Everyone Agrees Housing is an Issue in Nashville and Tennessee, but Candidates and Experts Offer Different Solutions

This fall, we sent out a community survey to ask what issues mattered most to you in this election cycle. This is the latest in our community-focused series.

When the Banner surveyed readers and community members about the most important issues to them this fall, there was one theme that carried over from the 2024 election cycle: people are still worried about housing. 

Nashville has faced an affordable housing crisis since the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession. It’s the other side of the coin to a 2010s population boom that has remade neighborhoods like Germantown, East Nashville and Wedgewood-Houston. If you’re in your mid-twenties with a normal, stable job, you may feel that it will be difficult to ever own a home in Davidson County. For the past two decades, local housing costs have risen at a higher rate than salaries. Each year, that gap widens. People whose families have lived in East, North and South Nashville for generations are being squeezed out, shuffled further from the urban core into areas like Madison, Goodlettsville, and Smyrna — and affordable housing in those outer ring areas is in rapid decline. 

Most experts — and politicians — agree that housing is one of the main issues to solve. The candidates, especially, disagree about how to solve it. 

For this story, the Banner collected earlier questionnaire responses from gubernatorial and legislative candidates about housing and spoke to several voters about their personal experiences with housing in Nashville. The Banner also spoke to experts about potential solutions. 

What the candidates for governor say

As part of our election coverage, the Banner asked each gubernatorial candidate how they would address the cost of rental housing and homeownership if elected. All candidates generally agreed on increasing housing supply to meet elevated demand, but differed on particulars. 

“There is a housing shortage in high-growth areas in Tennessee, but the solution is not more government intervention,” said Republican nominee Marsha Blackburn. She added that she would reduce barriers to development by simplifying permitting. “I will work to grow the economy … to make sure that people can realize the dream of homeownership, and I will work to make sure that spending and regulations don’t make it harder to build affordable, quality homes,” Blackburn said.

Democrat Jerri Green said that, if elected, on the first day of her term she would put $10 million of Tennessee Assistance for Needy Families funding toward “assisting young people and low-income Tennesseans with security deposits to get them into housing.” Green added that she would put more money into homeowner assistance programs and generally try to increase the supply of housing. 

Independent Lauren Pinkston said that a population influx from out of state has “effectively priced Tennesseans out of our own housing market. Young Tennesseans shouldn’t have to wait until age 40 to build equity in a home.” Pinkston wants to rework Tennessee Housing Development Authority loans to help first-time homeowners and current owners who need to make repairs.  

“I’ll partner with Tennessee banks to expand loan access and lower down payments, fully fund the property tax freeze for low-income seniors, and cap how much cities can raise property tax revenue annually,” Pinkston added. “And I’ll let counties charge proportionate impact fees on large developments, with exemptions for affordable housing and small infill projects.”

Green Party candidate Dave Seeman would invest state money in community land trusts, which would buy property and sell or rent it at below-market rates. Seeman added he would pass zoning reform allowing for more housing density and add more support for tenants facing eviction in a landlord-friendly state. He would also look to speed up permitting. 

How we got here and where we’re going

Several housing experts agreed that Nashville is in a difficult spot, but they had different ideas on how things can be fixed.

Jim Fraser is currently an associate professor at Virginia State University. From 2007 to 2018, he taught at Vanderbilt University and advised the city on housing policy. In the last few years before he left for Virginia, Fraser conducted several studies with policy recommendations on how the city might handle affordable housing, gentrification and its massive influx of new people. 

He shared several charts with the Banner showing that, between 2006-2010 and 2020-2024, Nashville added about 46,000 rental homes, but the number renting for under $1,000 per month in 2024 dollars dropped by 15,000. Gentrifying urban-core neighborhoods like East Nashville (-1,323 affordable units), the Nations (-1,258), and North Nashville (-852) bore some of the burden. Surprisingly, though, a lot of affordable rental homes disappeared in further-out areas along Nolensville Pike (-3,250), in Antioch (-2,340), in the 37217 ZIP code by the airport (-1,815) and in Madison (-1,093). During that same time, Fraser’s data showed that many of the city’s Black residents moved out of historic neighborhoods like East Nashville, North Nashville and Edgehill and into Donelson, Goodlettsville, Hermitage, Madison, Antioch and the eight surrounding counties.

One consequence is that people live farther from the city, commuting an hour each way, in areas that don’t have Nashville-level resources to support low-income people. Extending current trends, Fraser projects that by 2036, there will be between 7,500 and 13,400 rental homes costing under $1,000 in 2024 dollars. Fraser compared Nashville to Asheville — another city that went all in on tourism, with many people who live in surrounding counties. 

Fraser also showed that the Barnes Housing Trust, the city’s main tool for leveraging affordable housing, while well-funded, still had not received much public money compared to Oracle’s East Bank project and the new Nissan Stadium, indicating that the problem is values-based, not just market-driven. Still, Fraser said, “the city’s probably done more on [affordable housing] in the last five years than it’s done ever.” 

“I don’t want to say it’s too late,” Fraser said, “but the damage has been done. It’s great that they’re doing something, but the amount of affordable housing that’s been lost in that city is incredible.”

Fraser pointed to the April 2025 Unified Housing Strategy, which calls for 90,000 new homes, with 20,000 defined as affordable housing. One challenge is that the state’s definition of affordable housing is based on Area Median Income (AMI), which is high in Nashville, and developers will likely push for housing to be priced at a higher percentage of AMI to make the project profitable. 

