 2004.

Being so immersed in the hyperbole of the city's success, though, it becomes easy to forget about the core culture of the city and where Nashville is headed, if it can survive the growing pains without diluting the attributes that make it great. In just the past month, two issues arose that touched on the fate of Music City's legacy, the potential sale of RCA Studio A and a proposed retail restriction over 17 acres of Lower Broadway. Ben Folds, who leased Studio A for 90 days at a time and renewed his lease over 50 times, lobbied for the protection of the studio (which may never have been in real danger) and a general historic preservation overlay on Music Row. He garnered a lot of attention from artists, property owners, and developers. Some fall on the side of protecting the city's musical heritage by protecting the remaining studios in which that heritage was recorded. Others don't want to restrict any development and want to preserve the value of the properties as investments. Northeast of Music Row, the retail restrictions on Lower Broadway proposed by Metro Councilwoman Erica Gilmore would limit the types of business that can open there. The original bill banned national chains and required new businesses to be music venues or somehow otherwise reflect the country music theme of the honky-tonk district. Gilmore is working on a revision while opponents have proposed their own, less restrictive bill that redefines a "chain" and reduces the rule's physical footprint, decrying the push to narrowly define the face of downtown. Both problems reflect an old battle of capital versus culture.

The issues have been bubbling up in areas surrounding downtown in the past few months, also, as East Nashville bumps up against redevelopment district guidelines, and Germantown property prices inflated rapidly following the ground-breaking of a new baseball stadium for the Sounds this year, an event that drove a flurry of development deals. Metro Nashville issued a record value of building permits in the fiscal year ending June 30th, $1.87 billion. In Christine Kreyling's Nashville Post article linked above about East Nashville's redevelopment district, Metro Councilman John Summers stated the issue neatly: "Just because property values have risen dramatically doesn't mean everyone is going to do neighborhood-senstive development." It's an issue my husband and I know well from our experiences in Charleston, South Carolina. We've seen the rise in property values and property taxes that drive out poor populations, often driving minorities, especially, out of their neighborhoods to make way for new businesses and higher-income residents. We watched as rental rates on Meeting and King streets rose too high for the small, independent business owners to sustain their shops, shops that were later replaced with stores like Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma. Yankee vacationers and retirees began buying the mansions on the peninsula and the beautiful linguistic accent that rolled off the tongues of the Charleston elite all but disappeared. (Actually, I haven't heard it in years; it may be gone now.)

The music industry in Nashville has changed, as well, with the influx of new hopefuls following the success of the ABC show, "Nashville," a couple of short-lived reality TV shows, and the general trend in voter-driven singing competitions like "The Voice" and "Rising Star." My husband, a drummer, and his friends have been discussing the changes to their careers as a result. Hungry newbies on the scene dilute the value of creative work by playing for free, paying to play, or virtually giving away their catalogs. Executives want to know what show singers have been on, how many Facebook "likes" they've acquired, or how many YouTube hits a performer has attracted before considering them for a label. Record labels hire young--or young-looking--performers to back up their vocalists, to the detriment of the careers of seasoned professionals. Performers in the honky-tonks have to be human juke boxes to entertain the tourist crowds. The rapidly declining opportunities for paid gigs has caused more than one in our circle of friends to question the path this city is taking toward growth at the expense of the musicians who paint the scene.

Being pro-business and pro-progress, yet also pro-minority empowerment and pro-cultural preservation, I am torn on these issues. I don't believe that restricting Lower Broadway to only country music-related businesses is wise, but some restrictions could help retain the local flavor, whatever flavor local business owners choose to sell. I believe in preserving the heritage of Music Row, but I also believe the people who want to preserve those properties need to pay a fair-market value to protect them. I believe in the value of independent music labels and innovative start-ups in all fields, and I have grown to love the small-town feel of this somewhat large Tier 2 city. I abhor the big machine behind country music, but I recognize that profit motive always has and always will drive any industry.

