Budget Struggles: Public Goods and the Fight for Economic Democracy in Nashville, TN

Abstract

This dissertation examines contemporary struggles over municipal budgeting and the questions they raise about the political, economic, and racial determinants of public goods in the 21st century. Since 2020, nationwide calls for people’s budgets, or city budgets by and for the people, have brought renewed scrutiny to the assumption that public finance serves the public good. Why, people’s budgets ask, do municipal budgets bend freely to luxury development deals and policing but never seem to have enough money for affordable housing, reliable transit, and new schools, particularly in minority and poor neighborhoods? Why, they ask, does public finance struggle to serve the needs of all people? Through an archival, geospatial and ethnographic study of Nashville, TN, this dissertation illuminates how the history of racism and the racialization of space shapes struggles over the public good. I demonstrate not only why cities struggle to afford public goods, but also why the kinds of public goods minority and poor neighborhoods desire seem perpetually unaffordable and out of reach. Moreover, by examining people's budgets as embedded within ongoing racial and spatial struggles to define the public good, this dissertation argues that they move beyond a call for participatory budgeting, a global model of democratic governance over public resources. Instead, people's budgets pre-figure new forms of economic democracy, where the value of public goods is democratically decided and allocated. As mounting discontent with economic inequality grows alongside authoritarian populism, people’s budgets suggest that municipal budgets are an important site of struggle to decide what kind of urban futures should be made affordable, for whom, and at what cost.