Sweetbriar Avenue runs across the center of Belmont-Hillsboro, but it could be any street in Nashville’s old city limits. Sidewalks disappear and reemerge from one block to the next. One end is anchored by a strip of tired office buildings, the other by the 12South trinity — fancy tacos, bougie boutique clothiers and short-term rentals. The blocks between are an open-air museum of old architecture. The nondescript Hicks Tabernacle Baptist Church hides in a residential block — among the last of a vanishing legacy of historically Black churches in the area.
At 1703 Sweetbriar Ave., a midcentury duplex sold for $1.3 million in 2022 and marked the first million-dollar teardown in Nashville’s old inner city when it was replaced by a $4.4 million mansion. There’s a hole in the ground at 1812 Sweetbriar Ave., where a modest midcentury ranch lost its place on a million-dollar piece of dirt. Most recently, a 1961 brick duplex at 1712 Sweetbriar Ave. was bought for $1.25 million and has been approved for demolition to make way for a mansion measuring more than 6,000 square feet.
It takes only a day to demolish a million-dollar teardown, but the fate of these properties has been more than half a century in the making. Beneath its quietude and forever facades, Belmont-Hillsboro is the site where a radical revolution was launched in 1970 — a movement that transformed race relations and reshaped the entire city, just as it now threatens to erase its own noble legacy.
Fifty-five years after it began, the Battle for Belmont-Hillsboro rages on.
Sweetbriar Avenue
Yesterday
The Battle for Belmont-Hillsboro began with urban renewal and highway construction, and it nearly ended with urban renewal and highway construction.
The Interstate 40 inner loop and the Edgehill Urban Renewal Project displaced more than 2,000 households — 84 percent of them Black — into a housing market that restricted Black Nashvillians to small areas of the city. In Waverly-Belmont, adjacent to Edgehill, unscrupulous real estate agents capitalized on the demand shock with “blockbusting” tactics that stirred white homeowners to sell — a racial panic that tipped the neighborhood from essentially all-white in 1960 to majority-Black by 1970.
Planning for I-440 was ramping up, which fed into fears that the highway would act as the “retaining wall of a new ghetto,” as The Tennessean put it, with its delineation of urban and suburban. In its coverage of the integration of Waverly-Belmont in 1967, The Tennessean questioned whether a popular quip was true — was integration “merely the interim between the time the first Negro moves in and the last whites move out”?
The answers soon arrived, as if they were called.
The Invasion of Those Communists
Ashley T. Wiltshire Jr. has lived in Nashville since 1969, but the decades have not erased his Virginia Tidewater accent. Born and raised in Richmond, he occasionally breaks from his non-rhotic diction to punctuate an important point with sharp R sounds. It is a small act symbolic of a life in resistance to the cultural baggage of Southern stereotypes and the historical truths that shaped them.
Wiltshire read the same Bible as his forebears, but he read it differently. His faith in the Word moved him to attend the Union Theological Seminary, join the Student Interracial Ministry and embark on a mission trip to Thailand. Wiltshire then arrived in Nashville — a city that, he notes, George Wallace carried in the presidential election the prior year — to attend Vanderbilt Law and launch a decades-long career with the Legal Aid Society.
Wiltshire and his wife Susan found a rental house in Belmont-Hillsboro, with no special eye for the neighborhood. The house on Blair Boulevard just happened to be near the Vanderbilt campus — where Susan, herself an activist and a renowned scholar of the Classics, joined the faculty in 1971 — and affordable for the young couple. Rent was just $90 per month in 1969, around $775 in 2025 dollars.
The house was burgled multiple times in the Wiltshires’ first year. After one incident, Ashley Wiltshire recalls, the responding officer offered a simple piece of advice to prevent a recurrence: “Move out of this neighborhood.”
Then a fellow traveler moved in, as an appointment to the faculty of the Vanderbilt Divinity School brought Gene TeSelle to the neighborhood in 1969. TeSelle, too, was a man of liberal faith, a seminarian and a newcomer to Nashville, fresh from a professorship at Yale. His scholarship centered on St. Augustine, and his activism was as prolific as profound. But TeSelle’s most consequential cause was the neighborhood itself.
“Gene was a tremendous scholar and a real pioneer of urban neighborhoods,” Ashley tells the Scene. “I don’t know where he learned it.”
Archival materials reveal many sources, but none was more influential than the Rev. Bill Barnes, whose leadership of Organized Neighbors of Edgehill (ONE) formed “the only model” for what would become Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors.