So, what's to become of the culture here in the next five years? City leaders know that we have to get this growth thing right in terms of traffic, infrastructure, and housing, but it's up to the citizens to protect the pieces we love. In a way, it's another reason for locals to pursue their own businesses; it's the unique businesses here that do the most to preserve the culture. It's the locally-sourced and locally-owned restaurants, the small brewers and distillers, the indy labels and the label-less musicians, the artists, the techies, and the fashionistas that keep the profit-above-all system in check. They create jobs and opportunities while perpetuating that delicious blend of traditional and quirky. While I and others may worry at the dissolution of Nashville's peculiar flavor, it's possible that we are attracting and encouraging more of the ambitious people who will fit right in and help us become a more sustainable, more diverse, and ultimately more interesting community.

Is it likely? I don't know, but it is possible. It's possible we just need to fight business with business.

Hustling Is An Art

"Solutionism: the new optimism." --Dow Chemical Company's new slogan

A few months ago, I finally decided to apply for grad school. I have applied to the Masters in Civic Leadership program at Lipscomb University and am currently awaiting my entrance interview. In applying, I of course had to list my reasons for wanting to be in the program and what I hoped to accomplish.

It's well-documented in this blog what I hope to accomplish on a broad scale. After I said I would write about what this country's product would be as part of a Business Plan for America, I realized I need a focus. Our product, I believe, is our culture, that American spirit of ingenuity, optimism, and fortitude. What held me back from posting about this was the realization that we are losing that spirit, and it risks being supplanted by skepticism, partisanship, and helplessness. This realization gave me my focus: to begin my quest for a better America, I want to create programs that bring business and entrepreneurship education to the young, the poor, and eventually the masses. The programs would, over time, increase opportunities for success and remind people that we all have a hand in creating our own destinies by creating our own jobs, or making ourselves more marketable as employees, or becoming indispensable in the jobs we have already.

Having been meditating upon this project for a month or two, I was delighted when a young man--let's call him James--knocked on my door tonight and began to tell me about a program in which he was involved that helps teach people business skills. James said he came from Chicago and was on parole, and participating in the door-to-door sales program was required as part of his parole to help prepare him for the job market and prove his aptitude to future employers. I immediately thought about the Southwestern Advantage, a door-to-door sales program touted by Rory Vaden, author of Take The Stairs, as "one of the toughest and most rigorous yet exciting programs a young person can participate in."

James showed me the names of neighbors who had signed on to help him, and he had clearly perfected his pitch as he bantered politely and flattered me subtly. He wore khaki pants and a short-sleeved dress shirt with a tan argyle vest, and we both recited the phrase, "If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you sell good!" We spent about fifteen minutes chatting on my porch before he brought up what he was selling. I even asked him if I could give him my business card, and if he didn't mind, I wanted to connect with him later to learn more about his path out of crime and poverty.

James then showed me a list of magazines he was shilling. I think I concealed my disappointment, but every moment after that seemed like a waste of my time. I asked the price a few times, but it took him a while to finally show me that a three-year subscription would, at minimum, cost $80. "Oh, I can't do that," I told him. He tried a couple times more to get me to pick a different magazine, but I insisted I couldn't afford to lay out that much money for a magazine subscription. He mumbled something and then turned for the stairs leading off my third-floor porch and descended quickly. I watched him, confused, then realized he was actually leaving. Leaving! He didn't say goodbye or thank you or screw you or anything at all--he just turned and left after he realized I wasn't giving him any money.

My blood began to boil. As he made his way down our long driveway, I became infuriated that James had wasted my time, although he probably left in such a hurry because he realized he had just wasted his own time.  Possibly the magazine sales are a scam, and possibly he doesn't even realize it. The fact that he had no interest in help from an outside source, though (he left without my card), led me to believe he had no interest in genuinely learning more about sales or entrepreneurship or anything else of that nature. Regardless of his intentions, what angered me the most was that in a situation where I would usually be guarded, I'd let myself be pulled in emotionally because his story spoke exactly to the situations I want to improve: the job outlook for the poor, the paroled, the people looking to lift themselves up through their own hard work.

Hustling is an art form, and it doesn't have to involve the typical urban connotation of hustling: doing anything necessary to make as much money as possible. That struggle-for-survival mentality doesn't have to survive in the future if we teach people how to hustle better, more productively, and legally. So, young hustler James, who left me feeling robbed of time and good humor, you have motivated me more than any ex-prisoner-makes-good story could. I aim to put people like you out of business--out of the business of selling magazines, that is--and teach them how to use their skills to establish a level of financial security like they've never imagined.