Alisha Haddock hadn’t yet joined The Housing Fund when a deadly tornado ravaged Nashville two years ago. She was still with Catholic Charities of Tennessee when the storm hit on March 3, 2020, devastating neighborhoods including North Nashville. In the wake of the destruction, vultures descended upon the historically Black community, looking to buy up properties from desperate folks who lost their homes or couldn’t afford necessary repairs.
For Haddock, the disaster revealed just how unstable the housing situation was in North Nashville — especially for those who didn’t own their homes, and those who lacked insurance. But even before the storm, North Nashville had been changing.
“We were hemorrhaging neighbors,” says Haddock. “We were losing them left and right.” She soon noticed that most of the people leaving the neighborhood were renters. “I just think we were losing little pieces of our community, and it was going unnoticed that you were being pushed out because you didn’t own anything.”
Alisha Haddock, The Housing Fund
Haddock made her way to The Housing Fund in 2021, becoming the director of community impact. The nonprofit manages Nashville’s first public land trust, and the goal is to develop 15 properties and sell them to first-time homeowners, with a focus on people historically shut out of the process — like Black people, who are statistically denied loans more often than white would-be homeowners. It’s an effort to correct the wrongs of redlining and other forms of housing discrimination.
When those owners are ready to sell, the trust buys their houses back, preserving their affordability. It’s a long-term approach, and the model has seen success in other cities around the country. Haddock hopes The Housing Fund’s work can inspire and complement other efforts around the city. The nonprofit’s first home was completed in January on North Nashville’s McKinney Street.
Haddock is very excited about the work, and says the program can help people build wealth for their families and find some sense of economic liberation. At the same time, the flood of new residents into the city — some of whom are willing to buy a place over asking price sight unseen — and the increasing gap between housing costs and wages can’t be stemmed with The Housing Fund’s work alone. Tens of thousands of units of housing are needed in Nashville to meet demand in the next 10 years, according to a team of local housing experts.
According to a 2021 report from Mayor John Cooper’s Affordable Housing Task Force, Nashville needs to create 53,758 units by 2030, and 18,000 of those need to be affordable to households earning 80 percent of the area median income level or lower.
AMI is a useful metric in housing conversations, helping sort out what a seemingly vague term like “affordable” means. The U.S. Department of Housing and Development defines affordable housing as costing no more than 30 percent of someone’s income. Since incomes vary from region to region, AMI helps gauge what’s affordable in a given place. (It’s important to note that it’s the median — a number at the center of the range of Nashville’s incomes — and not an average.)
In Nashville, the AMI is $84,300 per year for a four-person household. So a family of four earning 80 percent AMI brings in $67,440, and 30 percent of that is $20,232. Any family spending more than 30 percent of its annual income on housing costs is considered cost burdened — and that describes more than 40 percent of Nashville’s renters. (HUD has calculations for other sizes of households, including individuals.)
Keeping the existing stock of housing affordable is also a concern. The task force’s report also notes that from 2010 to 2019, home values and rents grew by more than 150 percent.
It’s an imposing challenge, but people like Haddock aren’t deterred.
“It just can’t be one particular person, one particular entity,” says Haddock. “It’s going to take all of us to solve something as big as affordable housing.”
On the other side of North Nashville, at 2615 Clarksville Pike, sits a much denser project: a three-building apartment created by a nonprofit developer. A 1,000-square-foot mural by Norf Art Collective is on the side of the central building depicting civil rights heroes like Diane Nash, Curlie McGruder, Z. Alexander Looby and John Lewis. The development was created by Urban Housing Solutions, a nonprofit developer in Nashville that owns about 1,500 affordable apartment units all over the city. Founded in 1991, the developer originally focused on housing for populations with special needs, like people with disabilities and folks experiencing homelessness. But now housing is a common struggle for people who don’t require any kind of specialized assistance, and UHS is broadening its work.
“Nashville’s affordable housing problem has really metastasized to become, at this point, a market failure,” says Brent Elrod, managing director of UHS. “Our focus has expanded to continue to provide housing and opportunities for people with special housing needs, but integrating those into a more broadly mixed affordable apartment community.”