Belmont-Hillsboro was at a precipice. Planning theories at the time presumed neighborhoods had a natural life cycle — of birth, growth, decline and death or redevelopment. White homeowners on Belmont Boulevard repeatedly attempted to rezone the strip to commercial, one Black homeowner nearby told The Tennessean, “as a way to get out of a Black neighborhood and still make some money on their property.” If Belmont-Hillsboro fell to white flight, urban renewal could emerge as an imminent threat.
In response, TeSelle hosted a series of backyard confabs in the summer of 1970. At a mass meeting in September, TeSelle outlined the purpose and potential of an organized Belmont-Hillsboro. As he was quoted in Sal Rinella’s 1974 study “The Origin, Early History, and Development of the Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors, Inc.”:
“A few neighbors met at our house during the summer and we got talking about our neighborhood. … It is what many people would call an ideal neighborhood — full of variety, economically, socially, racially. A good place to raise children, a good place to live.
“It is also a neighborhood with a future — there are many people who are tired of the suburbs and would like to live in closer. But such neighborhoods are in short supply … and often they are endangered by outside forces — commercial interests, real estate practices, threats of urban renewal. It seems … that such neighborhoods need to organize, become aware of what they have that they want to preserve, and learn how to preserve it.”
Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors officially incorporated on Sept. 16, 1971. Most of its 29 founding members were part of the Edgehill UMC congregation, affiliated with a nearby university or both. All but one member — the Rev. Frank Horton — were white. They shared the radical belief that a stable, integrated neighborhood was possible — that it could be more than merely an interim moment.
Not everyone in the neighborhood shared that ideal. Susan Wiltshire recalls knocking at the door of a longtime resident while canvassing the neighborhood around the time BHN formally organized. Susan asked whether the resident was familiar with the association, to which the woman responded, “Yes, and we don’t want those communists in this neighborhood!”
The woman had no idea of the revolution to come.
Belmont-Hillsboro in Balance
Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors’ revolutionary power was built by praxis — they were, above all, great neighbors. BHN organized an annual street fair to connect residents, threw holiday parties, created a neighborhood directory, distributed pamphlets with mortgage tips and recruited like-minded integrationists.
Neighborhood organizing was not novel in Nashville when BHN began, but it tended toward negative, crisis-oriented reactions. BHN instead sought a positive vision to guide the neighborhood through uncertainty — a stability of purpose documented in Building a Neighborhood: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.
The 60-page booklet reads like the Civic Design Center’s long-lost demo tape. It expresses an appreciation for both near and distant pasts — the “modern brick duplex at 1712 Sweetbriar Avenue is designed to have general architectural harmony with the neighborhood’s older houses.” It envisioned bike lanes on Belmont Boulevard and a linear park instead of I-440. Though unsuccessful in stopping construction or redirecting funds to transit, BHN and allies won significant design concessions and zoning protections.
Racial integration through fair housing was central to the vision. BHN leaders, active in the private nonprofit Fair Housing Foundation, monitored real estate ads for coded language that sought to steer buyers by race and reported violations to federal authorities. The foundation built a network of pro-integration real estate agents, educated homeowners on how to resist blockbusters, and conducted audits to identify fair-housing violations.
Members also forcefully criticized exclusionary elements of Metro’s proposed consolidated zoning code and the proposed municipal incorporation of Harpeth Hills in Williamson County in 1973. The foundation, in a statement written by TeSelle, targeted regulations such as “minimum lot requirements, prohibition or restriction of multi-family developments, and other measures whose effect is to make it impossible for persons of low or moderate incomes to rent or purchase homes within the municipality.”
Just months later, TeSelle and BHN launched a fight on their own turf — against a proposed multifamily rental development on Hazelwood Avenue.
Wait … what? Isn’t that the definition of “not in my backyard”?
The context then was more complex than the NIMBY/YIMBY spectrum of today. In 1970, the share of renter households in Belmont-Hillsboro was 50 percent greater than the countywide rate. Original single-family houses were being converted, often illegally, to hold several apartments.
As Ashley Wiltshire, who was not involved in the Hazelwood case, puts it, “There was nothing wrong with rental housing. Susan and I were renters for our first couple years in the neighborhood. We weren’t second-class citizens. It was about a balance.”
The effort to balance benefits and burdens between urban and suburban coursed through every cause BHN founders championed — from school integration to fair housing to development to public investment. And it echoed efforts by contemporaries, both locally and nationally — from the Rev. Barnes’ work in Edgehill to a nationwide movement known as “Open Suburbs.”
Roiled by change both realized and threatened, BHN brought Belmont-Hillsboro into balance. From the outside, it was a model for a new ethos of urban development.
