The newly published Zoning Code for Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County is scarcely a page-turner. The black-covered, softbound volume does have its moments. Phrases such as “human male genitals in a discernably turgid state” occasionally grab the attention, but you have to look hard to find them. The talk about genitals is found under “Definitions of General Terms—Adult Entertainment—Specified Anatomical Areas.”
Nevertheless, the new Code deserves a close read. It is the document that will determine how Nashville develops and redevelops for the next decade or two. Our first—and, until now, only—comprehensive zoning ordinance went into effect in 1974. The new one—six years in the making, and with months to go before it’s law—will be with us well into the 21st century.
The impact of the zoning code is inescapable. It tells a property owner where an apartment complex or office tower may be built, how tall it can be, how far it must be set back from the property line, how many parking spaces and how much landscaping it must have. The code provides the specific tools for the implementation of Metro’s General Plan and the various Subarea Plans that are already in place.
Still, the 150-plus pages of the Code add up to nothing more than a tool catalog. It does not specify where specific tools are to be used. When the Metro Planning Commission staff has to make specific application of the new rules and regulations, high drama is likely to ensue. Remember the fiasco of the sign ordinance? In that instance, special interests lobbied so ruthlessly that even the most mildly progressive parts of the proposed ordinance were gutted.
The Metro Planning Commission has worked hard to avoid a repeat of that disaster. After years of consultations, advisory committee meetings, and hearings, the Commission is about to go public with its new Code. The Commission is poised to approve a draft and file it as a bill with the Metro Council in November. Optimists on the Commission hope that the public hearing before Council will take place in January and that the Code will become law before Metro holds its budget hearings in May.
The new Code does not attempt to fix Nashville’s suburban sprawl. The proposed document is much more flexible than its predecessor, but it also accepts the fact that Nashvillians love their suburbs—and the cars that take them there.
Ed Owens, a member of the Planning Commission staff, has grown thinner and grayer in the years since he began helping craft the new Code. “In crafting a zoning ordinance,” he says, “there’s no point in making one that doesn’t reflect community values, one that, politically, can’t be adopted.”
The community suggested by the new Code is one that seems to be inching its way into the unknown territory of quality development while still obsessing over the major urban bugaboo of the late 20th century: traffic and parking.
We are driven
The new Code provides for a greater variety of zoning districts. Waxing poetic, Owens describes the new options as “more colors on the palette used to paint the zoning map.”
New zoning districts will offer more opportunities for mixed-use. For example, the new Code will allow a combination of offices and residences on the south end of Music Row, but it will discourage the sort of increased retail development that the neighborhood opposes. Under the new Code, it will be possible to build a commercial strip that looks like Hillsboro Village, rather than fiascos like the Blockbuster strip on West End. Under the new code, we can have Hillsboro Villages where people can actually live over the shop.
The mixed-use provisions forbid the street and sidewalk setbacks that make strip malls such eyesores and pedestrians an endangered species. But they don’t mandate setbacks either. For Nashville, that’s a big step forward.
Meanwhile, the new zoning code does little to solve Nashville’s traffic problems. Perhaps it can’t.
Nashville has a woefully poor mass transit system, and it gets worse every time there is a cutback in federal funding. We slide into our cars every morning like knights strapping on armor. We have no efficient alternative.
Because of the off-street parking requirements contained in our current zoning code, each building in Nashville is an island in a sea of asphalt. The new Code does little to change that. The rules are based on land use, without regard to location. Thus, a restaurant must have one parking space per 100 square feet of floor space. It doesn’t matter whether that restaurant is located in Germantown or in Green Hills.
These off-street parking requirements explain why Nashville has so few neighborhood restaurants—and why our few mom-and-pop restaurants are in old buildings exempt from the code. People who dine at the Mad Platter today park on the streets of Germantown. If the Mad Platter’s owners were to build a new restaurant, they would have to build a parking lot to get those cars off the street. So much for the herb garden out back.
Downtown poses its own set of parking problems. In spite of the bombed-out look of Church Street these days, the new Code does nothing to discourage more surface parking.
When it comes to structured parking, the Code only makes the situation worse. The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce has argued that downtown office space is not competitive with office space in the suburbs because of a shortage of parking. In a concession to the Chamber, the new code includes new incentives for building garages in the central core.
