Early on a Friday, Antone Christianson-Galina ducks out of Bongo Java and into a light rain. He passes the short block of shops and restaurants across from Belmont University. He lives on the periphery of campus in a townhome, along with a few roommates. On his right, a grassy courtyard dotted with shady trees and lawn chairs opens up in front of Sterling Court Apartments.
“More of the city should feel like this,” he says, gesturing around. “Like a college campus.”
Three years ago, Christianson-Galina started to seriously consider buying a house in Nashville. He grew up in the city, and banking on a stable career in data science, he figured he’d be able to find something small close to his friends in a walkable neighborhood near the urban core.
“I was losing a bunch of bidding wars,” he tells the Scene. “The housing market was going crazy. I have a high level of education, supportive parents, no college debt, a tech job — all those advantages and I couldn’t figure out a starter home. That means most people are probably even more screwed than me right now. I realized this is becoming an existential issue for every millennial. Gen Z is even more toast.”
Antone Christianson-Galina (right) with his fiancée and their roommate
From there, Christianson-Galina joined the Affordable Housing Task Force convened by community advocacy group Nashville Organized for Action and Hope (NOAH) — “They were, and continue to be, big players in this space,” he says — and quickly realized the problem is bigger than just a hot real estate market. He contacted a Metro councilmember for help securing a spot on the small commission that oversees the Barnes Housing Trust Fund, a $30 million-per-year grant-making pot tasked with spurring affordable housing development. Now the committee’s vice chair, Christianson-Galina is 10 months into his first term.
Christianson-Galina notes that while the Barnes Fund is delivering units for low-income Nashvillians — a segment of the population that is in dire need of increased housing supply — affordable housing is also vanishing for middle-class earners.
“Regulations, zoning and planning make it really hard for developers to meet the need in middle-class housing,” he says. “We need massive zoning reform to build more, denser housing because there are just too many of us now. There’s enough old-timers, empty-nesters and neighborhood associations with big single-family homes blocking progress. What they’re doing — even if they don’t know it — is creating a future without us. A Nashville without families, without young people, where all houses are inherited or traded between the rich.”
In May, Christianson-Galina got engaged.
“We want to start a family, like they did,” he says. “We don’t want to get back from our honeymoon and move in with our roommates.”
Young people have flocked to Nashville over the past decade, drawn to a high quality of life, growing job market and world-class entertainment. Children who grew up in Nashville are moving back, many to start families near friends or grandparents. But the city’s population has begun to level off. Middle Tennessee suburbs — Wilson, Rutherford, Montgomery and Sumner counties — are growing even faster than Davidson County. Nashville’s low density — the city is in the 41st percentile when it comes to population-weighted density — puts it among peers like Oklahoma City and Jacksonville, rather than Durham, Charlotte or Austin.
Metro’s affordable housing study from 2021 prescribed 4,800 new units a year if Nashville hoped to stave off a worsening housing crisis. The city’s unhoused population steadily increases each year, driven by a housing market that has dramatically outpaced incomes. Commutes get longer, shouldered by the lowest earners who live the farthest away from the city center.
Rather than growing Nashville’s most sought-after neighborhoods like Sylvan Park or Lockeland Springs, planning and zoning regulations have forced additional units into apartment blocks on busy streets. With each proposal comes a fresh wave of public opposition, rehashing decades-old complaints about the existential threats posed by hypothetical new neighbors.
A particular proposal moving through the Metro Planning Commission pits current residents of Silo Bend, a 169-unit condo complex built in 2021, against 120 new units going up next door. Just a few years ago, older residents used the same language to oppose their current homes.
Apartment buildings in The Nations
“As a resident of this community, I believe it is essential to voice concerns that this amendment on Zone 1 of Silo Bend to add an additional 120 units will have a negative effect on the rest of the community that already owns, and resides here,” reads a form letter sent by dozens of residents to Planning staff. “I urge the City Council Planning Board to carefully consider the objections raised by myself and other concerned residents regarding this proposed building project. It is essential to prioritize the long-term well-being and sustainability of our community over short-term gains.”
Building still happens within single-family enclaves, but when restricted to one or two units, developers maximize square feet, producing cavernous modern residences from Oak Hill to Inglewood, Belle Meade to Edgehill. Neighbors complain about these too. They trade one family for another and command multimillion-dollar prices, keeping population density static across vast tracts of Nashville.