Missionaries and Their Children
The early years of BHN were set against a backdrop of federal court orders that demanded the collapse of Nashville’s neighborhood-centric school system as a segregationist bulwark. Those actions threatened to set off a countywide wave of white flight — with all its social, political and fiscal consequences — to suburban school zones unaffected by busing and to outlying counties eager to appeal to white families.
If Belmont-Hillsboro fell to white flight, a series of dominoes would likely topple, from Hillsboro-West End to Richland and beyond. The fact that it didn’t fall proved the power of the Belmont-Hillsboro model for neighborhood conservation.
Metro Nashville adopted its first countywide land use policy plan in 1970, which it updated four years later to emphasize neighborhood conservation strategies. The urban renewal program ended the same year, in 1974, with funding reallocated to grants administered by the Metro Development and Housing Agency for various neighborhood conservation programs, including low-interest loans for homeowners to rehabilitate housing in districts like Waverly-Belmont. The Metropolitan Historical Commission shifted focus from an obsession with the Civil War to a program of historic zoning districts predicated on the presence of homeowner-centered neighborhood groups.
Betty Nixon, who moved to Belmont-Hillsboro in 1971, won the district’s Metro Council seat on a pro-neighborhood platform four years later. What was then politically novel soon became standard — neighborhood associations formed in Hillsboro-West End, Richland and hundreds of other areas and grew into the primary pipeline for local political leadership.
Jessica Trounstine, a Vanderbilt University political scientist who studies how local politics create and perpetuate segregation, notes that the integrationist origins of Nashville’s neighborhood movement were unique. “The fact that this exists in Nashville’s history is incredible,” Trounstine says.
“Most homeowners’ groups that I have come across [elsewhere] were formed to create or maintain segregation,” directly or indirectly, Trounstine remarks. And after a pause: “But has it been able to maintain that identity?”
In a tragic irony, the tools and tactics Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors used to maintain an integrated neighborhood, when given to every neighborhood, created a system that now threatens to erase its achievement.
Early 1970s policies to facilitate apartment construction in suburban Davidson County spurred economic and racial integration — but the full dream of Open Suburbs, both locally and nationally, died in a reactionary backlash that transformed land use politics into an even stronger shield for privileged homeowners. The zoning changes TeSelle hoped would follow sewer system expansion into suburban Davidson County never came to fruition.
Newcomers to urban districts used conservation strategies to remake neighborhoods, rather than cultivate their delicate diversity. Other neighborhood groups adopted Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors’ stance on zoning stability and — stripped of its specific context and social commitments — used it to gatekeep walled gardens. The outcome was an astonishing rise in urban property values, in Belmont-Hillsboro and beyond.
“It reminds me of an old saying,” Ashley Wiltshire says. “‘The missionaries went to Hawai’i and did good. Their children started the pineapple plantations and did well.’ I think we did good with Belmont-Hillsboro. The truth is, we also did well.”
Today
By 2000, Belmont-Hillsboro was Nashville in miniature — its balance of Black and white residents, renter and homeowner, upper- and lower-income and in-between was reflective of the rest of the county. It was the model neighborhood in the third-most-integrated major city in America. It was exactly the neighborhood TeSelle had envisioned three decades earlier.
But then the balance began to shift. In April 2006, a house on Belmont Boulevard became the first residential sale to break the million-dollar threshold in the neighborhood. By the 2020s, the median sale price for single-family houses in Belmont-Hillsboro eclipsed the million-dollar mark. Now that’s the price of a parcel of dirt.
In the Belmont-Hillsboro of 2025, the marginalized are almost a memory, and even the middle class is increasingly crowded out by mansions of the moneyed. Residents question whether a 20th-century model for urban neighborhoods is viable today, but answers about an alternative are less than definitive.
Disappearing Diversity
District 18 Metro Councilmember Tom Cash has lived in the area nearly his entire life. His story mirrors those of many other longtimers — his family first moved into the upstairs apartment of a house on Cedar Lane in Belmont-Hillsboro, then to a duplex on Dallas Avenue before settling in a house in Hillsboro-West End. By the 2000s, that path had begun to disappear.
“There were a lot more homes that had an upstairs apartment,” Cash says. “Those have been going away for a couple of reasons. There’s a demand for single-family homes — and large single-family homes.”
