What will Nashville's new East Bank neighborhood look like? Planners are taking their cues from the 'DNA of our city'

Take a walk in some of downtown Nashville's most dynamic, livable neighborhoods and you'll notice clues of one crucial fact.

They took a long time to get that way.

In Germantown and Salemtown, historic buildings and new townhomes blend together along cobblestone streets. Modern improvements like traffic calming measures encourage drivers to slow down and share the road with cyclists. In the Gulch, restaurants and businesses buzz with pedestrian traffic, which flows out onto outdoor patios in the warm weather months.

Throughout East Nashville, neighborhoods are stitched together with vibrant restaurants, parks, corner stores and other businesses that give each block a distinct character.

Nashville neighborhoods, which can change rapidly due to road work and real estate developments, may not be perfect. But they offer a road map for the city's East Bank, where construction has begun on a new set of neighborhoods.

At the center of the first phase of development is the new Nissan Stadium, future home of the Tennessee Titans. But what will emerge around that stadium — in an area overwhelmingly occupied by parking lots — will be decided in tandem by the city of Nashville and master developer The Fallon Company.

From parking lots to homes: 'Evolve slowly over time'

While the timeline for building the new Nissan Stadium is relatively strict, the neighborhood that is set to emerge around it will be built over many years.

And according to city planners, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

"Outstanding neighborhoods evolve slowly over time," Metro Planning Director Lucy Kempf said. "There are places elsewhere in the country where it feels like a neighborhood just popped up overnight, and there isn’t the variety and texture that you come to really value in an area that has a really good sense of place."

Though the timeline is long, there are some key guideposts laid out in the agreement between the city and Fallon Company.

The city is interested in building a livable area, not an entertainment district.

"We've done our darndest to try to make it so what we're incentivizing is a neighborhood," said Bob Mendes, director of development for the mayor's office.

The first priority for the city, and for Fallon Company, is housing. Creating residential units and getting people living in the area as quickly as possible will attract businesses, Mendes said. According to the agreement, Fallon will construct 1,550 residential units, including 695 affordable units, on the first 30 acres of land being developed.

"We wanted to drive residential milestones as the key to building a neighborhood," Mendes said. "The theory is that if a neighborhood is our goal, you can't have [that] without people living there. You can't have people living there without residential units."

According to the agreement with Fallon, buildings should be mixed-use, with retail space on the ground floor. The developer will be responsible for pursuing grocery stores, local retail businesses and restaurants. A day care will be built in the first residential building, which will also be one of the affordable buildings.

Furthermore, multiple uses will be prohibited or limited. No short-term rentals will be allowed on the land owned by Metro, and the number of hotel rooms will be limited.

When designing streetscapes, Metro Planning will take a modern approach that invites public use of the areas. That will look like wider sidewalks, outdoor tables and seating areas, traffic calming efforts and landscaping.

Who will be able to afford to live in the neighborhood?

The levels of affordability will vary among the affordable housing units constructed by Fallon. Rent will be capped at 30%, 60% and 80% of the Nashville Area Median Income (AMI).

Two residential buildings will be made up entirely of affordable housing, totaling 600 units. Two-thirds of the affordable units will have rent set at affordable prices for people who earn 60% of the AMI or lower (an affordable rent price is defined as comprising no more than 30% of a family's monthly income).

Another 95 units will be located within market-rate apartment buildings and will be designated for people who make between 60% to 80% of the AMI.

The median family income for the Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area (which includes Murfreesboro and Franklin) is identified by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as $106,900. For a family of four people, for example, annual income would be capped at $85,500 to qualify for a unit affordable for people making 80% of the AMI.

With the majority of affordable housing set aside for people making less than 60% of Nashville's AMI, the area will be relatively affordable to many different types of workers. Fallon is also responsible for building 855 market-rate housing units.

Will there be parks and green space?

While the Imagine East Bank plan calls for swaths of parks and green space, large-scale implementation of that vision is yet to come.

The document, adopted by the Metro Planning Commission in 2022, encourages future development of a riverfront park on Metro-owned land. An East Bank Park is envisioned for the area between the new Nissan Stadium and the river, but that will have to wait until demolition of the old stadium.

While there isn't yet a concrete plan to build the East Bank Park, Metro's agreement with Fallon incentivizes the construction of parklets and open space interspersed between future buildings.

Fallon president Brian Awe said the public realm is just as important as the buildings in the master-planned development.

"There will be a lot of really great landscaping work that's done here," Awe said. "It's very much a focus of ours to make sure that it's an inviting space that feels open and accessible for everybody."

Neighborhood character to borrow elements from downtown, East Nashville

The city's aims to create several subneighborhoods within the East Bank's massive 550 acres. These distinct new neighborhoods, according to Kempf, will take design and character cues from surrounding areas.

"In this part of the city, we looked at cues from East Nashville, we looked at cues from the river, from downtown," she said. "Because that’s part of the DNA of our city. It’s been established for a long time."

If future development matches what has been laid out in both vision documents and the city's agreement with Fallon, East Bank neighborhoods will be denser than most of East Nashville. Residential density levels will be more similar to downtown Nashville neighborhoods just across the river.

The city also intends to extend the Downtown Code across the river, thus providing more detailed guidelines that apply to building heights and land use. That process is expected to take place later this year.

However, the overall livability of the East Bank neighborhoods to come will be unlike the entertainment districts of Lower Broadway and SoBro, where thousands of hotel rooms are concentrated to support Nashville's tourism industry.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Inside Nashville's plan to create livable neighborhoods on East Bank