One South Nashville neighborhood’s fight against development mirrors citywide debate

This story was co-reported in partnership with the Nashville Banner. It is also part of the Nashville Banner’s ZIP Code Project. The yearlong community engagement effort assigns Banner staffers to various ZIP codes across the city, where they spend significant time listening to residents and elevating stories directly from the community. 

The first interruption came just five minutes into the developer’s virtual presentation. The next two hours would feature plenty more.

One anonymous “concerned citizen” asked for developer Patrizio Murdocca’s home address in a not-so-veiled personal threat. Another meeting attendee, Edna Cano, asked Metro Councilmember Russ Bradford if he was getting “a kickback.”

“Build this somewhere else,” a resident named Jennifer wrote in the meeting chat. 

“The answer is no,” said Iris Arnold.

The message was clear, “abundantly heard and received,” Murdocca said. “The vision isn’t being well received.”

It sounded like Murdocca was prepared to give up on his plan to seek new zoning for a parcel near the intersection of Bell Road and Smith Springs Road in South Nashville. Instead of 64 row homes, priced in the low $300,000 range, he would instead build under the base zoning, allowing 25-30 single-family homes at an estimated per-unit cost of around $600,000, or build nothing at all. 

“You and your neighbors could have also treated me like a human being for the last two hours,” Murdocca wrote in the chat. “You just didn’t.”

The tone of the late-June meeting, called by Bradford to discuss the early-stages proposal, was especially vicious, according to neighbors, Murdocca and Bradford. But it was not without precedent, and it echoes similar meetings all across Davidson County, and the country. In their simplest form, the escalating conflicts pit developers and housing advocates against neighbors opposed to new development, with elected representatives, Metro bureaucrats and less vocal neighbors sometimes trapped in between. 

The arguments in these meetings frequently repeat. Traffic usually reigns supreme. Neighbors worry about new stress on infrastructure, loss of green space and viewsheds and “the right of quiet enjoyment,” as Murdocca puts it, borrowing a legal concept from rental agreements. 

Neighbors usually — though not always — say they support building affordable housing, but that they oppose it on the proposed lot. That position inspired the nickname NIMBY, or Not In My Backyard (the eternal foe of the YIMBY). 

It’s hard to measure the influence neighborhood pushback has had on the production of new housing units. Sometimes, like in the Bell Road case, the loss of proposed units happens even before a developer has filed anything with Metro.

But with housing costs on the rise, and the city expected to again fall woefully short of building the number of units needed in the next decade, Nashville officials are pushing a series of localized and countywide zoning changes. The goal, in tandem with continued funding of publicly supported affordable housing projects, is to spur the private sector to build more housing that is attainable for more people. 

The neighbors

The Bayview neighborhood is about 30 years old, with a single entrance off Bell Road. Most of the approximately 100 homes there have appraised values ranging between $300,000 and $450,000, below the median home value in the city. 

Two-story, brick-fronted homes line cul-de-sacs and sit behind pebbled sidewalks. Residents appreciate the affordability, quietness and proximity to recreational areas around Percy Priest Lake. 

Shauna Creque, a homeowners association leader and admin for the neighborhood Facebook group, moved to Bayview in 2018 with her husband and children. It was their first home, and they moved to the South Nashville neighborhood in part because they could not afford to live in Mt. Juliet, where she is from and would prefer to live. It’s the rare inversion of the typical anecdote: a teacher, first responder or other working person’s forced economic emigration to the surrounding counties. Still, they’ve grown to appreciate the community, and they like walking on lakeside trails and watching Fourth of July fireworks across the lake. 

“I think the overcrowdingness of the 64 townhomes in that tiny little space, it just seems cramped, uncomfortable,” she said. “If there were 20 houses, we’ll welcome 20 new neighbors happily. But as far as the 64 townhomes, it just seems like it would stick out like a sore thumb.”

Martin B. Cherry Nashvill

Neighbors in the Bayview neighborhood had a contentious meeting with the developer proposing nearby townhomes.

While Creque acknowledges that her family would have been more likely to afford a home in the higher-density proposal, and that agricultural neighbors 30 years ago might have had similar complaints about the construction of Bayview, she contends that cost-of-living concerns should remain separate from consideration of a development that she expects will negatively impact her neighborhood. 

