Quote:
Originally Posted by Texcitement
Lots of areas close to downtown were destroyed 50/60 years ago, and they're now being replaced by the new "tall skinnies" you see. I'm not a fan of many of the new t/s but they bring lots of density and people with high disposable incomes, not to mention cleaning up the area.
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I argue that the city isn't actually becoming much denser or walkable, even though there are often 2-4 houses standing where there was just one 10 years ago. Many of the new homes are occupied by childless couples or singles, so there is often only an incremental increase in population over the multi-generational households that occupied the neighborhoods in the past. What's more, all of the new residents are wealthy and own cars. They are unlikely to walk or use the bus system, so bus ridership has no doubt gone down in some areas that now have more residents than they did in the recent past.
The vast wave of tear-downs - indeed over 50% of the original homes in some neighborhoods have been torn down since 2010 - was enabled by revisions to the city's zoning. Here is a 2012 article on some of the changes:
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/nashville-values-development-rise-form-based-code
The tone of this and other 10 year-old articles seems naive in hindsight. You don't sense that any of these people anticipated the large-scale scraping of East Nashville, The Nations, Germantown, etc.
The limited switch to form-based code hasn't causes similar upheavals in the north because the prevailing lot sizes in first-ring suburbs are much smaller. Many SFH lots in established Nashville neighborhoods were roughly 50x150 to 50x200, which meant there was plenty of space to build 2-4 new homes.
By contrast, a common lot size in the Great Lakes area is 35 X 150, but many close to downtowns are more like 25x100. Replacing one old home with one new home is a completely different business situation as opposed to getting 2, 3, 4 new houses.
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