CITY LIMITS clearer by the massive Marathon Motor Works campus on Clinton Street to the east. The company began as Southern Engine and Boiler Works in Jackson, Tenn., and began manufacturing automobiles in 1907. In 1910, capitalizing on the resurgence of interest in ancient Greek culture after the 1904 Olympics, it changed its name to Marathon Motor Works and moved to this facility in Nashville (coincidentally, the Athens of the South, of course). It was a relatively shortlived undertaking. In 1914, they stopped making cars. Only nine are thought to exist, and five of them are inside the building. Occasionally, someone will offer as trivia that the Brass Era cars visible on the reverse of the $10 bill are Marathons, the artist subtly honoring Andrew Jackson, who was president when the pictured Treasury Building was constructed. That is, sadly, un-
METROPOLITIK
THE COST OF AN AMAZON HOUSING LOAN Tech giant becomes MDHA financier, establishing a new public-private relationship with the city BY ELI MOTYCKA
T
he Metro Development and Housing Agency’s latest financing plan relies on a $7.1 million loan from Amazon. The government agency, which oversees Nashville’s government-subsidized housing units, has struggled to move forward on Envision Cayce, its flagship redevelopment program, since the Briley administration. In January 2021, the company announced it would earmark $2 billion for housing-related projects in Seattle, the District of Columbia and Nashville, the three cities with Amazon corporate campuses. Desperate for financing and capital, MDHA turned to the newly created Amazon Housing Equity Fund one month later. Around that time, MDHA had hit an impasse in a years-long effort to overhaul its public housing footprint. Jim Harbison had just stepped down after leading the agency through four mayors, from 2013 to 2020. His work focused mostly on converting MDHA housing from federally owned to city-owned properties to prepare for Envision. The plan aimed to deconcentrate poverty and bring 7,500 new units online, most of them workforce and market-rate, flipping Nashville’s public housing into mixed-income communities. Workforce housing refers to households making between 60 percent and 120 percent of area median income, recently estimated around $62,515 in Nashville. Former Mayor David Briley promised to fund Envision with Under One Roof, a $35 million annual commitment that MDHA could leverage into a few billion over 10 years. Public-facing info was thin on numbers and dropped like a campaign press release. The eye-popping bottom line rolled together MDHA’s $35 million over 10 years, $15 million in Barnes Fund dollars, and $250 million in money that hadn’t been secured yet (called a “challenge to the private sector”). John Cooper ran against the plan in the summer of 2019, spinning it as an MDHA bailout. After winning the mayoral election, Cooper left Un-
8
true. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing instructed the artist that the cars not be of any particular manufacturer, so as the government could not be seen to be endorsing one company over another. Instead, the cars are an amalgam of various models available when the bill was designed … in 1928, 14 years after Marathon’s demise. Marathon is, however, a stunning example of adaptive reuse. The sturdy brick structure has been steadily renovated since 1988 and yet maintains the early-20th-century look throughout. It includes an eponymous music venue (Marathon Music Works), the local outpost of Antique Archaeology, two distilleries and a host of other businesses. In an era when many developers have found it easier to simply push down an old structure or renovate to the point where the original is unrec-
ognizable, Marathon stands out. The property is dotted with little automotive Easter eggs: old Dunlop tires signifying the former tire warehouse that was here between the Marathon days and the redevelopment; various old-school gas station knickknacks sourced from Antique Archaeology and the like. One gravel parking lot surrounds a chimney with no explanation. The campus ends at 12th Avenue, which hugs the interstate loop. At 12th and Jo Johnston, behind intimidating loops of barbed wire and a high fence, is an absolutely stunning collection of Cadillacs. But unless you are an enthusiastic fan of, say, Harold & Maude, these Caddies are not for you. This the home of Ambulance & Coach Sales and the surfeit of Cadillacs are specially designed to carry passengers to their final destination. It’s an absolute
der One Roof to rot on the vine. The agency functions independently of Metro’s operating budget but has a mayor-controlled board. Cooper appointed former Mayor Bill Purcell to chair the board, Harbison left, and after an interim stint from Saul Solomon, Purcell brought in Troy White to head the agency last summer. Groundbreaking progress on Envision Nashville has been mostly confined to Envision Cayce, where six mixed-income developments have broken ground in five years. Envision Edgehill and Envision Napier and Sudekum were launched six years ago and remain in the planning phase. MDHA funds Envision project by project. For Cherry Oak Apartments, MDHA combined low-income tax credits with its own capital, market-rate borrowing from the Bank of Tennessee, and the below-market loan from Amazon. Cooper’s administration sent Cayce $15 million in American Rescue Plan money last year, a onetime infusion from the federal government to update neighborhood infrastructure. Rather than directly fund MDHA, Cooper’s housing strategy has focused on market incentives. Last week, he announced incentives for private developers aimed at producing more units for Nashvillians making between $31,000 and $43,000 a year. Cooper’s Affordable Housing Task Force reported last summer that Nashville is short 14,000 units for households making less than $20,000 a year. An effective affordable housing response depends on closing that gap, and MDHA is one of the only developers building those units. Even so, the entire Envision plan would bring only a few hundred such units online. Cherry Oak will add eight. Matt Wiltshire, MDHA chief strategy and intergovernmental affairs officer, met with Amazon in February 2021 to coordinate Nashville’s slice of Amazon’s $2 billion commitment. (Wiltshire lobbied to bring Amazon to Nashville while working in Mayor Megan Barry’s office of economic development.) After pitching Amazon, MDHA kicked the deal to the mayor’s office for approval a week later, where it stayed until Amazon opened an official application process six months after that. Amazon approved the Cherry Oak deal after another nine months. According to Dr. Troy White, current MDHA executive director, Amazon’s lending will help MDHA accomplish its goals. “MDHA is committed to preserving and expanding affordable housing in Nashville, and partnerships with nonprofit and for-profit entities, like Amazon, are crucial to moving the needle and bringing more affordable opportunities to Nashvillians in need,” White said in a statement to the Scene. Amazon’s loan is attractive: $7.1 million at 2.5 percent interest and interest-only payments, terms favorable to the borrower. But it’s a stretch to call its
