On a rainy Thursday morning, hundreds filed into the Grand Reading Room of the Nashville Public Library downtown to hear the annual State of Metro address from Mayor Freddie O’Connell.
State of Metro speech emphasized day-to-day government services and previewed new property tax rate
High marble ceilings and wood paneling help the Church Street building exude a grandeur rarely felt in city facilities. All types of residents patronize the city’s flagship library. Caregivers lead children through an ample kids’ books section while stacks host citizen researchers and students from nearby Hume-Fogg High School. Dozens of people also seek shelter here for the day, toting belongings, waiting to avail themselves of the city’s clean restrooms and public computers.
Multiple recent reports either commissioned or conducted by Metro have confirmed what might be obvious for anyone familiar with Nashville’s streets or housing market: Access to permanent, private shelter has become profoundly unequal and increasingly unattainable as Davidson County’s housing supply struggles to keep up with steadily rising demand.
In last week’s address, after a loping introduction that paid respects to city departments, Metro Nashville Public Schools, basic urban services and the library system itself, O’Connell touched on the countywide transportation infrastructure plan gradually gaining momentum, made possible financially by referendum in November. It was a tentative victory lap for O’Connell’s stated priority upon taking office.
Housing diversity is seen as key to alleviating catastrophic home prices
Then he began describing a malfunctioning city.
“People want to be here, and we want to make it easier to stay,” O’Connell said. “That’s much of the work we’re going to be leaning into even harder starting today. The median home price has risen to almost $500,000. That’s more than five times greater than the region’s median income. So Nashville, it’s time to move on housing.”
He moved on to the various city planning studies that have attempted to guide city growth. The mayor will now grapple with the “tension between growth and preservation” that has emerged from outdated zoning and housing codes. And of course, neighbors who are determined to insulate pockets of Nashville from change.
“We can’t afford to preserve the high cost of housing,” O’Connell stated. “We, as a community, will need to find room and funding for 90,000 homes over the next decade if we want to have any hope of enough people having secure, stable housing at any income level in this city.”
He cited Metro’s recently released Unified Housing Strategy as a guiding document. The mayor also recommended a standard investment of $16 million in the Barnes Housing Trust Fund, which facilitates affordable housing projects, and a few other items meant to alleviate living conditions for currently unhoused people. To really tackle such a unit shortfall, major zoning changes and private market participation must follow.
The Scene caught up with O’Connell in a one-on-one interview after his speech to find out more about the mayor’s plans to alleviate the housing crisis.
“I know from having been on the Metro Council in a district that I think was generally comfortable with increased density that you can fit thousands and thousands of new homes into places where you don’t have to displace anybody,” O’Connell, who represented parts of downtown and Germantown for eight years, told the Scene the day after his address. “There are places on transit corridors on the periphery of neighborhoods that would not require a lot of difficult decisions. It just means a level of comfort at the district councilmember level, and at the community level, to say, ‘Can we have this conversation responsibly and effectively?’”
Development has become concentrated along corridors and in low-income areas
The thinking tracks with existing plans, like NashvilleNext, that recommend built-up arteries on the outskirts of Nashville’s single-family neighborhoods. That logic syncs well with the pedestrian, bike and bus transit the mayor envisions for Nashville’s future. It has also led to massive apartment buildings on the perimeter of expensive enclaves like 12South and Lockeland Springs and a lack of so-called “middle housing” that brings multifamily medium-density residences — like quad-plexes and courtyard apartments — to neighborhoods. O’Connell drew contrast to a suite of bills known as NEST brought before the Metro Council last year as an early effort to welcome density to much of Nashville.
“We strongly advise the people that were taking that approach that that was not an approach that we felt would be well received by the general public,” O’Connell said. “I’ve been far more impressed by the way the Planning Department has used data to help highlight need and to approach the conversation about housing from a more thoughtful perspective.”
Hannah Herner contributed reporting.
