When Green Hills was Nashville’s countryside — 80 years before Airbnbs and DADUs — prominent Nashville banker G.A. Puryear hired Olmsted Associates to plat out acreage for bucolic residences down Hillsboro Pike. This correspondence, typewritten alongside hand-drawn sketches and landscape plans, has been preserved by the Library of Congress. As neighborhoods gradually sprung up all around Woodmont Estates, its addresses — Valley Brook, Echo Hill, Knollwood — emerged as a premier Nashville enclave boasting stately residences along sloping hills shady with trees.
Ignoring the odd tennis court, swimming pool or failed construction project, the area’s few dozen lots have largely been preserved. Today, many are multimillion-dollar properties. Residents say the neighborhood’s “great beauty and history” is now under threat from a recent proposal from Woodmont Christian Church, which aims to develop a former parsonage that abuts the church campus wedged between Woodmont Estates and Hillsboro Pike.
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Renderings released by the church have so disrupted the neighborhood that oppositional yard signs — “Preserve Woodmont Estates Neighborhood” — now line its streets. The parsonage’s immediate neighbors, attorneys Bob and Kim Looney, have also hired legal counsel — land use attorney and former Metro Councilmember David Kleinfelter — to help them understand the permitting and zoning process the church must now go through.
“ We're the most directly affected, but many of the neighbors have concerns,” Bob Looney tells the Scene. “ We're not saying they can't do anything, but we feel like we've been good neighbors to the church. We would like to think that neighbors can respect each other and work something out.”
Though the expansion of a wealthy church is not about housing density or excluding new residents, Looney is still careful to distance himself from the NIMBY label.Â
“ This is a nice neighborhood, and, you know, this sort of comes off as, 'Not in my backyard,'” Looney explains. “ That's not our view at all.  We’re happy that the church is thriving, but if you look at the plan they showed us, it’s destroying a beautiful lot and covering it with parking and putting up an outsized structure that has no relationship to the nature of the neighborhood.”
The church included early renderings of a proposed renovation to its congregants in August. These images, which show a large new building surrounded by a parking lot in place of the current parsonage, frustrated Looney and other neighbors, who felt like the church considered community input an afterthought. They have since held a meeting with a small group of neighbors.Â
Zoning attorney Emily Lamb filed the church’s zoning appeal on Oct. 6. In it, she invokes the city’s special exception for religious institutions within residential districts, a permissive part of the code meant to ensure “compatibility.”
In a conversation with the Scene, Kleinfelter emphasizes that the zoning code’s special exception for religious institutions hinges on certain discretionary judgments, such as whether a new building “adversely affects” nearby properties. The neighborhood’s pastoral surroundings and ties to the historic Olmstead firm may help neighbors draw a sharp enough contrast with the church’s proposed renovation to win favor with the Metro’s Board of Zoning Appeals.
Clay Stauffer, senior pastor at Woodmont Christian Church, provided the Scene with the below statement. Stauffer previously lived at the parsonage before moving to Belle Meade.
"We are extremely excited about our plans to build a new family life center on our existing property that will not only better serve our young people and their activities, but give our seniors new and improved meeting and community space. Our goal is to better serve our congregation and local community for generations to come.Â
"We are still in the early stages but have met with our neighbors to discuss our plans and elicit their feedback. We thank them for giving us their time and input as it has been tremendously helpful. In fact, as a result of their feedback we have revised our plan to reflect many of the concerns we heard while still accomplishing our needs on the site.
"We look forward to continuing to work towards this important update to our campus as we know the positive impact it will have."