lending selfless. Amazon is making money on the loan, though perhaps not as much as it could make elsewhere. It will own MDHA debt and can advertise its community relations. Affordability crises seem to follow the tech sector, and a housing-focused partnership with Nashville makes a lot of sense. Amazon’s $2 billion announcement came as it deployed a new corporate presence in Arlington, Va., and a 5,000-person logistics command center at Nashville Yards. Queens, N.Y., the other chosen land for Amazon’s HQ2, embarrassed city and state economic development offices by uninviting the tech giant four months after Amazon announced its intentions to set up shop in the rapidly gentrifying borough. While $7.1 million is a sizable chunk of financing for MDHA, the seven-digits figure is pocket change for Amazon, which raked in $33.6 billion last year in profit and operated with $445 billion in expenses — about 10 times the budget of the state of Tennessee. Amazon is one of five corporations valued at more than a trillion dollars. It avoided $5.2 billion in federal income taxes in 2021 and spent millions to suppress unionization efforts at distribution centers, where its workers face production quotas. Critics have focused on the real costs cities pay for Amazon, beyond the billions in outright incentives and tax breaks. Seattle, Amazon’s home base, has one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. The 18th-most-populous metro area in America, Seattle has one of the largest populations of unhoused people in the country for a city its size. Each tech hub has some version of two cities — one rich and one poor — living side by side. Amazon’s six-figure workforce is a big log on a blazing fire. A quick influx of tech salaries distorts local housing markets, sending prices into the stratosphere. In a companywide memo on April 28, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky allowed employees to work fully remote and explicitly named Nashville as an alternative to San Francisco. The city functions like shorthand among the tech industry for “higher quality of life at a lower cost, but with familiar amenities and accessible cultural experiences,” a bargain compared to tier-one tech hubs like the Bay Area and New York. Amazon’s shift to benevolent commercial lender is a savvy public relations move against this backdrop. The company is no stranger to pivots — it started out as an online bookseller and now owns a third of the internet — and is already involved in politics at the local and state levels. A public commitment to affordable housing might help its reputation withstand blowback. MDHA’s business model relies on pieces, and this was a good one, far preferable to the alternatives. The loan is the latest link in Nashville’s evolving public-private relationship with one of the world’s corporate giants. EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
jigsaw puzzle of hearses, and it’s across the street from Farm in the City, a massive community garden opened by the Metro Development and Housing Agency in 2010, sitting on land that was the state quarry from whence the limestone used to build the Capitol came. Just a little life-and-death dichotomy in an otherwise vacant stretch of Jo Johnston. Landscaping is underway back inside Hale Homes, notable as the buzz and whir of the trimmers is really the only sound breaking through despite the proximity of the interstate. Chalk on the sidewalk directs visitors to Trae Trae’s birthday party, while Nashville heads to work on Charlotte. But inside the confines of the Hale Homes, it’s almost weekend-quiet, an easy place to drift away. EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
NO JAIL TIME FOR CONVICTED NURSE RADONDA VAUGHT
Nurses protested what they see as criminalized mistakes BY HANNAH HERNER
F
ormer Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse RaDonda Vaught will not serve jail time after making a medication error that resulted in the death of a patient. She was sentenced to three years probation last week for impaired adult abuse and criminally negligent homicide, both felonies that could have resulted in a three-year jail sentence. Vaught was a “nurse’s nurse,” said Elizabeth Kessinger, a Vanderbilt nurse who helped train Vaught and was called as a witness in the sentencing hearing. Vaught was the type of nurse someone in the profession would choose to take care of them. Hundreds of nurses gathered at Public Square Park last week in support of Vaught. The sentencing fell one day after the end of National Nurses Week. Many of the nurses in attendance came from outside of Nashville, some on their way back home from the national nurse’s march in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. Vaught, using an electronic medicine cabinet, overrode a function to mistakenly give patient Charlene Murphey a powerful sedative rather than an anti-anxiety medication, resulting in her death in December 2017. The case garnered national attention, and nurses with large social media followings — including personalities like Nurse Erica, Nurse Jessica, Taccara D. and Tina from the Good Nurse Bad Nurse podcast — spoke at Public Square Park ahead of the proceedings. Gov. Bill Lee confirmed that he would not grant clemency for Vaught, though an online petition calling for clemency garnered more than 200,000 signatures. In the sentencing hearing, the prosecution brought up a perjury charge, in which she is accused of lying on a form for buying a gun, and played an emotionally charged media interview, saying that her attitude should be taken into account. The defense entered 40 character >> P. 11
NASHVILLE SCENE | MAY 19 – MAY 25, 2022 | nashvillescene.com
citylimits_5-19-22.indd 8
5/16/22 4:23 PM