Fraser said the issue was that when the city marketed itself in the comeback after the Great Recession, it didn’t have many tools to keep housing affordable. Developers and investors saw opportunity in multifamily housing complexes. Fraser did one study in North Nashville in which developers saw up to a 60-70 percent return on their initial investment within 18 months. 

Warren Lowell, a professor of Human and Organizational Development at Peabody, is currently working on a paper about how property distress and disrepair typically drives away people who would buy that house to live in it, but is enticing to investors because they can “have the biggest discount.” 

People might not understand the true value of the property,” Lowell said. “They might not understand what you can do with the property. They might not have the resources to do any of those things with that property anyway.” 

This setup, which Lowell said has spread through East Nashville in recent years, can lead to “unbalanced transactions.” Some developers are tearing down the original homes building three houses on those lots, which is adding density, which is adding to total housing and is what urban planners often want in a vacuum. 

“But at the same time,” Lowell said, “you are drastically changing the streetscape in a way that makes it attractive to other kinds of people, and these are all things inside the investors’ heads when they’re buying these properties.” 

Fraser’s solution to the crisis is similar to Seeman, the Green Party candidate. Fraser would like the city to buy land from the private sector and put it in a land trust run by an organization with professionals with the right skill set. 

Much of the crisis boils down to a single statistic. Since 2010, Fraser said, housing prices in Davidson County have increased by an average of 2.3 percent per year, while incomes have grown by an average of only 1.3 percent. If you stack that difference up over 16 years, you get a pretty massive gap. 

“If you don’t do anything,” said Fraser, “what’s really happening is just banishment.” 

Gerard Domènech-Arumí is a labor, public and urban economist at Vanderbilt, by way of Boston and Barcelona. He created the World Housing Inequality Database, which lets users quickly access a wealth of data on the issue. 

“If you want to implement the right policies, you need the right diagnosis,” he said. “And for that, you need the right data.” 

Per the census, he said that more than 50 percent of households in Nashville are burdened by housing costs — meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. He added that around one in four households spend more than half their income on housing. He also referenced Fraser’s statistic, saying that over the past 15 years, housing prices had risen about 160 percent while incomes had grown 84 percent. 

One statistic that gave Domènech-Arumí hope was that over the past year, housing prices had decreased by 2-3 percent. As an economist, he focuses on a simple principle in his field: supply and demand. Like each of the candidates who answered the Banner’s questionnaire, he emphasized the importance of increasing housing supply. Even with all the housing the city has built in the past five years, he said, it is struggling to keep up with massive demand — all of the new people and jobs moving to town. He added that people being pushed out of their neighborhoods is also a key concern in all of this development. 

“That’s the concern with all of these success stories like Nashville, right?” he said. Domènech-Arumí said his hometown of Barcelona has provided some examples of what he wouldn’t do in Nashville. He said history and studies show rent control doesn’t work as a long-term housing solution. Domènech-Arumí added that the government can help with tools like Section 8 vouchers, which he acknowledged have their own set of complications. 

“But ultimately,” he said, “the solution is about building more housing.”

He pointed to Austin as an example of a comparable city doing better with affordable housing. Like Nashville, Austin has seen a massive influx of residents — but unlike Nashville has managed to lower rent costs, in part by building a lot of housing. 

‘I don’t see that in my future at all’

Diamond Bell is a Nashville native who likes to say she is “East Nashville-born, North Nashville-raised.” 

She spent the first few years of her life in the Cayce Homes, but has lived in almost every traditionally affordable area in Nashville, from Antioch to Madison to Donelson Street, just around the corner from the Napier Homes. She spent the most halcyon days of her childhood in North Nashville at a house on 14th Avenue North, right off Buchanan. That home was the first time Bell and her siblings all had their own rooms, and they could walk to Pearl-Cohn or Bud’s Hardware, their favorite neighborhood spot. 

“That’s when it was safe to go outside,” she said. “Just come back when the streetlights were on.”

Bell is 27 now, and throughout her childhood, her mother always found a place to rent in Nashville’s urban core for $700 to $900 per month. But when their landlord sold the 14th Avenue place, the new landlord raised the rent, and Bell’s mother could no longer afford the house. Bell has moved all over town since then, including during her time at Pearl-Cohn and her college years at Trevecca. When she and her sister looked for apartments as adults, they found they didn’t earn enough to realistically afford almost anything else, since she often needed to earn three times the monthly rent to qualify. The two sisters have since been pushed out of the city. They share a two-bedroom apartment in Goodlettsville for $1,780 a month. 

Throughout high school and college, Bell always pictured owning a home in North Nashville. 

“That’s my stomping grounds,” she said. “I feel like that’s where I feel the most culture, love, passion from the community. You see a lot more Black people there, because that’s our area. I just feel like that resonates with me. And if most people say they don’t feel like Nashville’s their home anymore, that’s the one place I can go to.”

“That’s just home to me,” she finished.

As part of Lowell’s study, he projected that Jefferson Street, home to three HBCUs, may be predominantly white in the next decade. 

In recent years, Bell’s faith has wavered. Based on her experiences renting in her hometown — and the stories she’s heard from other people trying to find housing — she’s felt less and less like Nashville is her home, less certain that she’ll ever own property here. 

“I told my mom a couple weeks back that in high school and college, I always felt like my dream was to buy a house,” she said. “I always felt like I had a way to do that, a path to do that.”

“Now, I don’t see that in my future at all.” 

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