Until The Price Is Right, One Edgehill Homeowner Is Staying Put

This is a story about when your neighborhood goes from affordable to in demand. That’s what happened to Janice Key. She moved into her house on Archer Street in the Edgehill neighborhood in 1992. Today, most of her neighbors have sold their homes to developers. But Key has not. She’s resolved to stay put until the price is right.

In the early 90’s, when Key, 64, found out her Church was building low-cost homes just blocks away from where she grew up, she knew she wanted in. She chose a lot on the high side of the sleepy dead-end street with sweeping views of downtown.

“They just built from the ground up. My girlfriend was next door. It was a blessing,” Key says of the house.

Key even helped the construction crew sort materials and saw boards. When it was completed, she and her two sons moved in. The home cost $48,000. It had a backyard and a small garden. Janice would swap perennials with her neighbors, many of whom also had well-tended gardens.

“One lady had a nice cactus plant. We had rose bushes, mums during the winter,” she says recalling Archer Street’s varied plant life. “I think I got carried away planting stuff.”

But today, those quaint houses, sandwiched between 12 South and The Gulch, are now prime real estate. It all started three years ago, developers began asking if she’d like to sell. They’d call her on the phone or knock on her door. “Sell my home? What’s going on? No,” she’d reply.

Her girlfriend next door, though — she did sell. For $300,000. Key, however, was skeptical. So, she started going to community meetings. She studied zoning codes. She learned her parcel is zoned for two houses. She figured if the developers were going to up their profit, so was she.

“I hated sometimes. When they tried to make you feel like, ‘You have to sell. You need to sell,'” she recalls. “I don’t like that.” Key goes on: “Don’t try to sugar coat [that] this little money is going to make it even better for me to sell my house and go somewhere else. That’s not it. You want my home. You want this property. Make me my offer. And we’ll go from there.”   

Here’s the thing about Key. She’s not very sentimental. Even though she knows the house she helped build will likely get leveled. What she is sentimental about is Edgehill, the community she’s spent the better part of her life in.

“That’s the scary part. I don’t know any other part of Nashville. I want to stay in Nashville,” she says.

If she is going to sell she wants a new house in the same part of town and money for retirement. And so she’s waiting. Even after being offered $650,000 just last week.

“They getting closer. They getting close,” she says.

Leaving is looking better since Archer Street is more of a construction zone than a neighborhood. Key is one of the last original owners on the block. Her back yard is still there. But the others have become foundations for new houses.

Now, there’s no room for gardens. “They’re so close together you can’t even plant a flower,” Key says. “It’s got to be in a flower pot.”