Nashville Land Giveaway Comes With A Catch — Builders Must Keep It Affordable

South Inglewood is sizzling with reconstruction.

When Kate Wolf and her husband, a musician, moved from Colorado to Nashville three years ago, they settled here — close to hipper parts of East Nashville but still fairly cheap.

Now many of the modest houses clad in aluminum siding that characterize this neighborhood are gone, and 
developers would like the Wolfs’ home to be next. 

She says they write nearly every day with an offer.

“I’m sure everybody on this street gets those letters.”

The houses being built here now tower over the treetops and stretch back from the street like semi trailers. Neighbors derisively call them “tall skinnies
.” Builders are asking prices that are double those of the older homes.

“A lot of tall and skinny ones are going for, like, $400,000 to $500,000,” Wolf says. “So that’s a pretty big price point for this neighborhood.”

Wolf says there’s no chance she could buy in South Inglewood now. But
Nashville officials think there may be a way to keep families like hers from being priced out.

Keeping Nashville Within Reach

The city plans to offer 18 vacant lots — land that tax authorities seized years ago — to nonprofits. They, in turn, would have to build homes at below-market prices.

The program is part of a broader effort to sprinkle below-market homes among those whose values are skyrocketing.

The Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency is also making a dozen properties that it owns available for redevelopment. Other ideas include
requiring developers throughout the city to build affordable units or offering them more financial incentives to do so.

The Planning Department’s deputy director, Doug Sloan, says he wants to keep Nashville within reach of families making $50,000 or so a year.

“They’re our nurses, our police officers, our teachers, Metro employees,” he says. “And we’re simply trying to create tools where we can encourage housing for that workforce.”

‘Need For Land’

The land giveaway isn’t the first attempt to tackle working-class affordability. In downtown, high-rise developers can get subsidies if they set aside a few, cheaper apartments or condo units.

But Mayor Karl Dean says tax-seized properties address a frequent complaint raised by developers. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a property in a hot neighborhood, they can’t afford to build anything inexpensive.

“It answers a real need, which is the need for land,” Dean says.

But the project is primarily meant to help workers find homes closer to their jobs. In addition to East Nashville, the sites are in Madison, Chestnut Hill, West Nashville and North Nashville — l
and that’s near mass transit and not too far away from the city’s commercial centers.

“So it’s an economic issue,” Sloan says. “It’s not just a social issue.”

These properties might not be the last land giveaways: Metro Nashville owns more than 300 tax-seized lots.