The Showdown In Nashville: A Missing Middle Moment Of Truth

A battle is brewing in Nashville over efforts to alter zoning to allow missing middle housing. Growing opposition is playing a familiar tune.

Protect our neighborhoods.”

Earlier this year, Metro Nashville Planning released its draft of “The Housing and Infrastructure Study,” outlining its initial findings and offering preliminary recommendations. A critical – controversial – recommendation allows missing middle housing types to help address the need for 90,000 homes over the next decade. According to the study, 56% of those should be for-sale housing.

The study released last Friday quickly stirred pushback. In a neighborhood West Nashville Facebook group, a community advocate posted a call to action to stop the effort.

GET READY TO PROTECT YOUR NEIGHBORHOODS!!!!”

Anyone encouraging missing middle housing has heard those words, or variations thereof. Any interests urging local municipalities to increase density to solve housing shortages in cities nationwide might want to stay tuned to how it plays out in Nashville.

The battle could be epic and lengthy. Further, it could end without a clear resolution.

The battle started last year, instantly polarizing Nashville's local residents, residential developers, and city official. Metro Council member Quin Segall Evans, a Nashville real estate attorney and corporate counsel for Alpharetta, GA-based Ashton Woods Homes, proposed two ordinances to reform zoning to introduce missing middle housing. Vehement opposition immediately arose, so she shelved the legislative proposal. The argument was, effectively, "too much, too soon."

Instead, the city’s planning department was tasked to develop a study.

One conclusion, the study notes:

Nashville’s current zoning code and zoning map are unlikely to be able to accommodate the amount of housing Nashville will need. The gap, estimated at between 20,000 to 40,000 homes, is smallest for rental homes, but far short of the need for modestly priced home ownership.”

Booming City Brings Need for More Housing

Housing affordability challenges in Nashville dates to the early 2000s. Local leaders and politicians then wrestled with solutions as Nashville was going through a growth spurt.

The Great Recession 2008-2009, prompted by the housing bubble bursting and wrecking the economy, sidelined the conversations until the metropolitan area’s growth went into overdrive leading into the COVID-19 pandemic. Major companies such as e-commerce giant Amazon, financial firm AllianceBernstein, Oracle Corp. and others moving into the city drove demand for housing.

Developers followed suit. For several years, Nashville led the country in the percentage of existing apartment inventory under construction.

Construction subsided with the rest of the country in 2022, when interest rates rose. But the supply pipeline is still flowing from the elevated levels of earlier starts.

Reurbanizing the Urban

Nashville’s urban core has been densified and rebuilt intensely over the past decade, with accelerating momentum starting in the late 1990s. Until the 1990s, apartments couldn’t be built in Nashville’s central business district. Developer Tony Giarratana succeeded in getting an apartment tower opened in 1996, jump-starting downtown living.

Giarratana built more apartments and for-sale condominium towers, spreading downtown south of Broadway Avenue into a largely barren area of parking lots and low-slung buildings. Other developers followed.

Redevelopment spread north of downtown and west to the railroad gulch. Outside downtown, Nashville’s Midtown blossomed with new residential buildings. New development spread across the Cumberland River.

Oracle is building a massive campus that will house its global headquarters north of the new NFL stadium, which is under construction to replace the existing one next door. Development around the new stadium will include residential neighborhoods.

New housing development flowed, as well, into East Nashville environs, pushing local prices higher.

Downtown residents – just a mere handful two decades ago – now number about 20,000.

Growth Beyond Expectations

In 2015, the city developed NashvilleNext, a general plan to guide growth through 2040 by intensifying the urban core and preserving historic structures, rural areas, hillsides, and floodplains. The more recent Housing and Infrastructure Study notes that while this strategy succeeded in many ways, the city’s growth exceeded predictions, resulting in an acute undersupply of affordable housing. 

According to the study, the central problem is that Nashville's zoning districts and development tools are not calibrated to deliver infrastructure improvements. 

In many zoning districts, the standards are both loose in allowing unexpectedly large buildings in some contexts but constraining when and how more cost-efficient and smaller building types are allowed,” the study says. “This creates a situation in which every change is unpredictable for neighbors.”

Median-income households earning $100,000 a year can afford homes in only 9% of neighborhoods, dropping to less than 1% for Black and Hispanic families, the study finds.

Missing Middle Solution

The study recommends altering zoning for more low-rise, moderately dense housing types.

By striking a balance between construction and land costs, they can provide both rental and ownership opportunities at a lower price point and more in keeping with smaller homes off of corridors,” the study notes. “New construction alone will not perfectly match the incomes of low- and moderate-income households but adding more homes at a lower cost than either large-lot houses or dense towers in downtown will absorb demand from other areas of the market and reduce the pressure on older homes, keeping them more affordable.”

Based on its findings, Nashville's city planning department determined that new for-sale home prices could be $220,000 to $344,000 less than typical current prices, and rents would drop by $300-to-$600 per month.

The study says the income needed to afford this housing would drop by 12% to 30%, depending on the building type. Rents were 100% of the area median income, while for-sale homes remain priced at or above 200% of AMI.

What’s Next

The study’s findings and rezoning recommendations will be hashed out publicly throughout this year, likely drawing stiff opposition from West Nashville and other parts of the city.

An added complexity is that the city and the county are the same. Nashville and Davidson County consolidated in 1963, and the Metro Council has 40 members, the third largest in the country behind Chicago and New York City.

Decision-making can take a long time.

Opponents of the added missing-middle density recommendations claim that Nashville has plenty of land available for residential development after the council passed legislation last year to open commercially zoned areas to residential.

Other West Nashville residents – opposing changes to current zoning that restricts missing middle residential buildings – are even looking into how to break ties with Nashville and create their own city, like Belle Meade.

For perspective, Belle Meade was a plantation dating back to the early 19th century. Planned residential development came in the early 20th century, and Belle Meade was incorporated in 1938. An old-money, wealthy city, Belle Meade remains independent, along with Goodlettsville and Berry Hill, a small area not far from downtown Nashville.

West Meade is newer and was once part of the Belle Meade Plantation. Residential development started in the 1940s, post-World War II ranch homes on one-acre and larger lots. This area has been popular for teardowns in favor of much bigger homes — the McMansions that sell in the millions.

The feeling is that it’s their choice to tear down and build bigger if they want, and it should remain that way.

Some of the same crowd of opponents defeated a light-rail referendum in 2018 and previous transit plans. They tried and failed to beat last year’s transit referendum, which included supporting affordable housing. Even though that referendum passed handily, opponents sued to invalidate the election results.

That matter is still in the courts.

Proponents of missing middle housing everywhere will do well to watch how the fight plays out in Nashville. It could serve as an extended-run sneak preview – for better or worse – of local zoning dust-ups coming to a city hall near you.