Brett Cooper — Private Equity Is Erasing The Cities We Love

- So people often ask me if I like living in Nashville, you know, the music and the culture and the people. And to be honest, you guys know we live on a farm, we live outside of Nashville proper. That is a very intentional choice by us. But these days I kind of struggle to answer the question because I don't really know what Nashville's identity is anymore. And truth be told, I don't even know if Nashville knows what its identity is, which seems to be a growing trend for these rapidly growing cities in the Sunbelt region like Denver or Dallas, Austin, Houston, all of those types of cities.

Or maybe it's just a growing trend for Americans in general. Do we actually have a culture? Do we have unified values or are we just getting steamrolled by mass migration and corporate interests? Because I sit here in Nashville in my own experience, I travel around to different cities where I'm doing shows or going on podcasts or Alex and I are travelling. But I just see all of these cities that I feel should be distinct, become homogenous caricatures of themselves where everything from the architecture to the businesses themselves have become.

What one author from New York Magazine wrote was quote, an unbearable sameness. I mean for example, main Street USA is essentially gone unless you are visiting Disney World and like who's to blame for this? Is it the like weirdo progressive mayors who oversee the demise of small business even though they're like waving pride flags and trans flags? Is it the private equity firms? Maybe it's even our social media algorithms or maybe it's just the lack of unity in America to begin with.

Now, before we dive into this thing that has been taking over my mind, I wanna thank you guys so much for being here. Thank you for watching the videos and liking and subscribing. And seriously let me know in the comments below if what we are about to talk about is an experience that you are having your own hometown. Or if I am just crazy sitting here in Nashville, I'm very interested because it's something that's like coming up a lot in conversations with me.

Alright, so as you all might already know, like this is not new information, but I'm a very emotional person. But now that I am, you know, postpartum and I'm a mom and I just like cry at everything and the thing that has had me crying so much lately is the insane amount of local Nashville businesses that are shutting down and all of the heartfelt posts that the owners make when they announce their closure, I mean it's like a gut punch to the heart.

I'm just scrolling at 2:00 AM feeding the baby. And it's like another Nashville institution started in 1991, started in 2002, shuttering their doors. They can't make it here anymore. The taxes are too high, they're being pushed out. The owner of their building just sold it for $17 million, whatever it is. And it is just devastating because piece by piece I'm watching what was once such a distinct and lively and rich unique city become a blob.

And a lot of this does have to do with policy because in Davidson County, which is the county that Nashville is in, it's like Nashville proper, the commercial property tax has had a historic 45% median tax increase. That's just the media. Some properties have seen a 60 70%, like one of the biggest restaurants like event centres down on Broadway, which is like our main big drag in Nashville. Their property taxes increased from I think it was $120,000 a year to $600,000 a year effectively because now they have to pay that.

It made their business not profitable. And that is a wildly popular restaurant on the most populated street in all of Nashville where all of the tourists are and they still can't keep up. So think about all of the small mom and pop restaurants, the meat and threes, all of those. I mean this has decimated longstanding business after business. And so obviously what is coming in to replace all of this now empty real estate, well things like aloe yoga and sweet green private equity owned specialty matcha shops, LA based acai stores, all of the usual suspects.

But now obviously Nashville is growing and I am not a Nashville native. I'm basically a Tennessee native, but I did migrate here as well. So I'm not gonna sit here and be like all these Californians. Like yes, I did move from Los Angeles, which I moved to from Tennessee, but I did move from Los Angeles. But anyway, like growing is natural, growing will happen, there will be growing pains in any city. But as Nashville has grown and expanded, it seems like it has very obviously lost touch with what made Nashville.

Nashville, like the heart and soul of Music City is now just a caricature of itself that is oriented towards, you know, tourists and bachelorette parties. But the thing that's so sad is that people that are coming in to experience Nashville aren't even getting a true Nashville experience. They're getting the experience that they could get in basically any other Sunbelt city. Like for example, take an area of Nashville, this is called 12 South.

Now I'm really getting into the nitty gritty here, but this is something that I need to rant about and you are going to sit here to listen. So just imagine that you are a Nashville resident and there is a street called 12 South. It's a small street in Nashville and it used to be a pretty rough part of town, but in the last two, three decades it became a very like thriving part of town. It had local watering holes and boutiques like one little coffee shop, a quaint church.

There was like a local farmer's market in the park nearby. People would play pickleball. There was a really, really cute playground, like all of the nice things. And when I first moved here, literally like this all changed in four years. So when I moved here four years ago, like it was the place where I would go walk the dogs after work when I knew nobody in this city. It was a safe place to go. It was quiet, it was sweet.

When Alex and I started dating, it was where we would go to grab a nice dinner at like one of the longest standing restaurants in Nashville or Urban Grab, by the way, you should go if you're ever in town. We would get soft serve at a place called Fries Cream. We would just like walk around and appreciate how sweet this city was. Now if you are in 12 South at any time, that is not 11:00 AM on a Wednesday. It is literally like you are playing real life temple run.

