from roadside zombiesTM which is a humorous look at the fascinations of everyday life

Nashville public housing adventures

H. CHRISTINE RICHARDS

I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Nashville this past week. Yes, I sought out Nashville as a vacation destination. Okay,
okay, part of my motivation included visiting a good college friend, but I had always wanted to visit Nashville anyway.
Fortunately, my friend enjoys endeavors like the ones I discuss at roadsidezombies.com. It’s reassuring to know that I’m
not the only one out there who enjoys such random and everyday adventures or, perhaps, it’s just reassuring to know that
there are other people who are city-crazy as well. We combed Nashville’s rolling landscape for malls, barbeque joints and
university campuses, but we also stumbled upon the wonderful world of public housing projects.

Our public housing adventures all started with your standard trip downtown. We saw your ordinary full-scale model of the
Parthenon. (It brought back horrible flashbacks of middle school (i.e., junior high) where I was forced to build a smaller
replica out of sugar cubes. Fortunately, Nashville’s model did not rely on sugar.) We also toured the state capitol building
surrounded by your everyday moat of steep grass hills. (It served as a fort during the Civil War.) We also stopped by your
stereotypical Greyhound bus station that occupied a recently closed car dealership.

Things took a turn for the weirder when we visited Nashville’s third-tallest-and-longest-named building: the William R.
Snodgrass Tennessee Tower. More impressive than the tower’s name was the view from its main plaza. As we gazed over
the surrounding valley, I saw what could best be described as an industrial Candy Land. In a sea of subdued, heavy
commercial and industrial buildings, someone had plopped down what might as well have been a children’s board game.
Primary-colored (remember, those are red, blue and yellow) homes were scattered across a perfectly square patch of green
pasture. It begged the question: Why the candy-themed housing development in the middle of a dingy commercial and
industrial area?

We agreed a drive-through was a must. Seth (my husband) kept us abreast of the latest football scores as we made our way
off the downtown hill into the housing development. The development featured what seemed to be brand-new single- and
multi-family homes, all spaced far apart for such an urban location. There were no fences, minimal landscaping, and
absolutely no signs indicating the name of the subdivision. What was it? What was here before? It obviously wasn’t virgin
land. We had to find out.

The results of intense googling

By now, I probably don’t have to tell you it was a public housing project, since that’s the title of the article, and I haven’t
mentioned a public housing project yet. Well done, Sherlock, you’re correct. What threw me for a loop was that it didn’t
look like your standard public housing, which usually comes in the style of super-tall towers or barracks-style housing.
This looked pretty much like a private housing development. Only the candy-coloring, lack of fences and no subdivision
name made me suspicious.

I found out through an intense five-minute internet search that the John Henry Hale Homes opened May 23, 2009. The
plan worked in 188 public housing duplexes and townhomes, along with 40 market-rate rental duplexes and 40 market-
rate single-family homes. Nashville’s public housing authority utilized some of the fed’s HOPE VI grant, which is designed
to help distressed public housing projects with redevelopment. Yes, you read me right, “re.”

That leads me to what was on the Candy Land site before the John Henry Hale Homes. It was the John Henry Hale
Homes! The original Hale development had 498 barracks-style units built in 1951. So, in 1951, Nashville thought it was a
great idea to build higher-density public housing, and now it had changed its mind. Things certainly evolve, which always

1 © 2010 by H. Christine Richards. All rights reserved

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makes me wonder what will happen to this development that opened in 2009, fifty years from now?
Let’s do a little roadside zombie time travel to better understand this question. (Cue Wayne and Garth hand-waving)
Many, many years ago, an architect named Le Corbusier (a guy with a memorable name and a more memorable penchant
for grass, grass, grass) developed the concept for what he considered to be the dream city, the Radiant City. To avoid pages
of community development theory, just know that he wanted to put skyscrapers in a park-like setting. More grass, more
space seemed to make sense at the time, and people latched on to the concept. You can see examples of this public housing
form all over the world.

However, people found out that this approach didn’t work for many places for a variety of reasons. The most infamous of
example of this high-density public housing is Pruitt-Igoe, a seventeen-building complex designed by the guy who
designed the World Trade Center. (Minoru Yamasaki) Pruitt-Igoe lasted a mere 16 years until it was torn down in 1971,
after being plagued with crime, segregation and extreme poverty. A lot people blamed the design because they said it
helped fuel unsavory activities. (I actually went to the overgrown, still unoccupied Pruitt-Igoe site during my last trip to St.
Louis. I have one word for the experience: haunting. The friend I was visiting had another word: boring. Apparently she
did not share my same love for suburban and urban ruins, but I digress.)

So people thought they had a solution to public housing woes with the Radiant City idea, but it didn’t work out as planned.
A newer design is bringing new hope to public housing, but is the design the only thing that matters? Will bright-colors,
lower-density neighborhoods protect the stability of these neighborhoods? I’m not entirely convinced. Of promise to me is
the fact that non-design items not included in earlier public housing, such as a focus on mixed-income neighborhoods, are
being addressed in the newer designs. Still, given the cycles and trends in building and community design, I have to
wonder will a John Henry Hale Homes 3.0 be in the works 50 years from now?

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2 © 2010 by H. Christine Richards. All rights reserved