The newest building in the development, created in 2020, is housing for low-income seniors — for example, couples earning less than $3,295 a month — and construction was funded with low-income housing tax credits. The other two buildings were built using grants from Nashville’s Barnes Housing Trust Fund and feature a range of studios and multi-bedroom apartments. Most of the units are priced for families and individuals making between 40 and 80 percent of the AMI, and aimed at housing working artists. A studio there goes for around $860 to $890, which is below the market average according to the affordable housing report.
Even though UHS builds apartments, Elrod isn’t sure that building dense clusters of units alone is enough to meet the housing crisis — though vertical density, meaning tall buildings with several units, will help a lot. What’s going to be crucial is public investment from programs like the Barnes Fund. Elrod says those grants allow developers to spend more money up front when building a project, and reduce the debt they have to deal with down the road, helping them keep rents low.
And like Haddock, Elrod says it’s going to take a lot more agencies doing this kind of work, including nonprofits and for-profits.
There are other factors to consider when creating affordable housing, Elrod says, like access to public transportation. The Clarksville Pike development is located near the planned site of a WeGo transit hub and is along a bus route, an important factor to many UHS renters.
Elrod, who grew up in Nashville, has been with UHS since 2006 and has been director since October 2020. While he’s excited for many of the developments going up around town, there were some difficulties early on — on March 25 of last year, just a few months into Elrod’s time as director, storms took the roof off one of Urban Housing Solutions’ East Nashville properties. That location housed many deaf and hard-of-hearing people, and several residents had to be relocated to other properties or extended-stay motels. Elrod says he takes full responsibility for tenants’ delayed return home, but after a slow rebuild and insurance disputes, he’s hoping to reopen in upcoming months.
Natural disasters quickly reveal how vulnerable many people’s housing situations can be — many feared the 2020 tornado would usher in gentrification the way Nashville’s historic 2010 flood did. But raging elements are far from the only threats to housing in Nashville. Rents rise, wages stagnate, new developments get built, and people begin to wonder if they’re getting forced out.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in February, a fish fry hosted by community groups and unions brings East Nashvillians out to eat, dance, mingle and discuss the future of a patch of land slated for redevelopment: the East Bank. The city has been discussing the development of the area, with plans to include parks and housing, coinciding with repairs to Nissan Stadium and the creation of a new campus for tech giant Oracle, which is moving to town. As Marshall Crawford of The Housing Fund told the Scene’s sister publication the Nashville Post, if for-profit developers are the only builders on the East Bank, and there’s no economic incentive to build affordable units, those homes will likely be pricey.
Judging from the dozens of Nashvillians showing up to the fish fry, neighbors share those concerns.
“Representatives from this community ought to be involved,” says Dorlisa Smikes, an East Nashville resident who lives down the street from the East Bank. Smikes is calling for fixes to existing buildings as well as infrastructure improvements like parks. She and her husband own their home, but she says housing in Nashville has “gotten ridiculous” and notes that stagnant pay rates make it difficult to keep up.
Another topic of conversation at the fish fry is news that the city might build a whole new football stadium rather than renovating Nissan Stadium — raising questions about the city’s spending priorities. Housing activists hope to secure a community benefits agreement to ensure affordable housing units are built, as well as other guarantees that can help fund local schools or allow Nashvillians to secure well-paying jobs involved in the development.
In some ways, the East Bank development represents some of the tension in the housing discussion — the need for affordable housing versus the need for more units, period.
“None of my people can afford to live in a $1,200 … or $1,400 apartment,” says Nate Carter of advocacy group Stand Up Nashville. Carter says that when developers come in to build 300- or 400-units complexes, SUN advocates for 100 or more to be priced for low-income workers — people trying to scrape by on minimum wage. The call is especially urgent when displacement is involved, like tearing down an old complex to make way for a new one. (That said, no housing needs to be torn down on the East Bank.)
In a story via the Nashville Post, Carter’s view contrasts with those of District 6 Councilmember Brett Withers. Withers argues that since there’s no housing on the East Bank and therefore no risk of displacement, adding supply at any price would be a benefit to the city, and possibly alleviate gentrification elsewhere.