You're jumping over stuff, you're dodging expensive, $200 RI leggings, you're dodging the expensive rag and bow jeans and the Reformation dresses and Lululemon, which is now getting looted by thugs. The parking is insane. They're putting in underground parking garages and like God forbid you try to go to 12 South on a Sunday morning. That actually is where Alex and I used to go to church and we finally just called it 'cause we just could not handle it anymore because you show up and you're just surrounded by tourists with huge things of luggage that are standing in line trying to get their hands on a buttermilk ranch biscuit before they catch their flight out of town.

And I know it's like Brett, you sound like a curmudgeony local, but this really isn't about a dislike of tourism or growth of a city. It's the type of growth that's taken over that's just so gross and inauthentic and completely corporate fueled. And the businesses and developments that have taken over. Some of Nashville's most popular areas are these cookie cutter private equity plans that have been plucked from cities like Austin and Denver and they're just being brought here.

And it's even bigger than that. I feel like Nashville used to have more local amazing restaurants and now we're just getting, you know, secondhand restaurants from Los Angeles and Chicago and New York. Like every time I get on my like Nashville Guru Instagram page and it's like new restaurant alert and it's like hailed from Chicago is the second location. I'm like, I don't want another restaurant from Chicago. I'm sure it's great, I'm sure it's fine, but can't we do something ourselves?

Can't we start and and then it gets so frustrating because it's like, well we used to be able to, but now locals can't afford to do that. It's too expensive to start something from scratch. So everything that's opening is coming from outside the city. And the point that I'm really trying to get at here is that it's not just Nashville, it's happening everywhere. Like the same private equity firm that developed South Congress Avenue in Austin, bringing like all the high end shopping and the $12 smoothies, they bought up all the real estate in 12 South and they dropped in the identical stores.

I mean the architecture looks exactly the same. The stores are placed on the same block. It's like you got Reformation, sun Life organics, Lululemon, all within 20 feet just like it is in Austin. So now whether you are in Nashville or Austin or Denver or Dallas or Houston, when you pop into one of the cities like trendy neighbourhoods, you're looking for a quaint place to walk around looking for the local flavour, you will literally find a Pastino tapas restaurant, a la la Land coffee with their yellow heart-shaped straws where girls stand in line for hours trying to take an Instagram photo, a Sun Life organic shop where you can get a $25 Aai bowl and of course a Lululemon.

Now this has become such a constant, like a literal meme on social media that it became a trend to use the location of a Lululemon to find the most recently developed nice parts of a city just watch. - I travel quite a lot for work and every time I visit a new city, I have a full foolproof way of finding where the nice neighbourhood is. It's called the Lululemon Strategy. Every time I go to a new city, I look up Lululemons in the area on Google Maps and use a process of elimination to find the neighbourhood with great walkability and $10 matcha.

I'm using Montreal as an example because I'm going there at the end of the month and as you can see here, this Lululemon is in a mall, so I'm gonna eliminate that for my search results. What we're looking for are those storefront Lululemons, and that's where you're gonna find the bars, restaurants, and a bakery dedicated to fucking brookies. Now if none of the Lululemons meet the criteria, then I have a backup and it's called the Whole Foods Method.

So I'm going to New Orleans the week after Montreal and boom, we know that Magazine Street is gonna be a nice place to walk around and hang out. - I mean, it's so perfect and it's so true. But the thing is like the point that I'm trying to get at is I'm laying all of this out, is that that is not culture, that is not unique, that is homogeny and it has taken over our entire country. And it does feel so ironic to talk about a homogenous American culture because we've actually talked a lot about losing that thanks to mass immigration and feeling like our culture is being torn apart.

We don't even know what it means or looks like to be an American anymore. But this homogeny is not based on a country's shared social fabric, it's just pre-planned corporate sameness. Again, that is not culture, that is corporatism and we are terrible as Americans. We are terrible at preserving our culture and protecting our small cities and uplifting small businesses. And so now the alternative has taken over at rapid speed.

Now in addition to me being inspired by my late night scrolls and tearing up over my favourite national steakhouse closing RIP Pelican Pig, if you know, you know so good, I literally cried over your goodbye post. But I was really inspired to do this episode because of a 2018 article from New York magazine called The Unbearable Sameness of Cities. And after one particularly Sad doom scroll, seeing all of these restaurants close, I ended up doing some Googling, finding some solace on Google and TikTok and I found this article.

Well, it was sad to see that yes, this is a trend and it's been written about for almost a decade now. It did reassure me that I was not crazy. So in this, the author wrote, I was in a non-chain coffee shop in Columbia, South Carolina. I was on a mission to the cities and towns closest to the geographic centre of each state. And this was only stop six of 50, but I remembered seeing the same lights in coffee shops in Bend and Oregon and in innumerable others I'd frequented while living in New York in the Chicago area.

