Near the new all-brick Wal-Mart superstore, Chuck E. Cheese, and the CoolSprings Galleria is a small road with a few unimposing homes sitting unobscured to the side. That once sleepy lane, Jordan Road, was a haven where folks came to get away from subdivisions, to spread out and enjoy the night sky.
“We lived there for 30 years,” says Betty Brown. “We had cows for several years and a few horses. We just enjoyed being out.” Randall Sands, whose parents moved to Jordan Road 20 years ago, says they moved there because “they thought it would be better out here for me and my sister.”
Gazing at the road now is like viewing the past. But you should probably look now. Like so much of the Cool Springs area of Franklin, there are realty signs posted. McArthur & Sanders is brokering 75 acres along Jordan Road, including the Brown and Sands properties. The old cow and horse pastures, as many before them in Williamson County, soon could become home to more commercial development. It is one of the largest tracts available in the area, says agent Mamie Sanders, and its sale is almost inevitable.
By now, most Middle Tennesseans have discovered that this area is no longer a sleepy, unknown suburb south of Nashville. The recently released 2000 Census confirms Williamson County’s booming growth. In few places was expansion more pronounced than there, where the population doubled in the 1990s. And within Williamson County, the swelling is most severe in the Cool Springs area of Franklin.
In the six years since Cool Springs’ growth exploded, the area has helped Franklin’s tax base double. Last year, Franklin, with a population of 40,000, had more construction value than Knoxville, with a population of 173,890. The value of assessed property in Franklin five years ago was $618 million and is now more than $1 billion.
“I would argue that there is nothing comparable to this in the state,” says Franklin city manager Jay Johnson. “Maybe the north side of Atlanta, or Tyson’s Corner near Washington D.C.”
Comparisons to Atlanta, considered one of the most sprawling cities in America, prove highly disturbing to many area residents, who’d argue that Cool Springs represents precisely the kind of growth we don’t want to see. Yet this explosion is undeniable and, it would seem, unstoppable. In the year 2000, 14 restaurants were constructed or opened in Franklin—most of them in the area defined as Cool Springs near I-65. Four more will open soon. Gary Luffman, director of codes administration for the city of Franklin, says that everything that used to flock to Nashville is now making its way to Cool Springs. “It’s research companies, specialty companies, everything, compressed in a smaller area. Everybody is looking at us, from upscale department stores to U-haul dealerships,” he says.
Cool Springs’ story in many ways is typical of the way so-called edge cities form. Travel to most any major city in the United States, and you’ll see smaller boomtowns around the core. “These are secondary employment centers with clusters of high-rise buildings,” says Malcolm Getz, associate economics professor at Vanderbilt University. “People go there because that’s where employment is; they access their everyday needs there, but can still access the whole cluster for entertainment.”
Generally, phenomena like Cool Springs are good for regions “because it’s not at the expense of other areas,” Getz argues. But the drawbacks include both broad and specific environmental concerns—witness the ongoing battle over state Route 840—and increased demand on services from local governments. As more people shift outside the city’s core, there’s more demand for transportation, which leads to more roads, more traffic, and more pollution.
And some would argue that Nashville itself loses potential revenue from the millions of square feet of new retail and office space that could have located in the bigger city. “That revenue from Cool Springs Galleria could have made a substantial difference to us,” says Bert Mathews, a Nashville developer. While Nashvillians consistently have paid higher property-tax burdens throughout the 1990s, those in Franklin have seen their taxes drop during the decade, thanks largely to the growth of Cool Springs.
How Cool Springs morphed from pastureland much like the area around Jordan Road just 15 years ago to the place it is today is a story of timing. In the 1980s, the area had only one exit off the interstate, where the Southwestern Manufacturing Co. stood. Next to it was a huge water tower with a blue ball atop. “I can remember the old blue ball,” says Franklin Mayor Jerry Sharber. That’s at least one way to distinguish newcomers from old-timers.
“I remember it was just farms,” says T. Vance Little, a Williamson County historian. “When it changed, it seemed like it happened almost overnight.”
