Great quote that gets at the heart of perceptions of commercial districts

'Time for a refresh': Even Nashville tourists think downtown's vibe is off. 

Photo: Andrew Nelles, Nashville Tennessean.

The Nashville Tennessean has an article, "'Time for a refresh': Even Nashville tourists think downtown's vibe is off," on its premier entertainment district, Lower Broadway, which is a mix of retail, restaurant, and music establishments ("'A money making machine': Is Nashville's iconic Lower Broadway losing its music soul?," NT), and cultural facilities centered around country music.  From the article:

"We visited a couple years ago, and I wasn’t 21, so we just walked up and down. Now that I’m 21, it’s going to be different for sure," Galicki said. "But it does seem a little bit more run-down, and there are more homeless people." 

The post-COVID tourism boom in Nashville has led to congested streets, incessant noise and unruly party-bus crowds, issues that city leaders are striving to manage. Cell phone thefts, assaults, and pickpocketing were common last year. 

Progress is being made, but not before some major downtown businesses are relocating to calmer areas like the Gulch and Midtown. Music City Center CEO Charles Starks told board members recently that convention attendees are hesitant to venture downtown between meetings. "It used to be that the first questions we got were about sustainability, food service and tech," Starks said. "Now, the focus has shifted to public safety."

There have been issues of various types for awhile, see:

-- "Another example of why local culture plans need to include an element on retail/dealing with for profit elements of the cultural ecosystem: Nashville's Tubb Record Shop," 2022
-- "Leveraging music as cultural heritage for economic development: part two, popular music," 2017

But like with downtowns and entertainment districts and destinations across the country, e.g., the Philadelphia Inquirer reports ("Philly arts groups struggle to bring back audiences after COVID") that many of the theaters and museums and other cultural establishments there have lost at least 30% of their audience compared to pre-covid times, Nashville's Lower Broadway district is going through some hard times as audiences have shrunken.  

To me, it's an illustration that you always have to actively manage such districts, especially because of the possibility of slowdown.  

E.g., in my old haunt of H Street NE in Washington, DC, a number of places are closing according to reports on local social media, and it's likely due to always increasing competition (the Wharf has expanded, there is more going on at Navy Yard and near by, the Union Market district continues to intensify), plus DC's crime issues, and the post-covid drop off in business.  

I also wonder if having lost one of its champions ("Joe Englert, DC nightlife impresario, dies | Lessons about nightlife-based revitalization," 2020) makes a difference too.  He was more than a planner, as he brought money, buildings, concepts, talent, vendor relationships, and the ability to deal with government agencies to the fore, and facilitated the opening of many taverns and nightlife destinations there.

The quote, emphasis added:

David Corman, director of safety services at Nashville Downtown Partnership, suggests that the heightened fear among the public is more about perception than reality, as crime rates have decreased. In the first six months of this year, 64 major, Part 1 offenses downtown were reported to police compared to 70 crimes during the same period last year. 

“We have a saying here that if it doesn’t look clean, then it doesn’t feel clean and, subsequently, safe and that can impact an individual’s perception of crime," Corman said. "When someone is solicited for money or experiencing an unhoused person’s living situation downtown, all of this interacts with an individual’s internal biases and plays into how we experience our own feeling of safety."

Perceptions matter.  And what influences them needs to be managed and addressed.

Years ago, I wrote a piece that I called "The Soft Side of Commercial District Revitalization," which included clean and safe issues.

But it's also about disorder and a more cavalier attitude about it.  Pre-covid there was a lot of willingness to futher "define deviance down" in terms of "petty crimes" like fare evasion and shoplifting, because of the idea that people committed these crimes because they were poor, not because they were inherently criminals.  

But I think it backfired, as did other measures (like letting more alleged criminals out before trial), in that it led to an increase in crime in many ways, making things worse overall.

This has been abetted by the public camping element of homelessness, which diminishes the quality of many public spaces.

Nashville.  The article discusses the area's transformation over the past 20 years, which has been remarkable.  But the impact too from touristification, the challenge of putting resources in other parts of the city and county (which have a merged government), and political interference from the State Legislature, which is Republican while the city is more Democrat.

=====

Cf.  There is a Business Insider article, "Every American city wanted to be cool. Now they're all just boring copies of each other."  While my line is that all places are unique, but few are exceptional, in that they can't be compared, which many people argue, Nashville is a unique place.  

But there is no question that as places are touristified, they can be homogenized.  Definitely this is the case as places become what we might call night life bar districts.