Jefferson Street Cap Project Is Falling Apart

Nearly a year into the project, residents are confused and worried. As of today, all public events are postponed until the Mayor's Office decides how to respond.

Ten months after the Mayor’s Office broke plans to cap I-40 in the 2020 Transportation Plan, residents of North Nashville have responded at the project’s first two public community meetings. At both the Oct. 9 “Community Led Design Kickoff” without Q&A and Nov. 4 “Community Discussion Meeting: Guided Listening Session,” residents reacted to the speed and confidence with which the project has moved forward, questioning the lack of community involvement.

Mayor Cooper’s brand-new Department of Transportation and Multimodal Infrastructure plans to supplement a federal grant ($72m) with $48m over a few years to develop (what looks like) a large parklet that would “cap” the interstate off Jefferson between 17th and DB Todd.

A rendering of the proposed $100m+ cap via the project’s website.

Last Thursday, in the packed basement of Pleasant Green Baptist Church on Jefferson Street, the first question for Faye DiMassimo: “Why is the community not involved in the beginning?”  

DiMassimo corrected the moderator, telling the crowd there has been community involvement every step of the way. 

Councilmember (at-large) Sharon Hurt loud-whispered to the crowd behind her: “That’s a lie.” 

Audio here (Hurt at 0:28ish… volume up!).

DiMassimo gestured to listening sessions for the 2020 Transportation Plan and the fact that the grant application was presented “in a public way” at Metro Council. The residents who showed up at these past two community meetings. Today, an email signed by Courtney Pogue and DiMassimo postponed both remaining community events until the Mayor’s Office decides how to respond.

“I do not agree with the way the Mayor’s Office has gone about this process,” Hurt, an at-large CM and head of the Jefferson Street United Merchants Partnership, told the crowd from the podium on October 9. “The first grant application should have included community engagement. To begin community engagement with a second-round application seems too little and too late.”

North Nashville residents are confused about how the project began and worried about its impact on the neighborhood. Meetings have been awkward, with residents posing legitimate questions and concerns about neighborhood priorities like affordable housing and grocery stores. Now in the second-round of a $72 million-dollar federal grant, the Mayor’s Office is looking for community support.

After announcing the project early last spring, Metro proceeded as if community buy-in were a foregone conclusion. Six months before the first community meeting, Mayor Cooper characterized the cap as a reparatory project for the historic harm of I-40 on North Nashville. For the Mayor’s Office and the Nashville Department of Transportation and Multimodal Infrastructure, the cap and millions in federal grant funding would be a flagship project.

At cap meetings, residents have voiced the desperate need for investment in North Nashville’s several neighborhoods, schools, homes, three HBCUs, and black-owned businesses. Last year, the 37208 Special Committee urged the city to address affordable housing and mass incarceration in an extensive and thorough report that makes no mention of an interstate cap. Since the 1960s, North Nashville bore the brunt of overpolicing, mass incarceration, and economic isolation from the rest of the city. About 70% of 37208 residents identify as black or African-American and it has twice the number of residents at or below the federal poverty line than the rest of Nashville (census data here). The 37208 report contains the same recommendations as the residents who showed up at cap meetings asking why housing affordability and food security don’t come before $100+ million-dollar obscure urban design concepts.

A bus turns down Jefferson Street. You can see I-40 in the background and TSU behind it.

The Mayor’s Office is struggling to convince the public that neighborhood input wasn’t an afterthought. For nearly a year, DiMassimo and Cooper have publicized the project, spun it as an act of racial justice, and publicly pursued a huge federal grant. They call it a win for the neighborhood while parrying residents’ actual needs and concerns. 

Community members brought up several concerns repeatedly:

1. What about the resulting increase in property value and property taxes from the cap?

2. This project will accelerate gentrification

3. There has been a lack of community involvement in the planning process

4. The as-of-yet-unclear benefits of the cap to the community.

5. Why is this money not being used for affordable housing? Or supporting HBCUs? Or addressing the area’s food deserts?

Most of all, residents asked: Of all the things we need in North Nashville, why this project? And why now? Rather than an open-mic Q&A, the Mayor’s Office decides which concerns come before the crowd and has a tight agenda of speakers. Therefore, questions often have come in bursts from audience members to make sure concerns are heard. Check out this thread by CM Mendes to see how this happened on Thursday.

A nice live-tweet thread by CM Mendes of last week’s meeting.

