bwithers1

Concur. And that was even with a MDHA Design Review Committee permit. In 2025 the East Bank Redevelopment District expires, leaving only the Gallatin Road UDO in place, which makes even the “urban” building placement and glazing requirements in the base zoning voluntary. This UDO was put in place after a court threw out the former Gallatin Road Improvement Plan SP that had placed urban requirements on building permits in the pre-Nashville Next days. A property owner sued Metro over that and this UDO making urban requirements “voluntary” was the result. Canceling or replacing that UDO would require outreach to all of the affected property owners, and it would essentially be adding restrictions back onto to their properties, albeit just the -A district base zoning requirements. Unless, of course, there was an effort to add new requirements. The UDO question would be complicated, and may be impacted by the nature of the prior lawsuit that threw out the previous SP.

March has been working with me and Metro Planning for quite a while now to update the site plan for the next phases of Walden. One of the facets was a prior requirement to extend 18th Street up to Eastland. While I ordinarily support connectivity, the topography in that location makes building the street in the existing right of way infeasible. If you know that area, you know that those streets back there are tiny, lack sidewalks, and have a lot of topography and visibility issues (especially on McEwen), and so creating a vehicular connection to Eastland here makes conditions worse, not better. I walked the site with NDOT’s chief engineer who approved this plan to cap the street with a hammer-head turnaround for fire trucks, garbage, etc. We are working through approvals for an abandonment. The revised site plan lines McEwen with townhomes and moves some things around to have a larger mixed-use presence along Eastland.

After hearing comments for and against this project the Planning Commission unanimously recommended approval of this SP at last night’s meeting. It will now move on to Metro Council for a public hearing scheduled for August 1st.

The RISE East Nashville SP is on the agenda for tonight’s Planning Commission public hearing. Please participate in the public hearing if your schedule permits. We would welcome any constructive feedback.

I will be holding a community meeting about the 800 Main Street project on Wednesday, May 31st at 6:00 p.m. at East Park Community Center. This project lies along the boundary between Districts 5 and 6 and it aligns with some multimodal transportation projects that Council Member Sean Parker and I have been working on, so we are holding this meeting jointly. We encourage anyone who is interested to attend. Right now this item is scheduled for the June 8th Metro Planning Commission meeting agenda.

The small lot sizes, the fact that a lot of those parcels up on Ozark and Glenview, etc, are accessed primarily by an alley that lacks infrastructure to such a degree that NDOT cannot repave it without causing stormwater runoff problems, and the overall topography make significant density increases or even DADUs difficult to construct and support. This is one of those areas where the conditions on the ground belie the geography. It would require huge assemblages of parcels - potentially entire blocks - in order to get the infrastructure requirements to pencil out for private development of any meaningful density increases on Davidson, Ozark, Glenview, maybe even Lenore. Certainly along the east side of 14th. But yes, I agree with you that a larger vision for this portion of Shelby Hills and the Davidson corridor is needed to tie in with the Envision Cayce Master Plan. I have been advocating for that for several years now, and my rezoning of 690 and 1106 Davidson to MUG-A was meant to test the market’s appetite for that. Obviously the Imagine East Bank Vision Plan implied that but did not include the area east of I-24 in the planning study area. I don’t have time left in my term to compete a UDO for the area. My hope is that if I can pass this SP that it will be a starting point and a reference document for a future UDO or planning study or small area plan.

It appears that the former Pawn Shop building at 801 Gallatin (NEC Gallatin/Seymour) will be renovated into a Bank of America branch office. That makes sense given that the Inglewood BofA branch at Gallatin/Stratford closed and the ATM at 800 Main will have to be relocated when that parcel is redeveloped.

As for access to the #56 inbound, this location is steps from the signalized crosswalk at West Greenwood where there is a brand new WeGo bus shelter that was installed as a condition of the Hill Center Greenwood development. This general area of Gallatin has a light and signalized crosswalk at Douglas, McKennie and West Greenwood and so crossing Gallatin in this immediate area is easier and safer than perhaps any other section of Gallatin. Previously H.G. Hill Realty had envisioned a five-story apartment building here. I don’t recall any ground-floor retail in that proposal. But there is no lack of ground-floor commercial space in that vicinity. There is a right of way dedication requirement for the Gallatin frontage so any building would step back from the street a little bit but not too much.