Metro parcel records provide confirmation. The million-dollar teardowns on Sweetbriar Avenue exemplify a trend of small rental properties rapidly disappearing from the neighborhood, both through demolition and deconversion into single-family houses. Forty percent of the multiplexes in Belmont-Hillsboro in 2010 — 257 homes — have since been lost. Rentership in the neighborhood has fallen by half since 2000 and is now at half the rate of Davidson County.
But not all stats are shrinking. Since 2010, the size of the average single-family house has expanded by nearly one-quarter — almost 500 additional square feet — as small units are replaced by mansions and modest old houses receive massive additions. Although more than 1 million square feet of residential floor space has been added, Belmont-Hillsboro is down just one housing unit from where it was in 2010.
Housing types intersect with social equity, according to Metro Planning director Lucy Kempf. “Planning broadly sees housing-type diversity as an important component of sustaining racial and economic diversity,” says Kempf. “However, when supply is tight, upward rental and home price pressures will have the same narrower effect on demographics within moderate density housing as on other housing types.”
The Black population in Belmont-Hillsboro — excluding the Belmont University campus — dropped by more than 40 percent in the 2010s. Now just 5 percent of neighborhood residents are Black — less than one-quarter of the share that had been maintained for three decades since Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors was founded to promote an intentionally integrated neighborhood. Belmont-Hillsboro now meets most of the technical criteria for a segregated neighborhood.
In our efforts to disprove that old, cynical quip about the futility of neighborhood integration, have we simply turned it around? Is an integrated neighborhood now the interim between the time the first Black family moves in and the last Black family is pushed out or bought out?
The Second-Best Time
As it was a half-century ago, the change in Belmont-Hillsboro is owed in large part to outside forces.
Several current and former Belmont-Hillsboro residents interviewed by the Scene note that racial retransition has been even more dramatic on the other side of 12th Avenue South. As racial attitudes softened, urban crime declined and residential preferences shifted, demand for well-located Waverly-Belmont exploded among well-off white homebuyers.
Some residents attribute high-end demand in urban neighborhoods to mass downzonings in Hillwood, West Meade and Green Hills. Others point to parallels in peer cities — gentrification and displacement are phenomena not unique to Belmont-Hillsboro or Nashville. Similar historical processes have occurred across the country.
Up against all these forces, what is a single neighborhood to do?
“Our neighborhood has faced changes and challenges over the last half-century, and our organization has continued to be a place for discussion and shared work to respond to those challenges,” the Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors Inc. Steering Committee says in a statement to the Scene.
Matt Wiltshire — son of BHN co-founders Ashley and Susan — believes some of the qualities his parents sought to preserve have persisted.
“It still feels like a friendly neighborhood,” says Matt Wiltshire of his block on Cedar Lane. “I know almost [everyone] … and we have a really close community.”
But the affordable housing executive and 2023 mayoral contender acknowledges that other changes have been dramatic.
“There are places that are continuing to gentrify across our city … and there are some assets within neighborhoods that I wish we’d been able to acquire and maintain as affordable 20 years ago,” Wiltshire says. “But the best time to plant an oak tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.”
Sweetbriar Avenue
Tomorrow
Doug Sloan found stability in a neighborhood stabilized by Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors’ shadow. Sloan “grew up going from apartment complex to apartment complex” in the Antioch area until the late 1970s, when a family friend who lived next door to Sloan’s grandmother offered his mother a sweetheart deal on a house in Hillsboro-West End. The move, he says, changed the course of his life and gave him a model for the vibrant, diverse neighborhoods Metro Planning was working to cultivate when he served as director from 2015 to 2017.
Sloan believes such dramatic countywide gentrification could have been avoided. Sloan says his predecessor as planning director, Rick Bernhardt, “through NashvilleNext, saw all of this coming and laid out the policies to address it.”
The policies might have been prescient, but the politics have proven perilous. A vacant lot at 21st Avenue South and West Linden Avenue has enticed several prospective developers of large apartment projects in recent years, aligned with the NashvilleNext vision for dense housing development along major corridors. None has reached the community consensus needed to yield rezoning legislation in Nashville’s council-driven process.
“I have some constituents who would like to see more affordable housing,” Councilmember Cash tells the Scene. “I have some that would like for homes to be owner-occupied. That was one of the things that came up with the 21st and West Linden property. That’s not something that I can or want to negotiate. Metro Legal would tell me that’s not kosher, on a discriminatory basis.”
Councilmembers aren’t always so diligent, says Sloan, who now represents developers in rezoning cases. “It’s a conversation I’ve seen repeated all over this county. … Councilmembers hold themselves out as these great progressives, then they turn right around and ask me, ‘Are these for sale or for rent?’ They say they understand all these things, but the moment you approach them with a development that brings that level of density — even if it’s on a corridor — the first time they hear their community say, ‘I don’t want those people in my neighborhood,’ they vote against it.”