The Cooper administration, no doubt stirred by the prospect of $72 million in federal *matching funds*, would also need to secure a multi-year commitment of $48 million in city funds. In the context of these meetings, such a big commitment for a Mayor-led project has come off as almost insulting to a neighborhood asking for investment in economic development, affordable housing, and food security. For decades, North Nashville has been denied sufficient attention from the city that would help address the historic harm of I-40. While literally tied to I-40, the Jefferson Street Cap has come off to residents more as a project by the city to prepare North Nashville for more (outside) real estate development, likely leading to situations in which it’s no longer tenable for residents to keep their homes. This was the chief concern at Thursday’s meeting at Pleasant Green Baptist, heard especially from older black residents.

A new build on DB Todd and Underwood, a few blocks from the proposed cap.

Courtney Pogue, Cooper’s new economic and community development director, represented the Mayor’s Office alongside DiMassimo last Thursday. At times, he seemed uncomfortable defending the position of the Mayor’s Office against the legitimate concerns of residents. When asked about how the cap would benefit the community, Pogue explained there is no plan in place to attract grocery stores, support workforce development, or support small business entrepreneurs, three primary concerns of the room.

“You may know that my actual resources for economic development in Nashville is about $150,000 for the entire city. That’s not much to do economic development,” said Pogue. “Historically we have focused on large corporate attraction.” Pogue, a recent hire from Dallas, is one of the few black senior staff members in Cooper’s office after the departure of Robert Fisher a couple months ago. 

This has been the only real ideological thread of the Cooper administration: attract wealth, let it permeate real estate quickly and efficiently, increase property values, and grow the tax base. New builds from Charlotte to the South, the Nations to the West, and Germantown to the East are already pulling land from the city’s oldest historically and majority black neighborhood. This cap would ratchet up these threats, which appear intuitive and obvious to North Nashville residents who have shown up to cap events. Given all the needs in North Nashville, it’s a confusing choice of investment.

The most likely scenario is that the Mayor’s Office hosts a series of tightly-controlled engagement events like Tuesday’s (now-canceled) “Community Discussion Meeting: Open-House,” at which reps from the Mayor’s Office will likely display design plans on easels and residents will “have the opportunity to participate in a survey process in order to inform project leaders on the community’s desire.” Both Cooper and DiMassimo said publicly that the project will not go forward without the concurrence (Cooper’s word) or decision (DiMassimo’s word) of the community. Neither laid out conditions by which the Mayor’s Office would determine a community decision and, regardless of how many Listening Sessions or Open Houses NDOT hosts, accountability for the Mayor’s Office will be up to the Mayor’s Office.

A new build on Underwood and 17th, three blocks from the proposed cap.

If the plan for a Jefferson Street Cap is not abandoned, significantly altered, or accompanied by large-scale investment that responds to the clearly communicated concerns of the community, it will be unclear

what input meetings were even for. If a second-round application goes through with few or no changes after months of events where the Mayor’s Office continues with the project’s original talking points, it will be a successful imposition of the government’s plan over community concerns. Not too different from how I-40 got there in the first place.

---

-An amendment by CM Freddie O’Connell to the Capital Spending Plan would redirect the $15m from zoo parking to bus/visionzero/bikeways/sidewalks.

-CM Sledge fired off a tweet on Friday calling out the Mayor’s Office for bailing on its singular permanent supportive housing promise-not-kept for units at 505 2nd ave N.

-The private FB group ”Belle Meade - West Meade - Hillwood - United Neighborhoods” has been a longstanding forum for West Nashville NIMBYs. This group has chattered nonstop about the encampment of people at Brookmeade Park near the Walmart on Charlotte. Admin Lou Wilbanks (remember the name) apparently went to ‘tour’ the encampment on Sunday—not her first time on one of these self-guided ‘tours’—and apparently a resident met her with a rifle. Lately, comments and posts on this group has dehumanized residents and called for the violent removal of the unhoused with a specific fixation on Brookmeade. Last Friday, the Mayor’s Office invited CMs on its own tour of encampments, promising police escorts and access to utility vehicles. The Mayor’s Office canceled the tour earlier today. Read OpenTable’s statement here and take a second with the $2 million in line items meant to surveil and bulldoze homeless encampments billed by the Mayor’s Office to American Rescue Plan funding.

Funds still need council approval and housing ends homelessness.

-After some conversations with individuals who have worked with Mayor Cooper, we have heard that the Mayor is known to deal with frustration by clearing his desk with his arm in a swift sweeping motion, like in a movie. It is possible that the alleged stapler throwing may have originated via one of these situations.

---

On (un)capitalizing ‘black’: I don’t think there is a correct choice but Nicholas Whittaker’s recent essay on the topic influenced my decision in this writeup.

An earlier version of this article mentioned the Facebook Group “Reclaim Brookmeade Park and Greenway For The People,” which has taken a housing-first approach to solutions to the Brookmeade encampment.