“If we wanted to sell our house now and get something similar, we would automatically lose our equity and it wouldn’t make any sense for us to do that,” she said. “I think that’s just a totally separate issue when it comes to the cost of living. Everyone’s trying to pull things together and make it work.”

Jim Grinstead and his wife moved into the neighborhood in 2007. He is especially worried about the traffic that the new development could bring. Several residents asked why the development couldn’t get its own entrance from Bell Road, rather than feeding from their main road, Harbor Lights Drive. (The Nashville Department of Transportation has determined it would be unsafe to add another intersection to that portion of Bell Road.)

“If you could imagine 64 more homes going into that same funnel, it would be just unworkable,” he said. 

What would be appropriate on the parcel? Five or six single-family homes, Grinstead thinks. “Anything larger than that in terms of residential could be a problem.” 

A light office rezoning, perhaps for a medical or dental office, would be OK with him, too, he said. Those uses generate more traffic than a single housing unit, but he said the cars would be spread out throughout the day instead of coming and going at the same time as everyone else in the area. 

Grinstead acknowledged that the row houses would be more affordable for a certain segment of the market but said even the low $300,000s figure “is nowhere close to being affordable housing.” 

Even still, he said, “that doesn’t mean we’re required to fill that slice of the market.”

“Just because there’s a demand doesn’t mean we have to do everything, regardless how reckless it might be, to fill it. There are some times when we just have to say no.”

The developer

Murdocca, who has developed projects in and around Nashville, said the late-June community meeting was “among the top two most antagonistic I’ve ever had.”

And despite his acknowledgment that the proposal had not gone over well, he’s not done with the property. 

“I don’t know yet on that specific property if it will end up being a higher density but more attainable price point, or if it’ll end up becoming a single-family home project that has larger lots but inevitably a higher price point,” he said. “Personally I’d be more passionate about the attainable play, but we’re still working on the feasibility.”

Denser housing projects are less expensive to build per unit, in part because of shared fixed costs, Murdocca said. His mom and sister are teachers, and he said he wants to build housing that people like them could afford. 

“Those $600,000 homes, just plain and simple, are going to bar, broadly speaking, certain age groups, certain demographics,” he said. “Sure, you have exceptions. There’s no technical discrimination. There’s no technical prohibition. But functionally, you end up prohibiting and blocking large segments of the population, specifically the young population, that still has a dream of home ownership the way their parents did or their grandparents did before them.

“Look at all the issues that our country has had because someone couldn’t understand the need of someone else,” he continued. “Homeowners acting like a marginalized population because someone wants to develop near them … They’re not the marginalized ones. The ones who can’t afford homes are the marginalized ones. The ones who get relocated for work and they have to go stay in an extended stay hotel because there’s not enough apartment vacancies, there’s not homes to buy — those are the marginalized people.”

Some residents described Murdocca as arrogant, unprofessional and dismissive during the discussion. Creque didn’t fully blame him for getting defensive, in part blaming her neighbors’ “embarrassing” treatment of him. Murdocca said it’s “fairly normal for those meetings to be very, very emotionally challenging.” To build the row houses, he was seeking a Specific Plan, or SP, zone change. That type of project-by-project custom zoning district has become a favored way of getting projects done in Nashville. It allows developers to expand beyond the bounds of base zoning in terms of project size and scope in exchange for shared community benefits, design restrictions or other guarantees otherwise unavailable as a tool to Metro. 

Murdocca said there were a number of potential benefits he could have provided to the Bayview area as part of the project, depending on city needs and neighbor preferences. 

“The most vocal, angry community members often rob themselves of the opportunity for true compromise and a true conversation because of how impossible those conversations end up becoming,” he said. “I’m not saying every single community member, I am saying the violent ones, treat it almost like a home invasion compared to a conversation and an opportunity to have input in something that more or less is inevitable.”  

