You have to stand on the property known as “Green Pastures” to realize what’s at stake. The land has the rolling lilt of horse country, some of the prettiest outside the Kentucky bluegrass region. The Little Harpeth River wanders through diagonally, lined with trees and crossed by picturesque stone bridges. You’d never know you were in the geographical center of Brentwood until you gaze up to the horizon—and see the cars.
Former Dollar General CEO Cal Turner owns Green Pastures. He’s tired of paying the $750,000 annual maintenance fee on 555 acres surrounded by subdivisions and the corridors of I-65, Franklin and Concord roads. It’s a lot of land, enough for two or three downtown Franklins or all of downtown Savannah. Turner has a long-term development strategy for his property, which challenges the Brentwood community to grow into a town like the aforementioned old ones.
But real towns blend office and retail and residential land uses. Brentwood’s zoning code forbids this kind of development. Traditional towns also have smaller lot sizes and a mixture of housing types and sizes. This formula is nowhere to be found in Brentwood. Since the city’s incorporation in 1969, the rule for housing has been one dwelling per acre. (By way of comparison, four units per acre is standard in the Richland/West End neighborhood.) But the May 6 election for two seats on the city commission could change the community’s painfully suburban rigidity.
Last January, Brentwood’s five city commissioners rejected Turner’s proposal for a new mixed-use zoning category that would have enabled the development of Green Pastures along the lines of Franklin or Savannah. In response, Turner said he’d sell off parcels along Franklin and Concord roads for typical Brentwood housing. Now, two candidates for Brentwood’s city commission, Dale Pacetti and Brad Lehman, are campaigning on a promise to reform the city’s planning and zoning and bring the Turner proposal back to the negotiating table. “We need more kinds of development,” Lehman says. “We rely too much on property taxes.” If Pacetti and Lehman are elected, the commission would have a majority to resurrect Turner’s idea and potentially transform Brentwood.
The plan for Turner Town evolved from a series of public meetings Turner initiated last August, asking for citizen input on how his property should be developed. Priorities among the more than 150 residents who turned out included preserving as much green space as possible, creating estate-size lots along Franklin Road and defining a town center for the city with a compact layout in which people could walk to shops and offices and kids could walk to school. What the majority didn’t want was more McMansions on acre lots. Seniors in particular said they wanted the option of smaller homes on smaller parcels and less dependence on driving.
In October, the Miami-based Dover, Kohl & Partners, working with local Gresham Smith & Partners, delivered a design plan that met these goals. But the density was too great for Brentwood to swallow. So it was back to the drawing board. The revised plan features 847 housing units—an average density of 1.52 homes per acre—200,000 square feet of retail and 828,900 square feet of office space, a little less than one-third the square footage of Maryland Farms.
The revised site plan features three distinct villages with clearly defined edges and almost 300 acres of green space. The majority of green is a park incorporating the 150 acres of the Little Harpeth River floodplain. The smallest burgh is “Ironhorse Hamlet,” so named because it lies within the wye formed by the divergence of two CSX lines. “Old Manor Village” surrounds the 1840 house where the Turners live and features a school and office buildings at the eastern edge to buffer the noise of interstate traffic for the residential quarters. The most intensive office and retail development is in “High Street Village,” which fronts on Concord Road to utilize this arterial and nearby interstate interchange to deliver customers and workers to the site and to minimize travel through the residential areas.
Dover Kohl’s concept plan is sophisticated urban design of the rural village mode. It pays careful attention to preserving the best sightlines through the property and blocking bad ones, such as those to the starter castles across Franklin Road. The plan also retains a great deal of the existing farm architecture—and the equestrian functions it houses—which gives the site its rural character.
“The pattern proposed is a 'town and country’ concept,” lead designer Victor Dover explains. “Deliberate design decisions make the build-out more compact, more closely knit, to save more of the land.” What Dover’s plan is not, is suburban. “This isn’t subdivision and office park, but living and work places as part of a town.”
But Brentwood is, by design, a town turned inside out. “The Brentwood 2000 plan envisioned a center that was primarily residential with commerce restricted to the northern and southern ends,” says city commissioner Anne Dunn, who’s running for reelection. “And 91 percent of the 4,500 people who responded to our survey for the Brentwood 2020 plan wanted to keep residential density to one per acre, and commerce to the northern and southern ends.”
In addition to responding to the citizens’ will, Dunn says, the commissioners nixed Turner’s proposal because “his development is so huge it would overwhelm the city’s infrastructure”—the roadway and sewer capacity developed for low-density housing.
Since the rejection of Turner Town, Brentwood has been treated to the spectacle of dueling experts. Turner consultants claim that sewer capacity is adequate, and roadway improvements, most of which were already called for in the Brentwood 2020 plan, could handle the extra 18,000 trips a day. They say that federal and state funds would cover the price for a new I-65 interchange and that the remaining road expansion costs of $5 million to $10 million could be negotiated between the city and the developer. City manager Mike Walker claims that the Turner plan is unfeasible because the infrastructure costs could reach $99 million.
City commissioner Bob Higgs, who isn’t up for reelection and is friendly to the Turner idea, calls Walker’s figure a “Doomsday” prediction. “In my opinion, the numbers offered by the Turner interests are much more accurate than the numbers provided by the city, and I’m part of the city. Take sewer: The city says each household will generate 350 gallons of wastewater a day. Do you know how many times you’d have to flush your toilet or run your dishwasher to use that much water?”
Besides squabbling, what’s emerged from Turner’s proposal is a city zoning amendment that the media have taken to calling “Turner Lite.” “We concluded there was popular support for the housing options in the Turner plan,” says planning commissioner Tom McCoy. “So we asked the staff to amend the zoning ordinance to permit those kinds of residential arrangements: houses more closely grouped, with small setbacks, alleys, even build to [the sidewalk] lines.” The new zoning allows only residential, at the average density of one unit per acre, and mandates 65 percent of any plan as open space. (In other words, instead of 100 houses on 100 acres, it would allow 100 houses on 35 acres, with another 65 acres as green space.) McCoy says a developer could do some neighborhood scale shops by getting commercial zoning for specific parcels within the site plan.
Turner consultants question whether developers will use the new zoning overlay, claiming that a developer would make more money building big houses on big lots. But McCoy is proud of the new residential possibilities. “We created zoning that allows exactly what the citizens found appealing. What we prevented was unrestrained commercial development in the residential and recreational heart of Brentwood.”
Whether Brentwood citizens are as afraid of mixed use and greater density as their current civic leaders are may be determined by how they vote May 6. Then again, given the low density turnout typical for city elections—less than 10 percent of the 18,000 registered voters—we may never know.