Most of the Envision Cayce buildings will have residential units on the ground floor. Having residential units face the street does activate the street more than having screened parking podiums, for instance. If the units can have doorways facing the street, then that provides even more interaction along the street. At least as much as in the townhomes. These buildings probably will have more street-level activation than the Eastside Heights building, which has taken many years to fill even a small amount of corner retail space. Vacant, papered-over retail spaces do not an activated street make. The Cherry Bark Oak Apartments building (Boscobel IV) works around a champion heritage tree specimen and addresses a fairly steep north-south topographic change while providing a lot of green space for trees lawns, which has been a major priority for the East Nashville community. The trees themselves promote traffic calming and provide for a pleasant pedestrian experience along South 6th Street, which is a local street that is almost entirely residential or institutional in use. For the most part, the Envision Cayce Master Plan calls for corner commercial spaces to face the planned central green space to support smaller businesses in a much calmer and more enjoyable environment that is centrally located for campus residents rather than along an outside edge of the campus that doesn’t even border on another neighborhood. The west side of South 5th Street is likely to remain the home of the Fire Department/OEM/Rescue, DCSO, NDOT/Public Works and other utilitarian uses for our lifetimes. Residential and other dense infill on the west side of 5th is supported by the community plan, but these civic uses aren’t likely to move anytime soon. Across Crutcher lies an NES substation. The proposed new East Bank bridge would lift at Crutcher and go over the river, so what remains of 5th from Crutcher to Davidson would likely not have retail activation for obvious reasons. A lot of that area south of Crutcher is also in the flood plain and retail cannot be constructed at grade level in a flood plain. So South 5th Street is not necessarily going to support the a lot of ground-floor retail other than up at 5th/Shelby where the Envision Cayce Master Plan calls for more intense mixed uses including a grocery or a larger retailer that also offers groceries. On the other hand, adding the large number of housing units here is exactly what is required to support those targeted retail corners and mixed uses along the central green space and further up at the Shelby bike lanes and bus line. As for Shelby House itself, the building on the corner is the actual Samaritan Recovery Community building for in-patient recovery services. They don’t necessarily need or want lots of people coming and going in and out of their lobby. But at the same time, this will not be a blank wall by any means. A lot of the other Shelby House building faces will have residential units on the ground floor connecting to or close to the street. But the corner building is the recovery center itself. Preliminary plans anticipated that the townhome units north of this building along South 5th Street going toward Fatherland would be live-work units that may have ground-floor retail or office spaces with loft apartments above. Those plans are still in process. But in any event, this building will have more pedestrian interest than the 1960s Edgefield Manor cottages across the street. And it will have nearly 375 affordable housing units including many deeply affordable units. That affordable housing need next to the East Bank is more important to Nashville’s future growth than creating just another retail pocket that few of the thousands of affordable housing residents living nearby would likely be able to afford to patronize frequently anyway.

This former Payless Shoes was later home to Calypso Cafe and will now be a Velvet Taco location.

The prior plan was to introduce mixed uses to generate sales taxes to pay bonds for Metro’s share of the renovation costs. Some people are crying about sports bars and singer-songwriter spaces in the renovation plan. Those were there to help generate the sales taxes within the capture area to fund Metro’s obligations toward the renovation to meet the current lease obligations. Then the cost estimates came in far higher than what these revenues could fund. That’s when the Titans went back to the State to seek the hotel tax option. Then Governor Lee asked why an enclosed stadium was not being proposed and he put the $500M in his budget to fund the approximate cost difference of a domed or enclosed stadium so that Tennessee can compete with several surrounding states for several events that we lose due to lack of an enclosed stadium. But yes, I agree with you that the public spaces of this proposal are a real selling point, literally. They will activate the facility, the proposed park and the entire neighborhood and generate lots of sales taxes on site that help to lay for the stadium.

Only if the Planning Commission approves that height. The community plan policy is residential which primarily supports 3-story buildings. You need mixed use zoning - and an underlying mixed use community plan policy - to support building heights greater than three stories in most cases.

This property was rezoned to an SP in 2015 by my predecessor. The SP includes single-family houses off of Village Court at the top of the hill and a multifamily building along Davidson at the bottom of the hill. The property owner is submitting a SP amendment proposal. The main change is to request additional height for the multifamily building atop the parking garage. The parking garage addresses the flood plain issue by lifting the housing above that flood plain elevation. In light of the multistory mixed use buildings that are likely to go in across Davidson along the riverfront, the property owner is requesting additional floors of residential units above the parking garage on this site. Yes, these are all industrial buildings currently. I rezoned the 690 and 1106 Davidson Street buildings from industrial/warehouse to mixed use about two years ago. Those buildings were acquired and are being considered as part of a property assemblage for a larger mixed use riverfront project.

Land Lease. I worked with the owners of two parcels at 690 and 1106 Davidson to rezone them from industrial to mixed use. That served to stop further industrial/warehouse use of those properties. It also served to test the market for further mixed use investment along the Davidson Street corridor. I am looking forward to the fruits of that effort moving forward sooner rather than later.