The councilmember

Russ Bradford is halfway through his second term representing District 13 on the Metro Council. He said he knew the meeting would be rough and had “mentally prepared” himself. As for the accusation that he was on the take, Bradford said he’s heard it before and has a simple response: Check the campaign finance disclosures. (It’s true: It doesn’t appear that Bradford has disclosed campaign donations from Murdocca or his development company.)

Bradford got into local politics because of a local zoning fight. He said he saw his neighbors get upset by the then-councilmember’s lackluster community engagement for a proposed 300-unit complex on Elm Hill Pike. Having seen the process up close, he decided to run himself. 

And six years later, his perspective on development in the district has shifted. Bradford said he and his partner have been searching for a bigger house for three years. 

“There’s really nothing in the district that fits that middle-class, working-family-type house,” Bradford said. “It’s kind of evolved how I’ve looked at these projects. When I first ran in 2019, I was more of the mindset of if the community does not want it, I won’t move it forward. … I’m still wanting to get that community input, but I’m also now looking at it from the lens of, we can’t keep doing it this way because that’s how we’ve gotten ourselves in this situation, and we’ve got to find a way to work between the two parties to get the housing built that we need.”

Both in the meeting and an interview, Bradford offered general support for Murdocca’s development. Units in the low $300,000 range still “seems a little high” to him, but it’s definitely better than $500,000 or $600,000. 

“The reason everything’s getting more expensive is because we have a high demand and low inventory,” he said. “And that’s just basic economics.”

Both Murdocca and Bradford reject neighbors’ concerns about rising property tax bills. They contend that, with more dense housing, more taxpayers will be sharing the burden, thereby limiting the impact of the rising cost of governing.  

“We have people complaining about homelessness, but they’re not willing to build housing,” Bradford said. “The two issues go hand in hand. … If we can send that message and really drive it home that we’re not trying to erase existing neighborhoods, we’re just looking for better ways to utilize our ever-disappearing amount of land and making it more efficient and more cost-effective for us to build on that land, so that we’re not building half-a-million-dollar homes in parts of town where the average resident can only afford $200,000.”

The future

Similar debates are happening across Nashville. They are also happening in surrounding counties, where some communities are considering shutting down apartment construction altogether. 

On the Metro Council, informal caucuses have formed for and against more general zoning changes aimed at encouraging denser housing. One of the leaders of the supporters is Councilmember Rollin Horton, who shepherded a rezoning plan for The Nations through council this summer. He is one of two candidates vying to take over the Planning & Zoning Committee in September, which would mark a changing of the guard. Councilmember Jennifer Gamble — more skeptical of the movement, and who helped delay the comprehensive NEST rezoning plan last year — has run the committee for the past two years. 

Councilmember Thom Druffel of West Meade and the allied group Save Our Nashville Neighborhoods are rallying opponents both in the district and beyond. 

As evidenced by Horton’s success in The Nations, the group of councilmembers generally in favor of denser housing options is larger than the group in opposition. But those coalitions will be further tested in the coming months, as the Planning Department this week introduced legislation establishing new zoning districts and making other changes, in part aimed at easing the path for developers to build “missing middle” housing in certain parts of town. The bills will be considered for the first of several votes at Tuesday’s Metro Council meeting. 

“That’s one of the reasons we are having housing issues in Nashville, especially affordable housing issues,” said Murat Arik, a professor and director of Middle Tennessee State University’s Business and Economic Research Center. “It’s because of the zoning challenges, and nobody wants to work on broader community-wide zoning changes. They just want to address issues as they come, a piecemeal approach, or going neighborhood by neighborhood. It’s not like they are really comprehensive at trying to address this issue, and in fact, if they try, they may not be able to do that because of the political pressure.”

Arik does not expect housing market pressure, and the car traffic generated by the resultant suburban sprawl, to let up any time soon. That’s in part a good reflection on Nashville, as he sees the region as a strong job creator. But it also could mean certain segments of the population will continue to struggle to afford a place to live. 

“We will continue adding jobs, creating opportunities, inviting people, and that will trigger the housing issues and push the leaders to find some sort of solution,” he said. “I don’t see any kind of short-term resolution to affordable housing challenges here in the region. And as long as we take it as a separate issue, separate than other major issues like infrastructure and transportation, we are not going to be able to solve it.”