Two freshmen Metro councilmembers are launching an ambitious push to reform parts of Nashville's zoning code in an effort to slow down rising housing costs.
Broadly speaking, the goal is to get the private sector to build more homes for middle-income residents by making it easier to build different types of housing across the city, in turn allowing Metro to redirect its own efforts to those in severe need. Additional benefits of the reforms, the sponsors say, could include reduced traffic and increased "community," as neighborhoods grow more self-sufficient and fewer people have to drive for daily needs.
Metro Councilmembers Quin Evans Segall and Rollin Horton filed a suite of bills this week, and the full council is expected to consider them on first reading next week.
"Nashville’s outdated zoning code has generated accelerating urban sprawl, endangering the rural and suburban character of some of the most beautiful parts of Davidson County, while locking our streets in suffocating car traffic and congestion to the point that we have been ranked the worst commute in America," says Horton, whose District 20 includes The Nations and Charlotte Park.
"By necessitating this urban sprawl development pattern, the city’s zoning code forces Nashvillians into car-dependent lifestyles so that it is necessary to drive to meet nearly every daily need, discouraging walkable neighborhoods. This has led to increased vehicular traffic, longer commute times and ever-increasing congestion."
Horton’s bills would accomplish four goals: allow certain residential structures of up to six stories to be served by a single stairwell, eliminate minimum lot sizes in multifamily districts, permit housing by right in commercial districts and ask Metro departments to create pre-approved pattern books for missing middle housing.
Additionally, Evans Segall, an at-large member, is sponsoring several bills. They would allow duplexes to be built wherever single-family homes are allowed countywide, allow triplex and quadplex homes to be built where single-family homes are allowed in the smaller Urban Services District and scale back certain safety standards for some smaller multifamily projects that currently have to match safety standards of large multifamily buildings.
Other proposals include smaller tweaks to Nashville's zoning rules. Evans Segall has set up a website to explain the push and has scheduled public meetings around the county in the coming weeks to discuss the proposals with community members.
"What building missing middle housing allows us to do in Nashville is redirect where we’re putting our subsidies," Evans Segall says, noting that the city in some cases incentivizes projects that house residents making as much as 125 percent of the area median income. "When you're subsidizing up to over 100 percent AMI, it tells you the average person can't afford to live in your city. ... As a government we do not have the capacity to continue subsidizing housing for more than half of this county."
The goal, in part, is to make it easier or more profitable for the private sector to build multifamily housing where otherwise a large, expensive single-family home would be the best option for a developer.
Nashville's 25-year-old zoning regime is seen by some affordable housing supporters, urban planning junkies and even right-leaning property rights advocates as a relic ripe for rewriting. These bills would be a first step toward a complete rewrite, which could take several years.
Conservative Montana and liberal Washington are among the states that have passed major zoning reform laws aimed at encouraging housing construction in the past year. The Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations last week submitted a draft report to the state legislature recommending policies that would encourage local governments to adopt zoning reforms that elevate so-called missing middle housing (smaller multifamily housing options formerly common across the United States but deemphasized during the decades of American suburbanization).
"We're never going to have community if every time we tear down a duplex or a smaller-scale home we build a 6,000-square-foot multimillion-dollar home," Evans Segall says. "A variety of housing [and] a variety of neighbors is what creates that community, and it's what we all are craving in Nashville right now."
Different types of housing, the sponsors argue, allow young professionals and retired people to remain in attractive neighborhoods, in some cases preventing rising housing costs from displacing residents.
Mayor Freddie O'Connell told Scene sister publication the Nashville Post last year that he wanted to try to rewrite Metro's zoning rules during his last term on the Metro Council, but COVID-19 and other issues put the undertaking on the backburner. He said he hoped the Metro Council would consider zoning reform this term, and Horton said the push seems to align with O'Connell's campaign slogan, "I want you to stay."
Any ambitious legislative push by the Metro Council is liable to draw attention from the state legislature. But between efforts in states like Montana, support from center-right think tank the Beacon Center and, according to multiple sources, interest by some in Gov. Bill Lee's office for statewide zoning reform, the issue has at least some bipartisan engagement.
Additional pushback could come from district councilmembers and neighborhood associations committed to preserving neighborhoods as-is and fearful of the wide-ranging application of the duplex, triplex and quadplex permissions.
Evans Segall contends that design restrictions should help stave off concerns about neighborhoods changing, in addition to education about the hoped-for benefits of zoning reform. She also said many single-family properties both in the Urban Services District and in the rest of the county are already eligible for duplexes due to historical uses, and granting blanket permission to build would relieve Metro departments of some of the time-consuming work required to confirm whether properties are eligible for small multifamily uses.
"By artificially restricting the supply of housing through rigid outdated regulations, our city’s housing stock has struggled to keep pace with our growing population, leading to skyrocketing property prices and rental prices," Horton says. "Moreover, the limited variety of housing options available, particularly for family-sized householders, compounds the issue, forcing an increasing number of Nashville families to face a choice between growing financial strain, or the prospect of living farther and farther from work, family and essential services."
This story was first published by our sister publication, the Nashville Post.
