11 minute read
A Brief History of Land Use Planning in Nashville
Nashville has experienced many cycles of growth and development in its more than 200-year history. Many of those cycles have corresponded with and been influenced by population growth and technological change that impacted how we relate to and use the land we occupy. In each of those cycles, we find in the historical record evidence of the same tension many feel in Nashville today – that of identifying itself as growing, future-oriented, and open to cultural adaptation yet also a city that does not want to lose touch with its existing character, natural environment, and cultural hallmarks that draw people here and convince them to stay for generations. Over the last 100 years, land use planning and zoning have been one of the most influential tools in shaping the development of our city. It is worth reflecting on the context in which those tools were used and how they have changed over the decades to learn how we might continue to modernize them to meet the needs of Nashville today and Nashville in the future.
In the earliest days of Nashville’s history, prior to wide-spread use of land use and zoning laws, the primary legal mechanism for controlling development and settling disputes between neighbors over their respective use of the land and its impact on others — whether such use had an adverse effect on value or quality of life or both — was through common law nuisance actions.1 Over time, the cost of litigation and the inability of nuisance law to reach all questionable or incompatible land uses — much less prevent them — led communities to search for more effective alternatives.
Creating a plan for the reasonable spacing of buildings and streets was a model used by many of the earliest cities in the American colonies for public health reasons, to minimize disputes between property owners, and to attract development.2 When Nashville (originally Nashborough) was created by an Act of the North Carolina Legislature in 1784, the 200 acre tract of land was surveyed and a plan for the city was developed, establishing 27 rectangular blocks, containing 165 lots, laid out in a grid pattern with four acres reserved for the construction of a Public Square.3 However, proactive land-use planning and zoning didn’t become more widespread until the late 19th century when the Industrial Revolution brought dramatic changes to the way people lived and worked in cities.
Cities grew dramatically in the latter half of the 1800s as people left rural areas and moved to the cities seeking jobs in factories and offices. With no rules to govern the development, these new growth patterns led to deplorable public health conditions in most cities. Specifically in Nashville during this time, early residential areas that extended from the central business district (Germantown to the north, Edgefield to the east, and Rutledge Hill to the south) were soon a mix of residential alongside industrial and manufacturing businesses. Following completion of the Capitol building in 1853, new businesses and government offices flowed into the core of downtown resulting in most of the grand single-family homes that had been built along the north and west slopes of Capital Hill being converted into boarding houses as families left the city center. Around the same time as industrial and business growth changed the character of the city center, technological advancements in transportation made it possible to connect the central business district of the city with suburban developments along the fringe.4
By the early 20th century, with the myriad new land uses that came with the Industrial Revolution, people began to look to their elected officials for less costly and more effective ways to resolve land use conflicts, improve the value of the land, and improve public health. Tennessee followed this trend and began creating governmental bodies dedicated to proactive land-use planning.
The General Assembly authorized the creation of the Memphis planning commission in 1920. Planning commissions were authorized for Knoxville and Chattanooga in 1922 and for Nashville in 1925. Tennessee’s local governments began seeking authority to zone land uses around the same time. The General Assembly passed the first enabling legislation authorizing counties and municipalities to enact zoning regulations in 19355 based on model legislation created in 1926 by the Department of Commerce under then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Tennessee adopted the subdivision regulation provisions of the Department of Commerce’s 1928 Standard City Planning Enabling Acts in 1935.6
Land use is a generic term that refers to the function of land, particularly what it’s being used for. As a development tool in cities, towns, and suburbs, proactive land use is a process of organizing the use of land to meet the public and private needs of occupants while respecting the capabilities of the land. Many communities create a comprehensive plan, which establishes a community’s goals for its physical growth and development. Zoning is the primary means of implementing the goals and objectives of the plan. Traditional zoning allocates the land in a municipality by dividing it into different districts or zones in which certain activities are prohibited and others are permitted. Land use planning and zoning regulations significantly shape and impact our physical environment and can affect property rights, housing costs, access to jobs and economic opportunities, climate mitigation and resilience, and racial equity among other matters, which is why it remains a controversial public policy to this day.
The evolution of land-use regulation through the 20th century produced additional ways of establishing community standards. In Nashville, the 1950s and 1960s brought the Urban Renewal Projects, including the Capitol Hill Redevelopment Project and replacement of numerous buildings built between the 1870s and 1920s to make way for skyscrapers. While Urban Renewal was intended to revitalize the city, there were many casualties including demolition of lower-income housing, all the Federal and Classical townhomes surrounding Capitol Hill, the James K. Polk home, and the Public Square, as well as disruption of the integrity of several historic neighborhoods in the vicinity of downtown.
In the later part of the 20th century, communities began to look for ways not only to control the way their communities developed but sought to preserve historically significant structures, protect historic resources, and otherwise preserve the historic character of established neighborhoods. In Nashville, many believed the city was at risk of losing its remaining historic resources if it did not incorporate preservation into its proactive planning process. As a result, in 1974, Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County adopted an ordinance creating historic zoning and authorizing the creation of the Metropolitan Historical Commission (MHC), and in 1977, the Metropolitan Historic Zoning Commission (MHZC) was established. The first historic zoning district, Edgefield, was designated in 1978.7 The ordinance was amended in 1983 to bring it into compliance with revised state enabling law, and again, in January 1985, to establish a second, less-restrictive type of historic zoning called neighborhood conservation zoning. These bodies work to incorporate preservation planning into the general plan of Nashville as a proactive approach to preserving Nashville’s historic resources and protecting Nashville’s unique historic character.
