Nashville Has a Land-Use Problem, Not a Data Center Problem

Metro Council could potentially spend $37 million to buy back land DC BLOX purchased for $23 million last week. The public fight looks like it's about data centers.

It's not.

It's about how Nashville handles land use — which has mostly been fighting battles lost a year ago.

That's Alain Bertaud's argument in Order Without Design, and it isn't a controversial position among urban economists. Everything — housing affordability, transportation, tax base, neighborhood character, industrial development — flows downstream from how a city allocates and regulates its land. Get land use right, and the rest is easier. Get it wrong, and you spend the next decade paying for it.

Nashville has historically gotten it wrong. Not because we lack talent or intent — we lack the timing.

Consider the data center fight. Hundreds of people showed up to Metro Council to speak against DC BLOX. Some of them probably didn't know what a data center was a week before the meeting. That's not a criticism of them; it's a criticism of us. Meta built a million square feet of data center capacity outside the city years ago. Where was the fight for that one?

It wasn't a fight because it wasn't yet a story. And by the time DC BLOX filed paperwork next to the zoo, the story had a villain and the villain had already bought the land.

Same pattern with housing affordability.

Metro is furiously working on it right now — Barnes Fund at $23 million, a new $7 million revolving loan fund, the $75 million Catalyst Fund, Eastpoint groundbreaking. Real capital, real intent. But most of that work is trying to fix affordability after unaffordability set in. The tools we're building now would have been meaningfully more effective five years ago, when the land was still cheap and the trajectory could have been bent instead of corrected.

Even when Metro does write forward-looking policy, it doesn't seem to matter. The new RN and RL zoning districts were supposed to open Nashville to middle housing — triplexes, quadplexes, the kind of density that makes neighborhoods walkable and housing attainable at scale. That policy exists. It's live. But, walk through The Nations right now — the neighborhood at the center of the density conversation — and what's going up? Tall and skinnies. Same 3-story single-family homes we've been building for a decade.

The policy is forward-looking. The culture isn't. Developers optimize for what they know how to build, capital knows how to finance, and neighborhoods know how to fight over. Triplexes threaten more of those things than tall-and-skinnies do, so triplexes don't get built. The zoning is a tool no one has picked up.

That's a real problem.

Nashville continues to operate like a giant suburb even after we've written the code that would let us stop. We keep playing whack-a-mole with each new land-use fight — data centers today, some other industrial use tomorrow — because we treat land use as the last item on the list instead of the first. We fight the fight in front of us because we didn't build a framework for the one behind us.

And we may spend $37 million just to correct one of them.