This one small observation to open up the floodgates, I noticed the same kind of person was behind the counter, young tattooed and bep speckled the same kind of patrons, young and tattooed and bep speckled clicking away on MacBooks. Full disclosure, your correspondent is young and tattooed and bep speckled clicking away on a MacBook. The wifi passwords were all some cutesy variation on coffee culture, Java, exclamation point, the great bambino, that sort of thing.

I couldn't stop noticing I'd go on to see the same in Colorado Springs in Fresno, in Indianapolis and Oklahoma City in Nashville. Ah, that's how I feel. And it wasn't just the coffee shops, the bars, the restaurants, even the architecture of all the new housing going up in these cities looked and felt eerily similar. Now in this article, the author goes on, he has a couple of theories. Number one, that millennials broke out of their small towns.

You know, they moved to New York and Chicago and LA and then they came back home years later to settle down in, you know, the Sunbelt states, the Tennessee's, the, you know, Texas cities. And they brought the same trends back with them. He also theorises that it is social media, which he writes about here. Perhaps it is inevitable, the sameness when you are taking a broad view of the country in which nearly 326 million people are strewn across 3.8 million square miles, a country which is connected by the light speed of the internet and hundreds of millions of people looking at Instagram photos of bistros in Nashville and Los Angeles and in Brooklyn.

Going quote, I want that now to further this whole conversation in 2016, an author by the name of Kyle Chaka, he wrote about this social media induced homogeny theory, calling it the airspace. And a few years after he wrote this article, he even transformed it into an entire book. But in his original 2016 article, he said this, we could call this strange geography created by technology airspace. It's the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co relive workspaces that all share the same hallmarks everywhere you a perfusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseur mindset, minimalist furniture, craft beer and avocado toast, reclaimed wood, industrial lighting, cortado fast internet.

Yet airspace now is less theory than reality. The interchangeability, the ceaseless movement, and a symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports qualities that led a French anthropologist to define them in 1992 as non places has leaked into the rest of life. Isn't that so depressing that what was once a non place, something that was so stark that you know caused anthropologists to label it as such is now just our day-to-day life.

Anyway, the author goes on and says, as an affluent and self-selecting group of people move through spaces linked by technology, particular sensibility spread, and these small pockets of geography grow to resemble one another. The coffee roaster four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby's estate in Brooklyn. Looks like the Coffee collective in Copenhagen, looks like the bear pod espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry quarta with perfect latte art of any of them that Instagram it on a Marvel countertop and further spread the aesthetic to all of your followers.

Now, in both of these articles, they were focusing on specifically how business and architecture felt the same, you know, similar lighting, similar products, that sort of thing. But now what's changed in my opinion in the last 10 years or so is that thanks to these huge developments, thanks to private equity, thanks to squeezing out local institutions in cities like Austin and Nashville. Everything is the same. But you know what?

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All right, now back to how everything is literally the same, not just feeling the same in many cases, it's literally the same private equity firm, one firm called Turnbridge Equities who was literally replicating the exact same walkable luxury shopping area in every single city. They are the ones who developed South Congress, they're the ones who developed in Houston, they're the ones who are developing this Ashwood development on 12 South.

And I guess my first thought is like why is our Nashville government prioritising and protecting this? Like if the goal is growth and encouraging this tourist economy that has helped our city boom, that makes people excited about Nashville, then why would we want to have the exact same development? Literally a carbon copy that has been copied and pasted in 10 other cities, dropped in your quaint local fair neighbourhoods that used to attract people, both locals and tourists because they felt something they, they felt like Nashville, they felt like Denver, they felt like Austin.

Why would you just wanna throw that out? And also, I have to ask, why does it seem like so few people care as we lose all of this Now I think what this says is that we have been so conditioned to find comfort in this sameness and corporations built a machine to profit off of that comfort. And now these corporations have used what we engaged with on social media and what is trending and what is cool to amplify that profit even more.

So we are all just wandering through the same real life algorithm, interacting with the same businesses, the same trends on a daily basis. And oh my God, it is just nauseating. Like take the coffee shop la la land for example, if you live in Nashville, you live in a city with la la land, you know the hold that those yellow drinks have over people. Like what started out as a single store in Dallas, Texas, it rapidly grew to I think 20 locations in six years.

It had a massive influx in cash. I think it was like $60 million poured into it through a private equity firm. It blew up on TikTok and now it is in all of these cities in these select developments. And you might be asking like Brett, are they innovating coffee in any way? Is it like so spectacular? Is it grit? No, it's a rounded cup. The straw is yellow. It's it they, it has like a heart on it and it's some of the locations the barista say love you when they hand you the coffee.