The squeeze toward extremes — mass apartment blocks on Dickerson Pike, Charlotte Pike and Eighth Avenue and huge single-family homes in between — and a missing supply for middle housing (multifamily housing types such as townhomes, duplexes, multiplexes and courtyard apartments) have evolved directly from the jungle of restrictions, regulations, market forces and political pressure tended by the Metro Planning Department.
What does (and doesn’t) get built comes down to the complicated game playing out today on every Nashville street. Councilmembers and advocates have targeted the city’s zoning code as outdated rules for last century functioning mainly to preserve rather than bring the city into the future. Within the department, planners proceed cautiously, unwilling to upset Nashville’s current housing equilibrium despite formal recommendations and growing evidence that density could bring homes back within reach for the city’s next generation.
To understand the evolution of land use in Nashville, look for a 19th-century mansion. Several still stand, thanks to private and public rehabilitation, marking the original single-family homes that anchored thousand-acre estates for the lucky few on Nashville’s outskirts. One — the original Bowling family Sylvan Park estate at 4501 Nebraska Ave. — was recently revamped into a grand single-family home. The Grassmere Historic Home is part of the zoo; Merritt Mansion has become a gallery for developer AJ Capital. Other historic mansions, like Belle Meade or Two Rivers or Riverwood, are museums and wedding venues. Some have been razed. Most if not all were renovated frequently through the centuries.
Wealthy from plantations, politics, real estate and the slave trade, these lineages — Acklen, McGavock, Harding, Porter — gradually sold off tranquil meadows and glades around the turn of the 20th century. These stately homes are now the outliers presiding over modern neighborhoods that have grown around them.
“In the wake of the streetcar, line extensions sprang up Belmont Park, West End or Acklen Park, the Richland-West End neighborhood, and then Belle Meade,” writes Christine Kreyling, former architecture and urban planning critic at the Scene, in her 2005 book The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City. “The subdivision of the historic plantation of the Harding family into spacious lots for ‘country homes’ on winding roads was the ultimate symbol of the decline of the landed gentry and the rise of the new commercial class.”
Sterling Court, the brick multifamily apartment building in the middle of Belmont-Hillsboro, arrived in 1915. Such a dense project in a historic, well-organized neighborhood would be daunting to build today, even if an owner had the patience (and money) to take it through the uncertain rezoning process. It’s a glimpse into a different kind of housing stock, like the rowhouses or tenements that serve today’s young families in Philadelphia and Boston.
Sterling Court
Nashville’s modern zoning regime arrived swiftly on the heels of the civil rights movement. Apartments buildings, once allowed conditionally in all residential zones, were severely restricted in the early 1970s after a building boom spurred by post-Fair Housing Act federal subsidies to integrate the suburbs. Tweaks, like 1984 restrictions on duplexes, reflected the interests of existing homeowners who opposed more affordable forms of housing nearby. Lot size minimums were tightened throughout the 1990s to prevent owners from further subdividing property. Updates continued throughout the decades, including a comprehensive rewrite that downzoned thousands of parcels to single-family housing, which took effect in 1998.
Ten years after Kreyling and the Nashville Civic Design Center produced The Plan of Nashville, which praises neighborhood walkability and speculates about how to court investment downtown, the city was exploding with money and residents. The Metro Planning Department produced NashvilleNext, a comprehensive plan to guide future city development, after extensive public engagement. A year later in 2016, the Planning Department published its first and last NashvilleNext annual report.
Pleas for modernized zoning reform are woven throughout its 80-page action plan.
“Amend the zoning code and subdivision regulations as needed to provide increased opportunities for innovative housing types including, but not limited to, accessory dwelling units, alley houses, cottage developments, triplexes, quads, manor houses and courtyard flats, multi-generational housing, and single occupancy units,” reads one goal recommended for the ensuing one to three years.
Another states the problem plainly: “Expand the use of context sensitive and scale appropriate missing middle housing types as a matter of right.”
In peer cities, zoning code reforms have followed soon after new or amended comprehensive plans. Austin recently passed a suite of reforms, including lower minimum lot sizes and three homes on most residential lots, as outlined in its Imagine Austin plan. Atlanta is currently rewriting its zoning code to align with a comprehensive plan update. But nearly a decade after NashvilleNext was adopted, Nashville’s zoning code remains largely as written in 1998.
NashvilleNext also formalized an additional layer of control over Nashville’s neighborhoods. Each urban block was designated either Neighborhood Maintenance (NM) or Neighborhood Evolving (NE), novel inventions within the Metro Nashville Planning Department.