Also at the fish fry is Martha Carroll of Nashville Organized for Action and Hope. She recounts the effort to include affordable housing at the new development replacing the Riverchase Apartments — her main focus for the past three years. When those low-income apartments were sold in 2017, groups like NOAH and The Salvation Army began asking for affordable units to be included and to make sure tenants weren’t displaced. Carroll says the developer was accommodating, and the number of affordable units agreed upon increased from 150 to 220. Other requests included letting residents with kids stay until the school year ended, helping tenants connect with housing navigators, and providing financial assistance on moving costs.
Carroll says the new owner, Cypress Real Estate Advisors, has been more responsive and done more than most developers. At the same time, 220 units is a “drop in the bucket,” she says.
At a Feb. 24 Planning Commission meeting, commissioner Pearl Sims stepped down after five years, saying the agreement at the development was a “great going-away gift” and that she was moved by the advocacy and data-collection efforts by nonprofits working at the apartments. Another commissioner said it would be worth doing a case study or postmortem on why the effort succeeded.
Even so, Carroll says, “We needed far more support from the city.” She also calls for an independent office of housing that wouldn’t be reliant on mayoral appointments. District 19 Councilmember Freddie O’Connell filed a bill to create such an office in October, and — despite some initial pushback from Mayor Cooper’s office — the city is carrying out a performance audit of the current structure to explore the idea.
Housing activists have seen other success in town. Negotiations between Stand Up Nashville and Nashville SC about the soccer stadium being built in Wedgewood-Houston resulted in the city’s first community benefits agreements. That agreement secured affordable housing units, a child care facility, a minimum wage of $15.50 for stadium employees and more.
Those accomplishments are heartening, but Carter adds that it’s still going to be difficult to reach the thousands of units needed just by pushing for 100 or 200 units at a time.
Indeed, building isn’t the only route that needs to be pursued. The Affordable Housing Task Force report listed nine high-priority recommendations, from tripling the Barnes Fund to expanding payment in lieu of taxes — or PILOT — programs to supporting efforts to create mixed-income housing on Metro Development and Housing Agency property. The good news is that some progress has been made on these recommendations.
A new affordable housing building under construction at 2940 Dickerson Pike
District 17 Councilmember Colby Sledge, a former member of the Barnes Fund commission, sponsored legislation to double the city’s investment into the fund (from $10 million to $20 million) and to create a housing catalyst fund that will purchase existing affordable units to keep their costs low. Sledge points to work UHS did in preserving two affordable apartment complexes near the airport as a model for the catalyst fund, keeping them off the market. Or as Elrod tells the Scene, basically freezing those rents. (Full disclosure: Freeman Webb, which is affiliated with the Scene’s parent company FW Publishing, will manage the property.)
The investments were made possible thanks to federal American Rescue Plan dollars aimed at relieving the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Sledge doesn’t want this to be a one-time investment. “My plan is to come back and ask for exactly as much money when the second round of ARP funds comes through next fiscal year,” says Sledge. “This is the new normal to me. We have to fund this at a level that says we’re committed and we know what the issues are and we know what it takes to help solve them.”
He’s also got a “new obsession” with housing for families and multifamily developments. “How are we going to encourage, and if we need to, incentivize three-bedroom-plus units and multifamily [housing]?” he says. “Because otherwise we are gonna be a city without families, and a city without families dies.”
Sledge says getting affordable housing built in Nashville is difficult, and can require frequent negotiations about building and zoning codes — though he doesn’t think it’s more difficult than many other major cities.
“I actually think we are further along, in a lot of ways, in creating the pipelines for affordable housing and setting up the infrastructure for it,” he says. “But it’s still really hard.”
Sledge points to the Twelfth and Wedgewood development, which he says seemed like a perfect candidate for affordable housing: It was on vacant public land, meaning nothing had to be torn down and no one had to be displaced. But it wasn’t seamless. The work on that project began in 2016 and finished in 2020, and the usual complications of legislation and construction weren’t the only reasons for the longer-than-expected build. An old gas tank from a filling station previously located on the property had to be removed, and right-of-way issues with nearby streets had to be addressed.