I have renderings of this project. It steps the height back from Woodland Street so that most of the tower portion kind of aligns with the parking garage of Eastside Heights. It’s a very contemporary design. There is a parking garage entrance off of Woodland closest to Eastside Heights where there is also a parking garage entrance. In this location alley access isn’t really feasible, though. It seems possible to me that similar to the new LaQuinta, this parking garage will make spaces unused by hotel guests available as paid public parking for events. The SP allows a greater floor area ratio than the base zoning in order to accommodate the greater height and building volume. The SP will also proving glazing and design guidance facing I-24 snd, by extension, the East Bank and downtown. This project is located within the MDHA East Bank Redevelopment District, which will be expiring in 2025. MDHA’s Envision Cayce Master Plan calls for replacing the CWA apartment buildings between S 4th Street and I-24 with a 12-story building. And so, taken together, these new construction buildings will begin to create a canyon effect along the eastern face I-24 between Shelby and Woodland that will create a gateway effect into East Nashville at both of those interchanges.

@AronGThanks! The southern end of the campus is starting to come together nicely, but the Envision Cayce Master Plan is only about a quarter done as of today. During the community plan amendment for Envision Cayce the NashvilleNext community plan was changed from residential-only to mixed use at smaller “corner commercial” spaces where the numbered streets intersect with the planned Central Park. My understanding is that after the Cherry Bark Oak apartments at the northeast corner of 6th/Dew and the 5th/Summer buildings get closer to occupancy MDHA may break ground on the remaining units along the 600 block of Dew Street between Cherry Bark Oak apartments and 7th Street where the Martha O’Bryan Center expansion is underway. At that point in a few years we may begin to see the space clearing for the Central Park directly behind the MDHA HQ building. Then and only then will we begun to see spaces constructed for those “corner commercial” cafe spaces along the park. This will be well timed since the addition of market-rate units in rather large numbers is needed to support new commercial ventures in that area. The Cherry Bark Oak and 5th/Summer buildings will have about 100 market-rate units between them to help support that additional commercial nearby. The private 5th/Crutcher project should really help to bolster the market studies for commercial tenants. That is a real opportunity not only to clean up a site that creates dust and pollution but also to kickstart private development between Cayce and Davidson that enhances Cayce’s efforts to bring new resources to a long-neglected community. The majority of the mixed use community plan policy area is along 5th Street between Shelby and Summer. MDHA would need to relocate all of those CWA residents into new Cayce buildings in order to clear those blocks for redevelopment, with the corner of 5th/Shelby being eyed for either a large grocery store or big box retail that would include a grocery component. Otherwise, the largest area of restaurant and retail will likely come along the Davidson Street corridor where folks are exploring some potential projects along the riverfront and working with me on rezoning opportunities and working through significant utility and other constraints. The recent installation of the 108” sewer main down South 6th last year is already helping with that utility effort. Next year’s installation of a similar sewer main down South 5th will also help. One thing that I have learned from Envision Cayce is that Metro Council can give properties all the zoning entitlements in the world but if the utilities are not there to support it nothing gets built anyway. The utility reality is much more difficult than Zoning Twitter. And the utility piece is precisely what is holding back Main Street, a lot of Woodland Street and Davidson Street. That is also why the East Bank Planning Study is so focused on infrastructure to make future growth possible: the East Bank already has Downtown Code community plan policies and often already has zoning for fairly dense housing and mixed uses. It is the utility and infrastructure issue in particular that is holding back those parcels. We are working with engineers to figure that out for future cohesive development.

@Bos2NashWhether condos or apartments, I am just glad to have reached an agreement after several years to move this site from industrial to residential uses. I am not certain of the number of units. These would be market-rate units, which is fine since the adjacent Cayce buildings are close to 50% affordable. The 5th/Summer building that is being constructed at the northern end of this block will be a little over 100 units with roughly half being affordable. Adding some private market-rate units on the perimeter of Cayce, particularly on the southwest corner of the campus, will help to support a potential grocery store at 5th/Shelby that has been called for in the Envision Cayce Master Plan. The location selection for the DCSO headquarters on 5th was also strategic to try to help attract a grocery store at 5th/Shelby.

@Bos2NashThe potential ask is for a sky control plane special exception to allow greater height than base zoning allows on a portion of the site.

It’s a little bit creepy to me that the map shows a geotag of my house on that arial map! But back to the topic at hand: as a reminder, the reason why some of these car-centric designs are still permitted for new builds on Main Street/Gallatin is that the Gallatin Road SP was challenged and thrown out in court and replaced in 2013 by the Gallatin Pike UDO that makes the bulk zoning requirements of the underlying base zoning optional.

A replacement fire hall is being constructed there to replace the old one that was demolished alongside the former DCSO HQ that has since moved to South 5th Street. Across the northern end of that parcel closest to the railroad tracks Metro is building a permanent supportive housing development to move residents off the streets and into housing units with onsite wrap-around services.