Trounstine, the scholar of segregation, bought a house across from the empty lot in 2023. “It’s funny because I study these things, and of all the people who could move across from an empty lot — from a developer’s perspective — you would want me,” she says with a laugh. “But nothing has occurred since we’ve lived there.”
Missing the Middle of the Market
NashvilleNext also called for denser development within neighborhood contexts, but few councilmembers have entertained the broad rezonings required to implement that vision due to a classic prisoner’s dilemma. If every district rezones, the effect may be dispersed — but if only one district rezones, it may receive concentrated redevelopment.
A suite of zoning legislation — introduced last year by at-large councilmember (and Belmont-Hillsboro resident) Quin Evans Segall — attempted to solve the collective action problem with allowances for denser development countywide. The result was a countywide backlash. Key elements were withdrawn — after a raucous public meeting on the Belmont University campus — to allow for further study by the Planning Department.
Beyond political perils, development trends and real estate arithmetic cast doubt on the potential for market-based “missing middle” housing in high-priced neighborhoods like Belmont-Hillsboro. Even the most modest multiplex cannot be affordable when the land underneath it costs $1.25 million. And the emergence of an ultra-luxury-mansion market crowds out even the upper-middle class — the developer of the 1712 Sweetbriar Ave. duplex could rebuild two large units in its place, but two households willing to share a wall can’t pay the premium that a mansion buyer will.
“If there isn’t a market solution, the answer is that the government must help,” Trounstine says. “The only answer is public subsidy.”
But traditional affordable housing finance favors large projects, which conspires with high land costs and the politics of privilege to concentrate affordable housing in marginalized communities.
Hannah Davis is trying to solve that puzzle. Davis leads housing innovation and policy work at the Housing Division of Metro Planning. She helped create the Nashville Catalyst Fund “to provide quick-deployment loans to preserve housing, particularly in high-cost neighborhoods like Belmont-Hillsboro, where affordability is a unique challenge.” The Catalyst Fund recently made its first loan on a quadplex in Madison.
Matt Wiltshire also sees potential in innovative finance. “It’s all just math,” he says about his work to preserve affordability with Pathway Affordable Housing Corp. He notes that the state recently passed legislation to allow cities to use industrial revenue bonds for affordable housing — one part in a financing model that has gained traction around the country.
Lucy Kempf, the current Metro Planning director and a Belmont-Hillsboro resident, points to another piece of state legislation — Senate Bill 2496/House Bill 2623, which passed last year and allows cities to offer density bonuses to market-rate developments that include affordable housing — as a key element to implement NashvilleNext. That legislation was drafted by Think Tennessee, an influential policy shop led by former Metro staffer and Belmont-Hillsboro resident Erin Hafkenschiel.
Neighborhood groups can also take affordable housing into their own hands. Mike Hodge, a veteran community organizer, recalls his work with South Nashville Action People to develop a five-unit affordable housing project and encourage MDHA to build duplexes on vacant lots. It solved a problem for the neighborhood — the lots were dumping grounds and vectors for crime — and for the city.
Like the founders of BHN, Hodge is a member of Edgehill UMC and a student of the late Rev. Bill Barnes. When it comes to the role of neighborhoods today, he speaks in scripture: “Jeremiah 29:7 — seek the welfare of the city, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
A New Model
The history of Belmont-Hillsboro — the neighborhood most at the vanguard of ideological, social and economic change over the past half-century — suggests that its status as the million-dollar teardown epicenter of Nashville’s urban core is not unique. It is simply the first. Others will follow unless a new model for diverse, vibrant neighborhoods can align housing finance, planning and politics.
The history of Belmont-Hillsboro also suggests that a new model for urban neighborhoods does not require total reinvention. The Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors model was never an immutable set of dicta about zoning policies or public engagement — it was about studying the issues, identifying solutions and creating a collaborative vision for the welfare of the whole city.
“It’s heartening to see that there are people working on this problem today,” Ashley Wiltshire says. “There’s a sense in recent years that things are going the wrong way, and a lot of people want to make it better. That’s what Gene TeSelle did — he paid attention to what was going on and did something to make it better.”
Historical information and quotes are sourced from files in Belmont-Hillsboro Neighbors Inc. Records, Special Collections Division, Nashville Public Library, unless otherwise cited in the online version of this story. The author would like to thank Linda Barnickel and Chi Amaefula of the Special Collections Division for their assistance with archival research.