Historic zoning in Metro Nashville is an umbrella term that currently includes six different types of historic overlays designed to protect the architectural character of Nashville’s historic buildings and sites while managing growth and change with predictability and transparency in the development process.8 Historic zoning overlays are applied in addition to the base or land-use zoning of an area and do not impact use. Today there are dozens of historic landmarks and more than 22 neighborhood conservation overlays across Metro Nashville.
In the modern era, additional strategies, such as concurrency requirements and performance-based planning, have been developed to reduce the strain on public resources and adverse effects on quality of life that sometimes come with growth and development.9 Either can be an alternative to zoning, but in many cases communities have incorporated a hybrid approach utilizing one or more of these approaches in addition to base zoning. Since the late 1990s, Metro Nashville has enacted several of these additional zoning overlays, including Urban Design Overlay, Contextual Overlays, Institutional Overlay, Corridor Design Overlays, and Planned Unit Developments, along with many specific purpose overlay districts like the Greenway Overlay District and Floodplain Overlay District.10 These planning tools that focus more on form and impact than separation of uses can help cities meet the changing needs of their community, from addressing housing shortages to incentivizing low-carbon development and preparing for climate change with the goal that the community gets the kind of growth and benefits it desires, balanced with reasonable costs (tangible and intangible) to the community and the environment.11
Nashville is defined by the people that live here today as well as those that preceded us. The land-use planning tools developed and implemented over the last 100 years, including historic preservation planning and zoning, are one of the important ways the city can maintain its unique mix of cultural conservation and preservation of our city while staying open and adaptive to change.12 Our ability to strike this balance (or not) will determine how resilient we will be as a city in the decades ahead.
Endnotes
1 Nuisance is a common law doctrine “grounded in the maxim that ‘a man shall not use his property so as to harm another.’”
2 Early colonial cities in North America were planned under the authority of the King of England by joint stock companies, the forerunners of modern corporations. Their goal was both to prevent conditions that might pose health threats and to stimulate growth in the colonies. For example, when Williamsburg was established as the new capital of Virginia, enabling legislation specified the position of the roads, amount of land to be set aside for the town, the site for the capitol building and further authorized the directors of the town to adopt rules and regulations for dwelling size and setbacks. Other early examples of proactively planned cities include Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and Washington, D.C. See, e.g., Land Use in Tennessee—Striking a Balance, Report of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, at pg. 8, available at https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/ tn/tacir/documents/LandUseInTN2013.pdf
3 See, Then & Now, A Historic Preservation Functional Plan, pg. 2 available at https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/1998_Preservation_Plan.pdf?ct=1663277176
4 The introduction of the electric streetcar in 1889 attracted homeowners to the area that would become Hillsboro-West End and 16th Avenue and adjoining areas near Vanderbilt University, which itself had only been established in 1874. Id. at pg. 4.
5 Public Chapter 33, Acts of 1935.
6 Public Chapter 45, Acts of 1935.
7 Nashville Metro Historic Zoning Handbook, pg. 2 available at Handbookrevised2023. pdf (nashville.gov)
8 The six types of current historic zoning overlays are historic preservation, neighborhood conservation, historic bed and breakfast, historic landmarks, historic landmark interiors, and historic signage. See, Chapter 17.36.110 of the Code. See also, https://training.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/DG_NCZOTurn_2022. pdf?ct=1651868291 for training materials and explanations of conservation overlay design standards.
9 Concurrency as a development tool requires adequate infrastructure for development and can be used both to direct development to places where infrastructure already exists, or will soon be built, and to prohibit development in areas that would require costly new public infrastructure. Performance-based zoning (sometimes called “impact zoning” or “flexible zoning”) is a method of regulating the design and location of each proposed development based on factors that related directly to the development’s site and the specific effects of the development on the surrounding community. The performance standards typically cover traffic flow, density, noise, and access to light and air among other effects. In some communities, performance standards may be tied to environmental impacts or certain climate mitigating impacts. See, S. M. White & Elisa L. Paster, Creating Effective Land Use Regulations through Concurrency, 43 NAT. RES. J. 753 (2003). Available at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol43/iss3/4 for a discussion of Concurrency as a land use planning tool and see, https://www.planning.org/divisions/planningandlaw/propertytopics.htm for a discussion of the various flexible zoning tools and techniques.
10 Chapter 17.36 of the Code. (Ord. BL2000-364 § 1 (part), 2000; Ord. 96-555 § 9.1(A), 1997).
11 For more information about form-based codes as a replacement for traditional zoning, see, https://formbasedcodes.org
12 See, e.g., Then & Now, A Historic Preservation Functional Plan, at pg. 7 (“[T]here is a real need to reconcile the changing face of the city with its existing historic re-
sources and to recognize that our heritage can be used as a tool to enhance new development rather than compete with it.”).
Additional Resources of Interest:
NashvilleMaps | Nashville.gov – zoning and land use maps, etc.
Swipe into the past.....Historical maps of Nashville (arcgis.com)
Special Collections | Nashville Public Library – historic photos of Nashville