In September 2023, city planner Olivia Ranseen prepared a slide deck for Planning Department colleagues pointing out what seemed like an arbitrary binary driving unequal outcomes. She found that the definitions of NM and NE are difficult to pin down or apply broadly, functioning mainly to justify additional development in some places and prevent density in others. Designations are based largely on a neighborhood’s support or opposition to new development, rather than objective criteria like infrastructure capacity, proximity to amenities or the existing built environment. The ill-defined binary has led residents and builders to believe that an NE designation marks an area as a redevelopment free-for-all and an NM designation casts an area as complete or off-limits for growth.
Ranseen’s study supported a 2021 internal report by three Planning Department staffers, which found that a neighborhood’s race and income, rather than the built environment, better predicted NE designations and project approvals by Planning. The result has driven high-impact development toward the city’s low-income and majority-minority neighborhoods while locking up opportunity in the city’s most desirable residential areas.
Both studies found the department was executing a pro-growth policy for minority and/or low-income neighborhoods, rather than white or wealthy neighborhoods. Decisions appeared to respond to angry neighbors and political pressure rather than expanding access to high-opportunity neighborhoods — the exact opposite of planning best practices and the city’s pledges for housing diversity, affordability and equity. Planning departments in other cities have found similar disparities in their land use policies. Louisville, for instance, developed a Confronting Racism in City Planning & Zoning project to guide equity-based reforms. But in Nashville, internal assessments of race and class disparity in land use policy have not led to public efforts at reform.
“I started doing research and presenting analysis to the department on how we should approach and upzone neighborhoods,” Ranseen tells the Scene. “I was continually met with pushback. I learned very quickly that the department thrives on doing nothing and is very afraid of public pressure. We give the Planning Commission the best, technical recommendation based on best practices and NashvilleNext. We shouldn’t care about public pressure.”
As she began her third year at the department, Ranseen became increasingly disillusioned with Planning Department leadership, specifically its director Lucy Kempf and assistant director Lisa Milligan.
“I was continually let down, ignored, disciplined — basically just told to shut up,” Ranseen says. “I brought up how middle housing continued to be ignored. I brought up how we don’t seem to be making progress on NashvilleNext. After that, meetings would pop up on my calendar where leadership would try to intimidate me and tell me to drop it and tell me to find a new job.”
She left the department in the spring of this year for a job at the National Zoning Atlas.
Councilmembers file bills aimed at encouraging more types of housing
While Planning puts out comprehensive citywide and neighborhood studies, the department’s power rests in its project recommendations. Anything that can’t be built by right must secure approval from the Metro Council, which receives recommendations from the Metro Planning Commission. The Metro Planning Commission gets its recommendations for approval, disapproval or approval with conditions from city planners, who review applications for rezones and Specific Plan (SP) Districts. If the Metro Planning Commission disapproves a project, it can still earn council approval with a two-thirds vote, rather than the simple majority required with Planning Commission approval.
Planning recommendations do not always determine a project’s fate, but they provide substantial initial momentum. That push saves developers lots of time and money otherwise spent revising or arguing projects. It gives tremendous power to those who know the system well and can decipher the preferences of department leadership.
“Not every maintenance area is the same as every other maintenance area,” Milligan tells the Scene. “Not every evolving area is the same as every other evolving area. And not every property within a maintenance area is the same. We look at every individual request on its own merits. We look really closely at every request and evaluate dozens of factors and whether or not something would be appropriate. Every piece of property is going to be different because its context is different.”
Both Milligan and Kempf broadly acknowledge the importance of increasing density, especially middle housing in areas dominated by single-family houses, but flag a variety of factors that hold back denser development. They point to two new ongoing projects — a Unified Housing Strategy and Housing and Infrastructure Study — as essential information to identify factors that hold back density. They also say strict requirements by the Metro Codes Department have stifled multifamily units, specifically triplexes and quadplexes, which are prohibited in most neighborhoods under the department’s current zoning.
“We are conducting that analysis because we think it’s a worthwhile question to evaluate,” says Kempf. “The absence of smaller-footprint multifamily from the code is one issue that we’re looking at.”
Milligan, the Planning Department’s assistant director for land development, references recent zoning work by Colby Sledge, the two-term former councilmember in Wedgewood-Houston, and Rollin Horton, the current district councilmember in The Nations, as glimpses of what might come next.
