The Art of the Deal Comes to Grassmere Park
Freddie O'Connell just reached for the one government power Donald Trump has spent his whole career loving, and dressed it up in progressive clothing.
On Monday the mayor filed condemnation legislation to seize 648 Grassmere Park by eminent domain. The stated reason: a "legitimate need" for the site, citing the closed Metro Southeast campus and growing space demands at the transportation and fire departments.
The unstated reason is sitting right there in the address. That's the exact parcel an Atlanta company, DC BLOX, wants for a data center O'Connell has opposed for months.
Why it matters
There's a clean, lawful way to stop an unpopular project: pass an ordinance, deny a permit, change the zoning. O'Connell tried the slow version. He pushed a 90-day moratorium and declined to hand DC BLOX incentives. But a by-right private project is hard to kill through the front door.
So he found the back door. When you can't regulate a business off your land, you take the land.
Between the lines
Watch the calendar. The condemnation was late-filed for the July 7 council meeting, the same night a separate bill tightening data-center rules hits its second reading. A "legitimate municipal need" that materializes, fully formed, on precisely the property your political opponent has been eyeing, timed to precisely the moment the fight comes to a head, invites an obvious question: which came first, the need or the target?
The fire department may well need space. But the sequence makes the public-use rationale look less like long-range facilities planning and more like a tool grabbed in a hurry.
The irony
Eminent domain is the most aggressively coercive power a government holds, and it is Donald Trump's favorite. In the 1990s he leaned on a state agency to condemn the Atlantic City home of an elderly widow, Vera Coking, so he could pave it into a limousine lot for his casino. He told John Stossel on camera that cities have every right to condemn, that a "terrible house" shouldn't block "beautiful fountains." Progressives spent two decades calling that the signature abuse of the powerful against the little guy.
Here's the part that should sting. Trump lost that case. A New Jersey court threw out the condemnation on the grounds that nothing guaranteed Trump would actually use the land for the public purpose he claimed. The stated use was a pretext, and the court could see it. That is the exact vulnerability now sitting under O'Connell's filing.
This week, the powerful one wielding the bulldozer wears a blue rosette. O'Connell didn't just borrow a page from the Trump playbook. He found the page conservatives hated most and ran it.
The bottom line
You can dislike the data center and still notice the method. Eminent domain to build a road or a school is ordinary government. Eminent domain deployed the moment persuasion fails, on the one parcel the mayor has been fighting, dressed in a "public need" that appeared the same week as the showdown, is something else. If "highest and best use of our land" now means the use the mayor personally prefers, secured by force when persuasion fails, then property rights in Nashville are exactly as durable as the mayor's mood.
Trump would be proud. That should bother the people cheering.
What you can do
The condemnation legislation comes before Metro Council on July 7. Read the filing, then ask your council member one question: if this site is a genuine municipal need, where was it on the facilities plan before DC BLOX showed up? A real need has a paper trail that predates the fight. A pretext doesn't.