Road Kill

The scope of MTC is big: 10 million square feet of office space and an additional 1.5 million square feet of commercial—retail, restaurant—as well as 5,000 residences in a mixture of town houses, flats, mid-rise and high-rise. By way of comparison, downtown Nashville currently has 7.1 million square feet of office space and Cool Springs approximately 3.4 million square feet.

The plan for MTC, first revealed in February, includes sites for nine corporate campuses surrounding a dense urban core, with the tallest structure reaching 18 stories. At the end of the projected 15-year buildout, in 2026, the development would have 150 buildings and its workforce of 40,000 people would rival downtown Nashville’s 47,000. To provide access for this hefty labor force, the developers are proposing a new bridge across the Cumberland River.

The stated rationale for MTC is to enable Davidson County to compete for corporate relocations with places like Cool Springs and create much-needed tax revenues for Metro. According to Janet Miller, chief economic development and marketing director for the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, “Davidson is very limited in the number of 50-acre sites available for the suburban corporate campus. Corporations generally come with a pre-wired culture. If you try to sell a suburban corporate culture on downtown, they’ll just go elsewhere, to Charlotte or Atlanta.”

Or Cool Springs. According to market researchers with Colliers Turley Martin and Tucker, 51 percent of all the seekers of office space in the total Nashville market, including Murfreesboro, went to Brentwood-Cool Springs in 2007. And Cool Springs is rapidly expanding, with more than 1 million square feet of office space currently under construction.

The concept behind the May Town Center is to make the corporate executives as comfortable in Metro Nashville as they are in Williamson County. The developers will provide plenty of parking, and a bridge across the river to carry the execs to high-end housing in Hillwood and Belle Meade. And if Metro’s public schools lack the cachet of those in Williamson County, well, there are no flies on Harpeth Hall or Montgomery Bell Academy.

But if Cool Springs is generic high-end edge city, MTC is being touted by its promoters as “unique.” In Cool Springs the land uses are segregated into office, retail and residential zones. This typical suburban development pattern defines a series of work and consumer opportunities hyphenated by corridors for single-occupancy vehicles and acres of asphalt on which to park them.

MTC, on the other hand, is being laid out in the manner of a traditional town, according to New Urbanist principles. At the center of the high-density urban core would lie civic spaces for public gathering featuring “natural water features and a dazzling glass pavilion,” according to an MTC press release. Surrounding the dazzle would be street-level retail with offices and residences above and parking —surface and structured—to the rear of buildings. Flanking this core is medium-density residential and office as well as the corporate campuses. Sidewalks are as important as streets in linking the site. The idea is to create a walkable environment, with a footprint smaller than the likes of Cool Springs, so that people don’t need to—or want to—drive between one land use and another.

The undeveloped portion of the May land—900 acres—would be permanently preserved as open space and serve as a green buffer between MTC and the rest of Bells Bend. The developers also promise, in another press release, that “the commercial and residential structures will be built to LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] standards (or equivalent)” established by the U.S. Green Building Council and that “an extensive network of natural trails and walkways” will connect MTC with Bells Bend Park.

So who could object to a project that introduces good urban design of such a scale to Nashville while preserving so much of the May’s land? Well, most of the Scottsboro community.

“They’re trying to build a city to compete with the city we already have,” says Sharon Work, a fifth-generation resident of the Bend. “I’m shocked at the idea of an 18-story building out here. Last spring we went door-to-door and it was hard to find a person who embraces this concept.”

In April and May—after Giarratana had publicly presented MTC and the project had been the subject of community meetings—15 volunteers conducted a survey of Scottsboro-Bells Bend residents to determine attitudes toward MTC. Of the 355 households in the area, 242 yielded signed ballots; of these, 92 percent were opposed to the development.

The people surveyed stress MTC’s incompatibility with preserving Scottsboro’s rural character. Others worried about the impact on natural resources and, naturally, the increased traffic the development would bring. A few residents seemed resigned to paving paradise. “I hate to see farmland used for this purpose,” writes one undecided, “but I know it will happen.”