Nashville zoning overhaul: What to know about push for more middle-income housing

A group of Nashville Council members are taking aim at some of the city's barriers to building more middle-income housing with a roster of proposed housing policy changes.

Among them: a bill allowing residential housing in commercial districts, a bill clarifying changes to how "detached accessory dwelling units" are defined and a bill to eliminate lot area minimums for residential multi-family districts.

The bills are spearheaded by At-large Council member Quin Evans Segall and District 20 Council member Rollin Horton, both serving their first terms. The bills will be introduced to the Metro Council for their first of three readings Tuesday.

Evans Segall said the bill package has two goals: streamlining inefficient permitting and codes processes, and ensuring "we are building housing in Nashville for all Nashvillians."

"Since the adoption of the '98 zoning code, we've significantly reduced the types of housing that are available to Nashvillians," she said. Housing options that fall somewhere between detached single-family homes and mid-rise apartment complexes (for example, duplexes, quadplexes and townhomes) are dubbed "missing middle" housing.

"The most important goal is to get a rein on housing costs, which have reached astronomical levels and caused gentrification and displacement and begun to price middle- and working-class families out of our city," Horton said. "It's not the inevitable consequence of a growing or dynamic city, but the result of policy decisions that we've made or failed to make."

In the week since they were filed, the bills have received support from multiple Council members signing on as co-sponsors as well as opposition. Council member Courtney Johnston has proposed two substitutes exempting certain areas from some of the changes.

In a Feb. 2 news conference, Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell said zoning matters are "generally the domain of Council" and he is "looking forward" to hearing how the planning department's housing division, the Metro Codes Department and Metro Council members respond to the proposals.

O'Connell said he expects Planning Director Lucy Kempf and her team to revisit NashvilleNext, a plan intended to guide the city on development decisions through 2040, during his term.

"That is not something we were anticipating doing this year," he said. "We know how important affordability is.... I have personally invested a lot of time over the past decade ensuring we have the most robust toolkit, but our priority this year for advancing affordability for Nashvillians is ensuring that we get as high quality an option as we can on lowering household cost of transportation."

O'Connell is expected to announce in the next week whether his administration will pursue a transit funding vote in November.

Here are some of the most consequential zoning bills under consideration.

Where can you build duplexes?

One bill (BL2024-186) seeks to clarify which properties are eligible for duplexes, a question that currently takes up around 60% of Metro employees' zoning research time, according to Evans Segall. In the time between Thanksgiving and mid-December, she said, Metro received 108 inquiries regarding whether or nor a property was duplex-eligible. It often is, she said, but complicated rules make it a lengthy process to find out.

The bill applies to properties in Nashville's Urban Services District, roughly 200 square miles of the city's highest-density areas.

"At least within the USD, residential and single-family should include our historic duplex uses, which were totally legal almost universally until 1998," Evans Segall said.

The bill includes restrictions for duplexes and style guidelines (think pitched roofs). Evans Segall said she expects more robust design requirements will be added based on feedback from the coming public meeting process.

The bill also allows people to convert a space within their home into an attached dwelling like a "mother-in-law unit," something that could help people age in place and have access to an income stream, with the ultimate goal of reducing displacement, she said.

"I think we would all agree that if the goal of single-family zoning put in in 1998 was to preserve affordable neighborhoods for people, then we have failed," Evans Segall said.

Attached multi-family housing on single-family lots

Another bill seeks to provide housing options in neighborhoods for people who may not want a single-family home: college graduates, newlyweds, people looking to downsize or graduate students.

"This would allow us to start creating that housing stock but do it in a way where the buildings are not out of scale with the community character," Evans Segall said.

Effectively, the bill would allow attached duplexes, triplexes or quadplexes to be built on single-family lots within the USD "as long as it fits within the neighborhood scale and character and looks like a single-family home," she said, referencing historic neighborhoods like Belmont-Hillsboro where this type of housing has long been built.

Defining 'detached accessory dwelling units'

One bill (BL2024-184) would standardize the definition of "detached accessory dwelling units," or detached residential units built on the same property as a larger home.

The bill defines "detached accessory dwelling unit" as a "clearly subordinate" dwelling unit detached from a primary structure permitted on lots that are more than 15,000 square feet, in a historic overlay district, in an urban design overlay with accessory dwelling development standards, or with an alley abutting side or rear property lines. They may be independent or above a garage, and may have separate utility meters.

Eliminating minimum lot sizes in multi-family districts

BL2024-188 would eliminate minimum lot sizes in multi-family zoning districts for multi-family lots, mobile homes and other uses.

This would allow "flexibility" for communities to fit multifamily uses where they want it, Horton said.

Evans Segall said this would remove some barriers to subdividing or building on property already zoned for multifamily residential use.

"We really need to be able to just build the housing where it's zoned to be built," she said.

Housing in commercial districts

Residential buildings would be allowed to be built in certain commercial districts under BL2024-187.

Horton said the main purpose of this bill is to reduce the "rigorous separation of uses that has characterized development patterns since World War II," dividing residential neighborhoods from retail, restaurants and other amenities. Horton said this zoning has resulted in increased reliance on cars and heightened traffic congestion.

"Currently you have to jump through a number of hoops in order to do housing in a commercial services district, like it has to be located on a busy road," he said. "This removes those conditions."

Stairway rule changes could alter how apartments look

The building code currently used in Nashville along with nearly every American and Canadian city requires any residential building above three stories to have two staircases.

Since the requirement was adopted after World War II, fire safety has improved through other regulations on sprinklers and fire-resistant building construction practices, materials and furniture, Horton said.

The double-staircase requirement leads to a common layout for apartment buildings: a long hallway with a staircase on each end, flanked by apartments on each side. Because people prefer bedrooms to have windows and this type of structure allows windows on just one wall of an apartment, many apartments are limited to studio, one- or two-bedroom offerings.

"That makes it very difficult for families to find more affordable multi-family housing, and it pushes our families exclusively onto single-family homes whether they want it or not, because it's the only option that's available for family-size units," Horton said. "Which are by far the most expensive type of housing and generate accelerating urban sprawl as people have to live farther and farther out to get single-family homes."

BL2024-181 would follow the precedent of cities like New York City, Honolulu and Seattle in allowing single-stair apartment buildings up to six stories. The bill also includes limitations on the number of units per floor and additional safety requirements shaped with input from Metro Codes and Planning.

Pick-a-pattern housing

Horton is also the lead-sponsor for a resolution requesting that Metro Codes and Planning create a "pattern book" of medium-density floor plans and instructions for Metro approval.

Evans Segall said a catalogue of this kind would offer developers guidance for building non-single-family homes without the extra expense of coming up with layouts from scratch. This method was common in the United States until suburban development took off, Horton said.

A pattern book would define design standards and give developers the option to "take one of these pre-approved designs off the shelf ... (and) know with confidence it's going to be approved by Planning and the Codes Department," Horton said.

Other changes

Other changes proposed in the slate of bills include:

• Allowing bars and nightclubs as permitted uses within industrial areas

• Allowing daycare centers serving more than 75 children as permitted uses within commercial, multi-family areas

• Removing washer/dryer hookup requirements in certain homes

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville Council members push for zoning overhaul: what to know