Sledge helped marshal an Urban Design Overlay through Planning and council in 2021 that relaxed zoning restrictions around Wedgewood-Houston and Chestnut Hill, which previously allowed only low-density single-family homes and some duplexes. This process, called “upzoning,” opened the door to triplexes and quadplexes by right, meaning property owners do not have to haggle with Planning or neighborhood opponents to build multiple units. The UDO also lists certain structure and design requirements, establishing a stronger sense of architectural compatibility in the neighborhood.
Horton took his seat on the council last fall with the same idea. His initial plans for a UDO in The Nations stalled with the Planning Department, so he began developing the necessary legislation with council staff. The Nations needs a grocery store, says Horton, and businesses want more patrons. More amenities and more value come with more people.
“All of these problems we have as a city — like rising homelessness, increasing urban sprawl, mounting car traffic, congestion, middle-class families being priced out of the city — are caused by our outdated and byzantine zoning code,” says Horton.
Horton also carried a suite of bills alongside Councilmember At-Large Quin Evans Segall meant to chip away at certain aspects of city planning unresponsive to today’s needs. The collection, termed NEST (Nashville’s Essential Structures for Togetherness), produced mixed results.
Multifamily homes are often complex to build, requiring rezonings and approvals and time and money, skewing the final product toward luxury apartment buildings. One answer was a bill commissioning a pattern book of preapproved designs and schematics for builders who want to build medium-density housing. That passed 37-1. A second piece that enables residential building in commercial-zoned parcels passed the council in July. Two others are pending studies with the Planning Department, including an effort to reform fireproofing requirements. Horton has high hopes.
“Europe, Japan — all the advanced economies have adopted this,” says Horton. “This bill would legalize the picturesque rowhouses that you see in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but they’d be higher-quality and more affordable.”
The two bills sponsored by Evans Segall that would have explicitly legalized duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes in single-family neighborhoods drew the fiercest opposition both within and outside the chamber. The legislation stalled amid opposition from councilmembers, specifically District 3’s Jennifer Gamble, who described the approach as “nuclear.” The chamber settled on Planning’s Housing and Infrastructure Study as a stopgap.
“The 10 or 20 people who show up at a public meeting are frankly not representative of the people who are working three jobs to afford a home, or the people who have young kids who can’t come to the meeting because they’re in the middle of bedtime and can’t afford a sitter because their mortgage is so high,” says Evans Segall. “What you see in Portland, Arlington, Minneapolis, Montana or Maine is that the bigger parts do not typically pass the first time all at once. It takes multiple efforts. We are asking people to accept change, and that can be really hard.”
Some pockets of the city offer a peek into a different reality. Ranseen points to Long Boulevard, where a design overlay embraced multifamily housing 20 years ago, as proof positive for how density brings affordability, walkability and quality of life. Evans Segall makes the prudent point that more housing brings more property tax dollars. That observation, and Christianson-Galina’s reflections on Belmont, remind us that functioning neighborhoods need not be only for the wealthy few.
Zoning reform is not a relevant topic for cities that are dying. People drive demand, and money follows people. As the city changes, it’s becoming clear to residents that the rules serving Nashville’s past will struggle to serve its future. Rather than figure out ways to expand housing, the cornerstone for a stable life, nearly 80 percent of urban housing stock has been functionally frozen as “neighborhood maintenance.” Satellite cities like Oak Hill, Forest Hills and Belle Meade add additional zoning restrictions to protect huge single-family lots.
The effect has been seen as much as felt. Formerly working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, like Inglewood or The Nations, have become more exclusive enclaves. Protections in one part of Nashville force concentrated, high-impact construction elsewhere, like Madison and Antioch. Conditions worsen in the city’s older apartment complexes, particularly in Southeast Nashville, where families have few other options.
As one planner puts it: “We’ve paused the American Dream.”
Alex Pemberton contributed to this article.
Update, 12:50 p.m., Oct. 10: Following the publication of this story, Metro Planning chief of staff Richel Albright responded with a statement contesting, in part, Olivia Ranseen’s characterization of events during her time with the Planning Department. “The Department values feedback from all staff and incorporate this work into our routine and major project work,” says Albright. “However, the allegations from the former staff member that she was disciplined for her views on policy are inaccurate and mischaracterize her tenure with the Department.”
Albright also notes that “current regulations allow Detached Accessory Dwelling Units (DADUs), which is an example of missing middle housing, to be built in neighborhoods such as Lockeland Spring and Belmont Hillsboro (through base zoning combined with historic overlays) and Hillsboro West End (through a Detached Accessory Dwelling Unit overlay).”
