LSNA Grant recipient: Tennessee Alliance for Progress

Grant recipient holds community meetings on affordable housing

This spring, the neighborhood board voted to give $650 grants to three organizations. We will profile each of the grant recipients in coming issues of The Fountain.  The first organization featured is the Tennessee Alliance for Progress.  This article was submitted by Nell Levine.

To state the obvious, East Nashville is undergoing rapid change.

To begin to address this, Tennessee Alliance for Progress, with a grant from LSNA, conducted two community meetings, in Lockeland Springs and District 5, on Affordable Housing, Diversity and the Future

Twenty people attended the Lockeland Springs meeting, held on May 30. Attendees were asked to identify the neighborhood’s challenges (parking, decreasing diversity, traffic, rising housing costs, and breakdown of a sense of community) and assets (culture, walkability, potential, great housing stock, amenities.) Attendees agreed that we want to keep East Nashville welcoming and truly diverse. We brainstormed on actions we can take to do this. The list included be active, study and learn from our history, stay involved with planning and zoning decisions, cultivate the political will to commit resources for affordable housing and become a community again. It was agreed that the latter will take work.

Fifty people attended the June 6 meeting in District 5 (see attached photo.) Dane Forlines of McFerrin Park presented a letter to the Planning Commission requesting that they help residents create a new District 5 neighborhood plan since the last plan is now 10 years old and outdated. The letter is currently being circulated at neighborhood association meetings and will be turned into Planning at the end of the month.

Both meetings aired important issues. The takeaway? The future of our neighborhoods will be determined by how active residents are in making their voices heard.