It's like the Trader Joe's, I guess, of coffee shops. And because of that, instead of supporting small family run local coffee shops, women will literally stand in hours for days or months on end after a la la land opens in their area to get an Instagram picture with the iconic yellow heart. Like it is just so crazy. And what is so ironic to me, I don't really wanna like bring politics into it, but it is always the most obnoxious eat the rich liberal women who eat up this stuff like they are playing right into the hands of these large corporations that they claim to hate.

It's also the same types of people who elected Nashville's weirdo mayor, Freddie O'Connell, who literally said in an interview recently that it's not his problem if businesses can't make it here, buddy. I kind of think it is your problem. You're the mayor, you should be trying to support these local businesses and support our local economy rather than letting your city be taken over by private equity firms out of New York City who want to make Nashville look like Denver and Austin and every other Sunbelt city in America.

Like Freddy, what are you actually focusing on trying to get a train in Nashville? It's always about the trains with these people. Like maybe focus on the small businesses first. And again, this doesn't even feel like a transitional phase or like natural growing pains as the city gets a lot more residents. It's literally a corporate takeover. And it's sad because in so many other areas of the world, it seems like they care more about protecting their cultural fabric and the identities of their countries.

Like in Paris, I feel like when I travelled there, the side streets still have the same bakeries that they've had for a hundred years. When I lived in Budapest, yes there was at McDonald's, yes there was the Starbucks, but for the most part it felt authentic. Not much had actually changed. They were actively working to preserve their culture. They were actually trying to undo the Soviet influence to bring back true Hungarian culture.

They also don't let many people immigrate there, which probably helps. I mean in in Tokyo they have entire neighbourhoods that are built around this concept of having pedestrian shopping streets that are just exclusively small, locally owned businesses. And Japan actually, I just learned this when I was putting this episode together, but they passed a large stores law, which requires government approval and community input before a large retailer could even open.

Which honestly probably never work in America because of corporate lobbying, but it's nice that they can make that happen. I think France did the same thing. They passed law specifically designed to prevent large retailers from using financial leverage to push out smaller competitors because they want to protect what makes France great and protect those small French businesses. And so while obviously there is a political side of this, there are policies at work that are helping protect those businesses.

I personally don't necessarily think that government intervention is the only solution or the reason why many other places in the world have been able to protect their culture. I mean, number one, a lot of these places, these countries are smaller. They're like the size of Texas or even smaller. They've had less mass migration. They are not the melting pot. And number two, they actually care about their cultural identities and they take pride in it.

And I would actually say that that is probably the most important distinction like for Americans. I mean we've experienced this over the last decade, but half of the country thinks that Americans and white people have no culture. And if we do have a culture, it is something to be mocked and ashamed of. Like they see us as being these awful oppressive colonisers. They see us as being greedy and consumeristic, but they literally feed into those very things as they take over what remaining culture we do have.

So it's just like this depressing never ending cycle. And then why would they care about that if they don't believe that we have any unique cultural identity to begin with? I mean it's just such a depressing cycle of set. Like I did not in Denver this episode to become some kind of like depressing black pill moment. It's just something that I have been thinking about constantly as I watch the city around me change. And I wish that I could like wave a wand and become some amazing like urban city planner that would upend and all of America's great cities and revive small town America.

Like I would absolutely love that. Unfortunately that is not possible. I mean it's just so depressing when you drive through American small towns and it's just like a Dollar General and nothing going on there. I mean it's just so awful. I should do an entire episode about Dollar General and how they're scamming small towns in America. If I can't magically wave my wand and fix everything, the best thing I can do. And the best thing I think you can do as well is have, you know your running list of local places where you choose to spend your money and seeking out local flavour whenever you are travelling and going to a new city.

And I know that that feels small, but emotionally it just feels so much better. You know the phrase like shop local, it always felt like some, you know, cliche that you would see on a Subaru's bumper sticker or in a tote bag that you'd be given for free at a farmer's market. But these days it doesn't really feel like a cliche. It feels more like a desperate necessity. I'm one of you, it's day three going undercover on an American farm.

I've crossed the border, I'm blending in with the herd and now I'm passing is a hundred percent American beef. Woo. Now back in Brazil where I'm actually from, we don't really do this whole pasture raise thing, but I mean I love grass, big fan I I've never really eaten it, but big fan and all I need is a couple more days and then I'll be vacuum sealed with a product of USA sticker slapped right on me on a grocery store shelf under LED lighting right back where I belong while away from all of this itchy grass and natural sunlight.

Oh no, I think Ice Barbie found me. Well nevermind, I had a good run. I guess I'm getting deported again. A lot of beef labelled product of the USA isn't actually from here. Good ranchers though is a hundred percent American meat, no imposters. Use code Brett and get free meat for life plus a hundred dollars off your first three orders. I just wanna be friends.