“You have to be doing basically everything all the time in order to keep up,” he says. “You have to use every tool in your toolbox, and you have to be inventing new tools at the same time.”
For all the work and challenges ahead, Metro’s new housing director Angie Hubbard, who previously worked at the MDHA and Greater Nashville Regional Council, says that after two months on the job she is feeling “energized.” There’s a lot to tackle, but she says the priority is gathering data to inform those efforts.
Data will help in efforts to preserve housing, Hubbard says, as well as in identifying the needs of residents to ensure they have housing security. Even though the new housing supply may relieve pressure on households making 80 percent of the AMI, she says, families and individuals in the lowest income levels may still face other barriers to housing, and a fair housing strategy will be crucial to helping them out. In addition to good data, deep community engagement will be needed to learn about and address those needs.
Metro Planning Department spokesperson Richel Albright adds that she’s been attending community meetings and taking note of what community residents want out of the East Bank. “The stadium is one component of that entire area,” says Albright. “It will not be the entire 300-plus acres, because we know that that’s not what the community wants. The community wants to see housing, they want to see amenities that help neighborhoods grow and thrive.”
Hubbard’s goals include the creation of a dashboard to track affordable housing, hiring a manager for the housing catalyst fund and engaging the community to figure out ways to incentivize affordability.
Hubbard was on the Affordable Housing Task Force and is familiar with the recommendations of its report. Some of those recommendations will be difficult to take on in the current political environment. For example, the report notes that linkage fees — in which market-rate developments are charged a certain amount of money that goes toward an affordable housing fund — would be useful, but state law currently prohibits them. And even tools like in-lieu fees and inclusionary zoning lead to other conversations, debates and knots that will need to be unraveled.
District 5 Councilmember Sean Parker would also like to see more ambitious city-led efforts, including more municipally built, municipally owned options as alternatives to what the private market offers. “When you build housing and you hold it on your balance sheets, you’re capturing those rents,” says Parker. And once construction costs and debts are paid off, he says, that rent money can go toward building more housing.
Parker adds that a new messaging effort about affordable housing and public housing may be needed to combat old stigmas stemming from the ’80s and ’90s — not just dispelling stereotypes and myths like the infamous “welfare queen” trope, but also communicating that plenty of middle-class workers like teachers and firefighters are struggling to secure homes. “We’re talking about middle-class folks [who] are in dire need for housing these days,” says Parker.
U.S. cities have been building fewer units of public housing and working toward more public-private efforts. Even the MDHA’s overhaul efforts at James A. Cayce Homes — turning the project into a mixed-income community — involves private investors and loans.
Ambitious plans may be needed, but the threat of state preemption looms large. Nashville had a short-lived inclusionary zoning law in 2016, which allowed developers of projects with more than five units to request certain permissions — like being allowed to build taller structures or build more densely — if they set aside a certain percentage of those units for affordable housing. The state legislature blocked it.
While there are still some calls for it to return, there’s also debate about how effective inclusionary zoning is. Some studies say it does help build units at low-income levels, though not necessarily the lowest, while some opponents say it can drive up prices of market-rate housing. As a 2019 study from the Urban Institute think tank notes, data is pretty limited and quite mixed, despite the growing popularity of such laws.
Advocates note that alternatives to new zoning laws exist in the form of incentives — for example, a new ordinance allowing homeowners to build separate housing units in their backyards to create more affordable housing. The city is also trying to get more landlords to accept housing vouchers, which will assist in efforts to house people experiencing homelessness.
But the current model of community groups, politicians, officials and developers trying to hash things out might be the modus operandi for a while. And Hubbard hopes she can help get all these groups on the same page using engagement and plenty of data.
“The primary thing that we are working on is to align all of the great work that’s happening around housing,” says Hubbard. “We have great nonprofit partners. We have for-profit developers that are very much committed to increasing housing affordability. We just need one place where there’s a unified strategy around how we do that.”
