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I’m Jeff Yarbro and I’m running for Mayor of Nashville.

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I believe in this city. It’s where my wife Tyler and our kids Jack and Kate call home. It’s a city about the future, not the past — and we have the chance to shape it this election. The central question is: Who will decide what our future looks like? 

Will it be decided by legislators from other parts of the state and investors from other parts of the country? Or will we decide our own future? Will it be shaped by — and for — out-of-town developers, or will we build a better Nashville for the people who live, work, and raise our families here?

We can create a future built for all, not just some. That’s what we’ve always done in Nashville at our best — and what I’ll do as Mayor. Will you join me?

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A Nashville for the Future

Sometimes it feels like our city doesn’t make those who live here the top priority. We see new stadiums, skyscrapers, and restaurants, but none of that matters unless Nashville is a great place to live — and people can actually afford to live here. Whether folks want to walk, bike, drive, or use transit, we haven’t done enough to help people move around the city. 

We want Nashville to keep being a place where people come to chase their dreams, but it also has to be a city with safe neighborhoods, affordable homes, great public schools, and city services that folks can count on. The cranes dotting Nashville’s skyline don’t represent our highest aspirations – our greatness is found in the neighborhoods and communities we call home.

It’s time for us to invest in ourselves. This has to be a city where you can not just make a living, but build a life.

Our city is at its best when we come together, so please join me, if you can, by making a grassroots donation to fund this movement.

About Me

Like so many who now call it home, I wasn’t born in Nashville. Instead, I grew up looking to this city from a few hours west in Dyersburg, and dreaming it would one day be home. It’s where I’ve built my life, am raising my family, and it’s the place I’ve been proud to represent in the Senate for the past decade. 

As a Democrat in our State Senate, I’ve built broad coalitions to pass more than 80 pieces of legislation to improve people’s lives. I’ve been successful in working across the aisle to get work done for the city and the state. But I’ve always stood up to extremists in the legislature when our values were on the line. And you can trust that’s exactly what I’ll do as Mayor. 

From investing in affordable housing and expanding childcare options and affordability, to providing resources to homeless youth and prohibiting wage discrimination against those with disabilities, my work has focused on helping people right here in Nashville. 

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EDUCATION

GROWTH & INFRASTRUCTURE

AFFORDABILITY & HOUSING

CRIME & SAFETY

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Paid for by Jeff Yarbro for Mayor, Danielle Norton, Treasurer.
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Education

Providing a top-notch education for my first-grade daughter and eighth-grade son is the most important thing Nashville does for my family — and I think that’s true for a lot of families. If we don’t get public education right, we’re going to fail the families of our city. The Mayor can’t micromanage our public education system, but there are a few critical things our next Mayor has to do, starting with investing in our teachers. 

Right now, in Nashville, across Tennessee and around the whole country, we’re facing a teacher shortage. This makes sense when you look at what teachers are paid and the chronic underfunding of education, not to mention our affordable housing problem here in Nashville. So our next Mayor needs to be a full partner with the school system in recruiting and retaining our teacher corps — because you can’t invest in public education unless you’re investing in public educators.

The Mayor also needs to take a good look at what we can do to help families before kids even get to school, and after they leave school, too. We need to focus on high-quality child care options and pre-K, and we need to look closely at how we can transition kids out of high school, into community colleges, four-year colleges and universities, and technical and vocational schools — and into the workforce.

GROWTH & INFRASTRUCTURE

Part of building a Nashville that works for all of us is getting a handle on growth. The growth and development of our city is moving at an exponential rate, but our housing and services are growing much more incrementally — and it’s in the distance between those two spots that the frustration and anxiety of people in this city lives. For many people, it feels like the growth is happening to us, not for us. 

Buying a house that you can afford in the neighborhood you love shouldn’t feel like you’re winning the lottery. And dropping your kids off at school or driving to work shouldn’t feel like you’re navigating around road closures and dodging potholes constantly. But that’s what we’ve got right now.

We need to take advantage of density where there’s demand and infrastructure for it so that we don’t have constant spread. We also need to have a laser-focus on what’s happening in people’s neighborhoods. Because where we run into problems with growth is when there’s no place for families to take a walk in their neighborhood, or no place to take their kids to play. We need to improve pedestrian infrastructure and small-scale infrastructure where people live their lives.

And finally, we need to get real about our transit problems. We are one of the only major cities in the country that doesn’t have a built-out transit system, and we’re about 30 years behind on this. The most important thing when it comes to solving this problem is thinking in terms of decades — not four-year mayoral terms. We can’t come up with a new vision every time we elect a new Mayor. Instead, we need to think about the long term and start making incremental improvements to our systems — making them more reliable, more frequent, and easier to use — while we collaborate with the people around us to think about transit regionally, too.

AFFORDABILITY & HOUSING

The next Mayor of Nashville has to make affordable housing a city-wide priority. In the state legislature, I helped author the legislation that allows Metro to invest in the Barnes Fund and appropriate dollars to acquire properties to build affordable housing — and that’s all well and good, but the reality is that as things stand, we are losing affordable housing units faster than we’re adding them.

Not only does pricing people out of our city clash with our values, it’s also an economic imperative for the city, from our tourism sector to almost any employer you’re talking to. We’ve got to be able to house more people in our city affordably if we want to have a thriving and inclusive Nashville.

To do that, we have to start with preserving more housing and improving property tax freezes so we don’t lose the affordable housing we’ve got. We also need to better utilize the Barnes Funds and public properties to bring the private sector off the sidelines on this issue. And finally, we need to clean up and speed up our zoning, permitting, and code process to ensure that you can make money by building affordable housing — because if we’re not bringing the private sector into the solution, we’re not going to solve this problem in Nashville.

CRIME & SAFETY

As a starting point for a safe city, we need to have a fully-staffed, well-trained, and well-compensated police force — and we need our police officers to be able to afford to live in the city they work to protect every day. 

Our next Mayor needs to work hand-in-glove with both the Chief of Police and the people who are out working in the field. And part of that is looking at the responsibilities we put on the police. Because we have a lot of police officers, we tend to ask them to do everything. But we need to have a real conversation about when there are other people who are better suited to step into a situation, like mental health services professionals. By focusing on and investing in wraparound services, we can allow our police officers to focus on the work they are trained and equipped to do. 

Nashville also needs to be much more intentional about having a trauma response strategy, especially for instances of significant violence. The tragedy at the Covenant School is a clear example of where more support on the trauma inflicted was needed, but it’s not just the obvious examples — if there’s a homicide on the street, we know from the data that kids’ test scores go down on that same street. There’s a broader effect of crime and violence, and we need to holistically respond to the trauma caused by lack of safety for our kids and families.

Election Day is August 3rd and early voting is now open! Find out when and where you can vote→

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Jeff believes this city is at its best when we come together – and right now we have the chance to shape our future. Make a grassroots donation to power Jeff’s campaign to become Nashville’s next mayor.  

To contribute by check, please address to:
Jeff Yarbro for Mayor
P.O. Box 90785
Nashville, TN 37209

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