CoolSprings Galleria, the true impetus for the area’s growth, opened in August 1991. But before that, lawyer Gary Baker was assembling acres of former farmland and phosphate mines along Interstate 65. By the early 1980s, he had gathered close to 700. Originally, Baker hoped to put a NASCAR racetrack on the acreage, but when that fell through, he found himself with a lot of property on his hands.
“It didn’t take me long to realize, wow, this is right in the path of progress,” Baker says. “Something is getting ready to happen right here, and I might as well make it happen right.”
In the 1980s, he teamed up with Southeast Ventures, whose principal George Volkert was heavily involved in the Hickory Hollow area of Davidson County. Volkert, Baker, and another partner, Jerry Ezell, put together even more land and began constructing an $8 million interchange, called Cool Springs, south of Moore’s Lane. At about the same time, CBL & Associates, the Chattanooga-based developer of shopping malls, began development of the CoolSprings Galleria.
The now almost forgotten Tax Reform Act of 1986, which laid financial waste to property-rich investors, put a wrench in the Southeast Ventures plans, however, while the Galleria powered ahead. So Baker looked elsewhere for money and developers. Finally, in 1992, he found Hines Development Co., a Houston-based firm responsible for developing some of Atlanta’s most valued real estate. Baker secured financing from Provident Life of Chattanooga and the private DeMoss Foundation (an evangelical Christian organization best known for its “Power for Living” ad campaign).
By 1993, the land package was once again at 1,000-plus acres, and Hines and Baker began developing what would later become a master plan for the east side of I-65. Today it holds some 2 million square feet of office space, 1,250 apartments, four hotels, and 550 single-family homes. “It’s been a good investment,” Baker says, understating the enormity of the project—infrastructure costs alone were $45 million, and the property cost about $2,500 an acre on average.
While the Hines property began attracting migrants from Davidson County and parts much beyond, retailers began finding locations for these new office workers to eat, have their clothes cleaned, and be entertained. In 1994, there was $104 million in new construction in Franklin; the amount doubled by the next year, and by 2000, the construction investment skyrocketed to $328.5 million, Luffman says.
The mall’s business was slow in the beginning, but it began to take off in the mid- to late 1990s, after a second generation of retailers gave the Galleria a more upscale mix of stores for shoppers to choose from. CBL owns 51 centers throughout the U.S., and the 160-store Galleria is among the top three, says mall manager Tom Furnari.
The Cool Springs area has attracted dozens of retailers, from Home Depot to Starbucks to Rooms To Go and beyond. Plans for all of them undergo a detailed review in Franklin that dictates everything from the height of the building to the exterior material. Wal-Mart, for example, is not the huge mass of gray that most commonly dots America’s landscape. In Franklin, it’s a sea of burnt-red brick.
Such considerations, proponents reason, help keep this area from becoming another faceless, generic collection of corporate logos and strip malls, like so many suburban developments across the country. Critics argue, however, that design review does little to ameliorate the unrelenting spread of big-box retailers, which inevitably make it harder for smaller businesses to thrive. And in some cases, Franklin’s carefully considered parameters are keeping out certain kinds business that would help diversify the area: For instance, hotels in Cool Springs must have 200 rooms (120 for suites) to be considered, which explains the lack of mom-and-pop roadside inns along what would have been an appropriate landscape for them.
But all that wide-open space is precisely what the big businesses are looking for, because it attracts more establishments just like them—and, by extension, more customers. The mass of retail space outside the Galleria’s door is a godsend, Furnari says. “I always tell retailers, you can never have too much. What is being developed complements the mall,” he says. CoolSprings mall draws record numbers of shoppers because it has five distinctive anchors (Sears, J.C. Penney Co., Hecht’s, Dillard’s, and Parisian) and, of course, because of location, location, location.
That location along I-65 has propelled all of Cool Springs. Compare its visibility to say, Bellevue, where a mall of roughly the same vintage has experienced a much tougher time attracting business. The mall there is barely visible from Interstate 40, as are many of the other stores.
Visitors to Cool Springs may not even realize that there’s a historic downtown area a few miles to the west. Sensitive to the notion that Franklin is simply chain America, the city has erected signs in the area pointing visitors to its quaint town square.
