White people now make up the majority of Nashville’s core, while Black people have seen places they used to have a strong hold on slip from their grasp.
The first draft of the city’s new council and school board district maps reveal a stark image of displacement.
Every decade, Metro’s planning department uses census data to redesign the city’s districts to reflect the movement of residents.
This year, they had to deal with major shifts in the demographics of North and South Nashville. If you look to Southeast Nashville, Latino residents are gaining influence.
Southeast Councilmember Tanaka Vercher represents neighborhoods like Oakwood and Deborah Heights, which has more established neighborhoods with HOAs. She questions if the city is doing enough to keep up with growth and needs in that part of town.
“It’s everything across the board,” she says. “We can’t build schools fast enough out here. We can’t repair the roads fast enough out here. We don’t have the police response.”
She says she’s concerned that the city is resegregating and that it could affect policies in place over the next decades.
The planning department wants to hear what residents think of their proposal. Mappers from the city will be at the first meeting Monday afternoon at the Howard Office building.
Middle Tennessee State University Professor Sekou Franklin says it’s worth peeling back some layers and analyzing who the people are making up districts.
“District 21 and District 2 (Northeast Nashville) are the only districts with a supermajority Black population. Yet, District 21 has experienced significant and visually noticeable patterns of gentrification,” he explains to WPLN News via email. “So, what is going on here? There is gentrification, but also the district has the HBCUs. Basically, the Black student population is inflating the overall Black population. Thus, the Black student population may be inflating Black voter strength if one assumes that students are a transient population, or they are voting in their home districts.”
He also points out that in District 1 and 20, the Tennessee Women’s Prison, Riverbend and Lois Deberry Special Needs Facility are a part of the community.
If Black people are overrepresented in prison, then they could be inflating the numbers in the district, especially of the people who can vote.
That is considered prison gerrymandering. Tennessee law allows county governments to opt out of this if approved by ordinance.
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