Street View: Making East End More Livable

Street View is a monthly column taking a close look at development-related issues affecting different neighborhoods throughout the city.

Building more housing in Nashville isn’t always easy. New developments can spark months of neighborhood resistance, or run up against zoning and legal restrictions.

But over the past few years, one community in East Nashville has worked to remove barriers to affordability, rezoning their neighborhood to allow for denser multifamily housing. Now East End neighbors are tackling a unique piece of the affordable housing puzzle: revising their conservation overlay. 

James Guthrie, president of the East End Neighborhood Association, tells the Scene that neighbors are enthusiastic about the zoning changes — not just in theory, but also in their own backyards. “At our community meeting we had about these specific areas that we were rezoning, a lot of the current residents and homeowners in those parcels were vocal supporters of this project,” he says. 

Guthrie says East End — a small neighborhood to the south of East Nashville’s popular Five Points area — contains a number of vacant lots, where higher-density housing makes sense. “The street can handle more of what we already have in the neighborhood, these multifamily developments,” he says.  

Former Metro Councilmember Brett Withers represented District 6, which includes East End, from 2015 to 2023. Now a member of Metro’s Planning Department, Withers worked in his council role to rezone parts of East Nashville to encourage high-density housing, including an update to the MDHA Five Points Redevelopment Plan.

Withers says that throughout 2019 and 2020, community members in East End expressed interest for multifamily zoning in their neighborhood, specifically in areas around South 10th Street, Fatherland Street and Shelby Avenue: a good match for housing density because of the areas’ accessibility. 

“We are a walkable neighborhood with sidewalks on both sides of almost every street in the neighborhood, and we are between two transit lines,” says Guthrie.

In August, just before the end of his second and final term, Withers passed legislation that changed the zoning in areas of East Nashville from two-family to multifamily parcels. In 2021, a previous bill from Withers incentivized high-density housing in existing mixed-use districts.  

Now members of the East End Neighborhood Association are working with adjacent Lockeland Springs neighbors and the Metro Historic Zoning Commission to revise parts of East Nashville’s conservation overlay. 

Robin Zeigler, the historic zoning administrator for the Metro Historic Zoning Commission, tells the Scene that overlays “don’t have anything to do with how a lot [or] building is used, or density.” 

Even so, design guidelines can influence how easy it is to build for certain uses. 

In an email to the Scene, Withers explains that proposed updates to the conservation overlay would make the Historic Zoning Commission rules more friendly to high-density development. This could mean changing guidelines around roof heights and design, or even yard size. “Some of the properties on South 10th Street have very deep front setbacks, which create nice front yard sizes but limit the number of housing units that could be built if the buildings could be constructed closer to the street in more of a townhome style,” Withers says. 

The design revisions could also allow some locations to have “taller heights and different designs such as flat roofs that are more conducive to townhome and multifamily development than is typical of historic house designs,” says Withers.  

Zeigler tells the Scene that altering pockets of a historic overlay is rare but not unheard of. (The last instance was before her time as zoning administrator.) However, historic zoning regulations can allow flexibility within overlays. “State law requires that the design guidelines meet the Secretary of Interior’s Standards for Rehab, but that is flexible enough to allow us to also tailor guidelines to the specific historic context of each neighborhood or even individual pockets of historic districts,” Zeigler says. 

Many historic overlays already have pockets in place with exceptions to more restrictive aesthetic requirements: Portions of Lockeland Springs, for instance, allow two-story buildings with flat roofs, whereas other portions do not. 

Nashville’s zoning code has been a point of serious discussion in the past year, as the city’s changing landscape has created an affordable housing shortage, and advocates have called for better access to transit and local amenities. There’s growing bipartisan support for zoning reform, though some advocates have spoken out against rezoning and development proposals in their neighborhoods. 

Overlays, too, have their champions and detractors. Last month’s Street View followed one family’s potentially costly violation after they built a garage 19 inches too high, a process that sparked frustrations with both the homeowner and their local neighborhood association in Nashville’s Richland-West End neighborhood.

Zeigler says conservation overlays have many benefits, pointing to a 2019 economic impact study that concluded, among other findings, that people living in historic districts are less cost-burdened than the rest of Nashville, and that preserving buildings promotes sustainability by preventing demolition. (It’s worth noting that some overlays can prevent noncompliant sustainable construction, such as external venetian blinds on an energy-efficient Passivhaus earlier this year). 

Guthrie says East End’s conservation overlay has worked as designed, preserving a particular architectural character. “Having been here for 13 years I’ve seen the neighborhood really hang onto that architectural aesthetic while other more fundamental things … have continued to change in a way that we don’t have any kind of planning or overlay to prevent,” he says. As the neighborhood has become less affordable, he says it’s lost diversity. Local businesses have changed too. 

In a letter he shared with the Scene, Guthrie writes to Metro’s Planning Department that rezoning would help preserve “a vibrant, walkable urban neighborhood accessible to a range of socioeconomic and professional backgrounds,” and that “allowing more people to live in walkable areas reduces carbon emissions at a critical point in time for our planet.” 

In the coming months, the East End and Lockeland Springs neighborhood associations will hold community feedback sessions on their proposed overlay changes. Together with the Historic Zoning Commission, local leaders and current District 6 Councilmember Clay Capp, the groups will draft a proposal to fit the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s standards for historic overlays. 

After that, the Historic Zoning Commission will decide whether to adopt the proposed changes at a public hearing. The results of that decision will ultimately shape what East Nashville looks like — in more ways than one.