For the past 18 months, The Contributor ran a series called A Few Questions With where we interviewed councilmembers about their district’s most pressing issues. While we will continue to include newly elected officials to give them the opportunity to present their vision and goals of how they intend to serve their constituents, we have opened up this Q&A to include interviews with other community leaders.
Moving forward, you will not only hear from politicians but also from city leaders, community leaders that present new initiatives and programs that we feel may not be widely known. With that, we invite you to provide us with folks from whom you would like to hear in our Q&A. You can email your suggestions to our columnist directly at judithtackett@hotmail.com.
In this issue, we decided to focus on departing advice from outgoing Metro Council members to the new city leadership. Thus, we posed one question to all of the outgoing councilmembers who were not running for reelection and asked this question before the polls closed on Aug. 3. The respondents did not know who would be elected or in run-offs at the time of submitting their responses.
The Contributor’s question: What should be the top priority elected officials tackle over the course of the next few years?
Dave Rosenberg, District 35:
Affordability is the top issue, though there’s no single solution. The current situation is the cause of so many ills: homelessness, traffic due to longer commutes, teacher/police shortages as many move to less expensive counties and get jobs closer to home, and more. It’s a difficult situation with people continuing to move to town, driving up demand for housing and, as a result, housing costs, but every small improvement to the crisis is one we should strive to make.
Brett Withers, District 6:
I believe that the top priority is to streamline the city’s housing approval processes. This could be [accomplished] through identifying areas near bus lines, schools [and other locations] where upzoning land to permit multifamily and missing middle housing by right can be considered at one time rather than through parcel-by-parcel rezonings that take six months. Affordable housing projects need to have such zoning in place before financing processes can even start. Metro could then prioritize infrastructure spending to support the new housing in these areas.
It will also be essential to streamline building permit reviews. Some cities are finding success with pre-approved multifamily housing building plans that are ready to be approved on any eligible lot. But others require departmental reviews. Inspections need to be streamlined, and discretionary reviews need to be more predictable.
Colby Sledge, District 17:
Undoubtedly, housing will be the top priority our city continues to face over the next several years (and beyond). The next mayor and Metro Council would do well to focus specifically on “attacking the gap” regarding housing financing and subsidy, especially for Nashvillians making well below the average income. Construction costs remain high, and housing won’t materialize unless the city steps in to direct both financing and affordability terms. Thanks to the work of the Planning Department and specifically the Housing Division, the next mayor and Metro Council will be equipped with a comprehensive public land inventory. Metro should immediately begin work on the most development-ready parcels, whether that involves a partnership with private- and nonprofit-sector development organizations, or by building the housing itself (so-called “social housing”).
Thousands of new apartments are opening in the next year or so, which should help further stabilize market-rate rents. However, most of those units are not suited for families, who are being both priced out and pushed out of our urban core. Metro will need to flex its land use policy muscle to encourage more family housing in our urban core by allowing more housing types in more places, so we all have an opportunity to enjoy life here and put down roots.
Mary Carolyn Roberts, District 20:
In my opinion the top priority of the newly elected officials should be listening to their constituents. We’ve heard time and time again that there’s a disconnect between what the public wants and what the legislators are enforcing both on the state level and on the local level.
We are elected officials that are supposed to represent the district that we serve. Being in tune with your constituents means going to local meetings, hearing what they want and desire, and acting upon it. Going forward I think the best thing that we can do from the local level to the national level is to try to listen to each other and move forward as a united front.
Bob Mendes, at-large:
The top priority for the next Mayor and Council should be to lead the city to a new generation of goals. In the 1990s, Nashville decided to reinvigorate downtown as a way to pay for the things we need to do as a city. Half of this vision has been accomplished – downtown is an A+ international tourist destination. But has the other half been accomplished? Are our schools better than they were in the 1990s? Or traffic? Or affordability? It’s time for a new set of goals that put the people of Nashville first.