“This area has grown by far the fastest I’ve seen, and I’ve been in business 30 years,” says Bob Martin, planning director for Franklin. “When I give my talks, I tell people that the day the mall opened, on Aug. 8 of ’91, Williamson County’s economy reversed itself.”
Today, the mall is the largest employer in the county with 5,000 workers, and it draws shoppers from northern Alabama up to Nashville and beyond. The year before it opened, the city of Franklin (which annexed northward before its opening) collected about $1 million in sales taxes. Now the mall alone generates about $1 million in sales taxes, Martin says.
On the other side of the interstate, the offices in Cool Springs have attracted at least 14 regional offices of Fortune 500 companies, says Pat Emery, regional vice president of Crescent Resources. Crescent, which is owned by Duke Energy Corp., owns about 1 million square feet of Cool Springs-area office space. Among the tenants are CIGNA Healthcare, American Express, and Metropolitan Life.
“I think it’s definitely caught the eye of the industry on a national level,” says David Wilson of Hines Development. “When you talk to people about locating to Cool Springs, you don’t have to explain to them it’s south of Nashville. They know.”
Cool Springs’ offices were filled because Brentwood’s Maryland Farms was running out of space, and there were few other choices for large tenants, Emery says. “They were locked out of other markets. They had to come here,” he says. “It was the only thing available, and now they come by choice.”
Office space in Cool Springs and Brentwood is typically lumped together in local office-space surveys. Together, they have more than 5 million square feet. Downtown Nashville, excepting the government buildings, has 6.4 million. Crescent has the potential to develop another 2 million square feet in the Cool Springs area.
It’s true that Cool Springs office vacancy is much lower than downtown’s 11 percent, but it’s not necessarily attracting tenants who otherwise would have gone downtown. “Most of the effect would have been on the West End area,” says Fred Harris, vice president of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.
To the chamber, Cool Springs is essentially a place to take the many company executives who want to see alternatives to downtown. “And the fact about Nashville is we don’t have a whole lot of buildable property,” Harris says. “The property that is here is difficult and costly to build on.”
At least for now, property prices and energy costs are cheaper in Cool Springs, Emery says. And transplants are attracted to the area—with its rows of chain stores and half-acre finely manicured lawns—because it looks like home. “Many people get transferred every five to eight years. When they move, they want to know, ‘Where are the best schools, the best places to live, where can my family feel most comfortable?’ ” Emery says.
The Enclave at Carronbridge has a two-story clubhouse with a large pool and space enough for anyone’s idea of a large party. There are security gates, sidewalks, and underground utilities. At the Alara Cool Springs apartments, kickboxing classes, car wash bays, and a billiards room lure tenants.
Construction begins soon on Ashton Park, a 231-home development near Carronbridge east of I-65. The traditional single-family homes will be priced at $375,000 to $500,000 and smaller “cottage-style” homes targeted to empty-nesters and singles will top out at $350,000, says Randy Chastain, president of Main Street Homes, the Murfreesboro-based builder of Ashton Park.
“The area has every convenience known to man,” Chastain says. “There’s quick access to just about everything imaginable.” There’s comfort in the familiar, he says: “People are used to this. They come with a preconceived notion that looks like this.” Depending on who you are, this sounds like pure heaven...or pure hell.
People who buy homes in Williamson County may pay more than in most places in Middle Tennessee, but their tax burden remains relatively low, by big-city standards.
Franklin residents pay a combined city and county tax rate of $3.51 per $100 of assessed value, but the city rate actually has declined four times over the past decade (once for a reappraisal). In 1990, the city property-tax rate was $1.10 per $100 of assessed value; the rate is now at 69 cents. A tax hike is not in Franklin’s near-term future, city manager Johnson says.
Because many of the people pouring into the Cool Springs area do not live in Franklin proper, it could be argued that the county is bearing the disproportionate burden of services, particularly with schools, which is the very reason many people move there in the first place. (That hasn’t always been the case. Forty years ago, many Williamson County parents sent their children northward, to Davidson County’s private schools, to be educated, historian Vance Little says.)
“Even if you increase your property tax and your impact fees, it does not cover the cost of infrastructure and services,” laments Lillian Stewart, former mayor of Franklin and a critic of the hyper-growth in her county. “This is an American phenomenon.