I have been otherwise engaged and was not able to follow the discussion about Five Points streetscape and how that devolved into nativism, but here are a few thoughts. The Sidewalk Bill legislation update that I cosponsored in 2019 now requires that new construction projects and some renovations in NashvilleNext Center policy areas update sidewalks to current standards and include street trees. This is generally benefitting the streetscape in Five Points and along Main Street as new projects upgrade the sidewalks, ADA curb ramps, and even sometimes storm drains. The Main/McFerrin intersection is a good example of a spot where three adjacent projects are upgrading the sidewalks to include street trees. The same is true of the privately-owned parcels in Five Points that are being redeveloped. Here are some comments that I offered in the Post about the 1000 Woodland parcel https://www.nashvillepost.com/business/development/five-points-site-eyed-for-two-restaurant-buildings/article_fa6bdf43-0b8c-5491-ab3e-83c81631ef8f.html. This project will greatly improve walkability on that 10th/Woodland intersection. If/when the privately owned parcel at 11th/Clearview redevelops it will be required to update sidewalks on both frontages, which will improve the streetscape. The Woodland Studios property was included in the Five Points Rezoning Plan that I undertook in 2020. The parking lot area is included in the NashvilleNext Mixed Use Corridor policy area that can support additional intensity, particularly on Collector or Arterial corners like 10th/Woodland. My conversation with the owners was that Planning would support MUL-A for now but any potential redevelopment of the parking lot would likely best be served by an SP zoning plan to address the changing topography of the site and the need not to overpower the historic Walnut Exchange Building at the bottom of the hill. This would tend to suggest a tapered or terraced building that steps down the hill somewhat. But in any redevelopment scenario, the sidewalks would be updated to include street trees, etc, similar to the 1012 Main Street project which is also terraced. In the past, one-time grants have been used for streetscape improvements such as one block of specialized lights that now rarely work. In the future, the redesign of Woodland to create bike lanes may help spur discussions about other streetscape and pedestrian improvements. I am unlikely to see either of those through this term but perhaps the next District 6 CM can pick up where I left off. I would also suggest a Business Improvement District for better coordinated garbage/litter collection, signage/wayfinding and beautification improvements. Metro is not quite there yet in terms of having a standardized BID program that neighborhood business centers can use for these purposes. But to my mind, that is a more sustainable and public process than the use of one-time grant funding, especially since the area has long since ceased eligibility for CBDG funding.

Correct. A local architecture firm is working on future plans for this site. The plans have not yet been finalized for submission to the MDHA East Bank Redevelopment District Design Review Committee.

Downtown and Lower Broad in particular have a Business Improvement District, which is how the Nashville Downtown Partnership pays for the extra garbage collections, the crews who clean the area continuously and other services that are in addition to the basic service levels that are provided to the entire Urban Services District. The Central Precinct provides police patrol services at a much greater rate of saturation downtown than at other areas of town. Even the Fire Department has purchased special smaller-sized vehicles to respond to ambulance and other emergency calls since regular fire engines and ambulances struggle to move around downtown’s narrow and densely crowded streets safely. The fact that the BID-funded special services cannot seem to keep up with the activity downtown in recent years speaks to the level of the problems that downtown business owners and residents are raising to Metro Government and in particular to the Mayor’s Office.

Those are some interesting points. This building was constructed during WWII, and so if it had been lavish that would have been noteworthy. I’m surprised that given the wartime materials and rationing conditions that this building was constructed at all. I would describe the building as simple yet elegant, at least when cleaned up. The whiteboard writing added a uniquely human touch to the space and that is why I snapped a photo of that. Dr. Williams’s presentation talked a little bit about how this facility was part of a launch of political and career influence for African American mothers in Nashville, and that is something about which I would like to learn more. It would also be interesting to learn more about those who attended school here and what they were able to accomplish later in life. For my part, when this came before Metro Council last time some of us had asked MNPS to provide more feasibility analysis or a site plan to explore a potential rehab of some or all of this building as part of the proposed Nashville School of the Arts. For instance, could this building serve as a school library or something like that. MNPS asserted that the building was not salvageable and that they would plan to demolish it but didn’t provide additional detail to support that assertion. That’s why I voted against acquisition last time. I didn’t want Metro to buy the property with the stated intent to demolish an historic structure. It is one thing for private property owners to demolish historic buildings that they own. It is quite another for Metro to buy an historic building with the intent of demolishing it. In retrospect, perhaps at that time I should have voted to acquire the property but not given it to MNPS without first requiring a structural engineer’s report which is quite commonly required for demolition requests within historic districts. But in this case that structural evaluation information was provided and we have authorized acquisition. At some point in the near future Metro can conduct some feasibility analysis for adaptive reuse possibilities and lead community engagement efforts to select a future use and user of this building. And perhaps in that reimagined state this building can once again bring people pride as well as joy.

This made me laugh out loud, and I needed that!