NEWS

A Few Questions With Councilmember Brett Withers, District 6

BY JUDITH TACKETT

Councilmember Brett Withers represents District 6 in East Nashville. Withers is in his second term, but has been getting to know the people he represents by participating in neighborhood organizations such as Eastwood Neighbors, The Neighborhoods Resource Center, Friends of Riverside Drive, and ReDiscover East! for more than 15 years.

The Contributor talked with Withers as part of a series called A Few Questions With where we interview council members about their district’s most pressing issues.

How has being involved in neighborhood groups affected your decision making?

Working as a neighborhood leader you actually have to talk to your neighbors and listen. Sometimes they have different viewpoints, and you have to learn to manage the discussion so that when people who care about their neighborhood have different ideas about it still feel respected even when their [solution] is not chosen. I think that’s really good training for Metro Council because you always have disagreements in different districts.

What are some of the main issues you hear about from your constituents? Other than garbage? (laughs) East Nashville, District 6, has become a community that is much more affluent than it had been even a few years ago. It has a lot of first-world problems such as concerns that someone’s parking on their street, and they don’t like that, or that someone’s building a house next door for a half million dollars and there is noise involved, or they become really focused on someone’s cutting down a tree.

The East Nashville of 10 years ago was honestly more focused on things like homelessness in our community. East Nashville neighborhoods used to be much more focused on big challenges and wanted to be involved in big solutions. It’s become a very affluent community where you don’t see the level of participation that you used to anymore. And that’s unfortunate.

District 6 includes a large portion of the much-discussed East Bank. What do you hear from your neighbors about that development?

The East Nashville community has been hoping for redevelopment of the East Bank for many, many decades and worked with MDHA (Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency) to create the East Bank Redevelopment District in 1995. There was a lot of hope in the mid-90s of bringing positive development to the East Bank, but the only new building that we ever had was a LaQuinta hotel.

The thing that severed the East Bank from East Nashville was the construction of the interstate in the 1960s. Most exits focused on how people can go Downtown. That demolished houses and businesses and created this barrier between the East Bank and East Nashville.

We have a lot of folks who are concerned that the East Bank development is going to lead to displacement. But there are no permanent residential addresses in the entire East Bank, so any housing that we build on the East Bank will be a net increase in housing and no one will have to move. So that is a really good location to add housing in our city.

I have heard voices in this conversation that are concerned about equity. Have you heard similar concerns?

A lot of people do talk about affordable housing. I know that Stand Up Nashville takes the view that we need 30,000-50,000 affordable housing units and all of them should be on the East Bank, and I don’t know we need to create quite that much of a concentration of low-income stock in one location. Another factor is that most of this land is privately owned, and we can’t compel people to provide affordable housing.

In discussion with the Titans – Nissan Stadium was built in the late 1990s and it barely met the needs of the NFL at the time it was constructed, and Metro government has a lease with them where we are required to provide a first-class stadium, which it’s not. They’ve been really good partners with us and not calling us in to require paying some of the capital improvements that we owe on the facility. The Titans are looking at either renovation or constructing a new stadium. The cost for the renovation came in much higher than we had anticipated. It’s looking like it would be roughly the same amount of money to build a new stadium versus to renovate the old one.

The Titans themselves are interested in being good partners with the city as a whole to support affordable housing more broadly. They’re interested in working with some of our nonprofit partners, maybe even the city directly to support affordable housing throughout the county. That’s something I hope people will keep an open mind to.

In District 6, we have Casey Homes, which will be 1,000 affordable housing units. We have other MDHA properties nearby. Samaritan Recovery Community at 4th and Shelby is building a new facility and they’re adding 195 affordable housing units in phase 1. They’re doubling their bed space for their recovery community services and the idea is that folks who come out of their recovery program will have first dibs on these affordable apartments, so they continue to receive support if they need it. Then at Cleveland and Dickerson, there are about 225 affordable housing units being constructed, which is also adjacent to the East Bank.

So, we do have affordable housing underway in several nodes adjacent to the East Bank currently. I think that’s a better model of having nodes that are integrated into a larger community than have a big concentration of low-income all in one area.

You mention Cayce Homes, which is the first Envision project by MDHA. Have you had a chance to meet with the new MDHA executive director Dr. Troy White yet?

Yes, I have. One of the things that stands out about Dr. White compared to some of the other applicants is that he has really extensive experience with some of the elaborate financing tools that are used for affordable housing. I think that’s going to be really beneficial to figure out how to get grant funding to help us pay for affordable housing.

I’ve had great conversations with him. The Envision Casey plan has some good momentum going on the housing side. Our next piece is to try to get access to employment. Particularly for younger people. They need to have access to jobs that they can get to especially when they don’t own a car.

You serve on the Human Services Committee, which is looking at how it can help address homelessness. What are your thoughts?

I was the past vice chair and then chair of what used to be the Personnel Committee. So I have a strong background on the HR side of Metro government. The one thing that I want to urge caution to my colleagues about is that ... I think some of the recent discussions on our committee, from people who want to do the right thing, have not been conducted with a tone that is needed when you’re working with Metro employees who are career public servants and dedicated people as well as the nonprofit community.

You can make a point, but you need to do that in a way that keeps everyone at the table. And I worry about the tone of the discussion that we had recently just fraying those relationships and eroding the credibility of the Council to be a body that convenes our community to provide solutions.

What would you like for this committee to tackle when looking at solutions?

There are a couple of things, and they really are already underway. One is the program to try to attract landlords. I think that’s exciting and really important because Section 8 vouchers just aren’t as attractive in this market as they used to be. Recruiting landlords is really important work because we as a city government are never going to be able to build all the housing units we need.

The other thing that I’m interested in is the permanent supportive housing blocks, approximately 100 units. I know we’ve got one planned in the Downtown area that’s a little bit delayed. For some of our neighbors who need more help than just a room, I’m hopeful that that will be a good model that we can replicate. I’m more interested in something like that on the East Bank than additional affordable housing. I hope we can get some of the permanent supportive housing underway and ramp that up in a few more select locations.