“You have to know what you are subsidizing and pick what you want. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have any growth.”
Williamson County is building about one school a year to accommodate the influx of 600 to 800 new students annually, says Rebecca Schwab, acting director of county schools. The county has 29 schools, compared to 18 a dozen years ago. Franklin’s Special School District has another seven schools, with three added since 1978.
County schools have built their reputation by emphasizing the basics such as reading and math instruction, along with providing extras such as foreign language classes. Not surprisingly, parents are extremely involved, and test scores are among the highest in the state.
That’s not to say that Williamson County spends the most money on its students (barely at the state average) or pays its teachers the highest salaries. While the county’s school budget has generally kept pace with the growth, having doubled in less than 10 years, it needs to be boosted, or the system could lose its edge, Schwab says. “We are not keeping up with the operating budget for the kind of school system people moving here are expecting,” she says.
Stewart predicts that “Williamson County schools are going to get worse,” because growth creates disparity. “They’re piling on more and more, and it’s dysfunctional. That’s the first thing that suffers in boomtowns: the schools.”
The age-old debate about who pays for what is especially divisive in Franklin, where the rise of Cool Springs essentially created a third area of special interest, Mayor Sharber says. “I think of Franklin as three different areas,” he says, “Cool Springs, historic Franklin, and the Highway 96 area. They’re all different.”
A case in point: Cool Springs merchants feel so removed from those in downtown Franklin that they have their own chamber of commerce, and a large one at that. The Cool Springs chamber (affiliated with Brentwood’s) has some 350 members, many of whom represent businesses in the mall or nearby.
“When we started talking to businesses at Cool Springs, we found that a very, very tiny number belonged to any Chamber,” says Suzie Ahlberg, president of the Brentwood and Cool Springs chambers. “When we started probing that, we found out that Cool Springs had its own identity.”
The emergence of Cool Springs obviously places demands on other services, such as roads. Despite good traffic planning to get people to and from the mall, anyone hoping to breeze in and out of the area on a Saturday afternoon will have to sprout wings to do it. Among the traffic solutions planned is a new interstate interchange called McEwen, planned between Cool Springs and Highway 96 exits. Its cost will be around $10 million, to be borne by the city, the state, and developers.
In addition, the city is planning a parallel road to I-65 on the east side just as Mallory Lane functions on the west. It would extend Carruthers from Highway 96 to Moore’s Lane. Developers will pick up most of the cost of that project, Johnson says. Crescent Resources, which is planning a new office building, will be responsible for some of the road expansion.
In addition, the city has bought 83 acres near Liberty Pike on the east side of the interstate to house a fire station and park. Those projects are at least two years away. “It’s a balancing act for elected officials,” Johnson says. “We’re real careful [to] meet the needs of the Cool Springs area for growth, to not ignore the needs of neighborhoods.”
With the economy slowing down, the volume of construction should slow as well. It won’t be another $320 million year in Franklin, Luffman says, but the city is still quite busy. “Every day I meet with two or three individuals or groups proposing something for Franklin. Maybe one of them will follow through.”
Over the next few years, Cool Springs will morph south into Highway 96 and head east as much as natural boundaries allow. “I think Cool Springs will go through several economic cycles,” Mayor Sharber says. “It has been in a very high growth cycle, and I think we will see it flatten some. It will be temporary.”
One of the big challenges over the next decade will be to develop affordable housing. If more housing isn’t found, traffic will only worsen. And therein lies the paradox of this area’s story. As it grows more and needs more workers and builds more houses to put them in, it begins to look more and more like the cities those people have escaped.
Despite impact fees and design restrictions, it still makes sense to develop in Franklin, Emery says. “But the equilibrium is moving,” he notes, adding that he could see a time when it is no longer attractive to build there.
“For now, you’ve got a choice of over 50 restaurants to go to at lunch. There are plenty of hotels and meeting places. You can ride your bike to work. You’ve got everything you need except cultural and performing arts.” Speaking from a different vantage point, developer Bert Mathews essentially says the same thing: “We have to have a heart and soul that makes us different, and that’s downtown. But that said, I like being able to shop at REI and Old Navy."