Above-ground parking garages in the center city will now be exempt from the standards that govern how much square footage can be built on a piece of property. Now a developer will be permitted to build one building that includes an office tower and any number of parking levels. The exemption also means that a developer can build a free-standing garage of any height, with no square footage limits at all. For developers, a parking garage is a unique freebie. Structured above-ground parking is the only sort of land use that is exempt from the square-footage standard.
Public, city-built garages have been proposed as a means of creating more downtown parking spaces. Such garages would provide a less expensive alternative for motorists now held hostage by Central Parking and All-Rite. Some developers are also supportive of the idea. They reason that they could lease parking spaces more cheaply than they could build their own.
At least the new Code does take steps to make sure that all these new garages, public or private, will not look like garages. The new Code requires that parking garages be buffered at street level by a veneer of retail or office space, that they have an architectural cladding, and that they be constructed for possible conversion to a non-parking use, just in case we ever get a good mass transit system. Those cosmetic standards are good. The fact remains, however, that more garages in the center city will mean more cars on downtown streets. The Chamber’s lobbyists haven’t told us what to do about that.
Green of judgment
In a progressive gesture, the new Code requires landscape buffers. Surface parking lots must be screened by a perimeter border of trees and shrubs, and the developer must plant trees throughout the lot.
To no one’s surprise, Central Parking is objecting to these requirements. The parking-lot behemoth has requested an exemption for all surface lots in the central city, as well as those in the area that frames the core—that includes the area south of Broadway. So far, the Code’s landscape requirements have remained intact. But watch for this issue to be a hot topic when the Code reaches Metro Council.
The new Code encourages more greenery, but it no longer encourages open plazas such as the vast expanse of paving in front of the SunTrust Building or the grassy knoll next to City Center. Current zoning regulations provide a bonus, in the form of additional square footage, to developers who build these sorts of plazas next to their downtown buildings. After members of the Urban Design Forum, a group of architects and planners, pointed out that such spaces add nothing to the quality of our civic life, the bonus was deleted from the new Code. Predictably, developer Tony Giarratana says he is “disturbed” by the deletion.
Other special interests have bristled at the new limits that would be set on development in floodplains and on hillsides. Too much paving in floodplains can create water run-off problems and lead to the erosion of riverbanks and the destruction of wetlands. Hillside construction ravages the vegetation that holds the earth to the slope. We’ve all seen pictures of the mud slides of California. Let’s just hope that a majority of the Metro Council has seen the same pictures.
Setting the limits
Many architects and planners are critical of the very concept of zoning. They argue that zoning standards, which are necessarily general, must apply to too many different sorts of areas. As a result, the critics complain, zoning is like buying off the rack when what we need is custom tailoring. They point out that we built our best neighborhoods before we had zoning. They note that Houston is not much different from other American cities, even though it still doesn’t have a zoning code.
Our nation’s first zoning laws were enacted in New York in 1916. They were a response to civic concerns about the loss of light and fresh air that resulted from the construction of ever taller and more massive skyscrapers—the Equitable Building of 1915 had piled 1,200,000 square feet of floor space onto a plot of less than one acre. The laws were an attempt to maintain basic quality of life for city-dwellers, even in the midst of boom times.
Since the World War II era, most zoning ordinances have been enacted to segregate land uses. For the most part, zoning has made sure that a factory is not built next to a residential neighborhood. So far so good. But segregated land use has also created residential ghettoes that divide people by class. They also encourage commercial spaces that can only be reached by driving a car.
Old neighborhoods like those of East Nashville or Germantown offered a mixture of housing stock that allowed a bank teller to live in the same community as his bank president. In many new subdivisions, the required size of the lots guarantees that people will be separated on the basis of their incomes.
Old neighborhoods offered corner stores and restaurants, a post office and a bank, churches and schools—buildings compatible with a residential scale and made accessible by sidewalks. In the new subdivision, such neighborly uses are forbidden. At the very least, they are discouraged by off-street parking and setback requirements.
Nashville’s proposed zoning Code recognizes that at least some Nashvillians value a diverse population and that they like the idea of not having to drive 40 minutes between the place where they live and the place where they work. At the same time, the new Code still accommodates those who want to play by the familiar suburbia-tailored rules.
Given Nashville’s current zoning Code, it would be illegal to build a Second Avenue or a Hillsboro Village from scratch. Under the proposed new code, we can build these sorts of areas if we want them. It remains to be seen whether or not we can accept the reality that our city cannot keep sprawling out into some infinite expanse of time and space. A zoning code is only as good as the people who use it.
