I moved to Nashville in 1996, back when it was a sleepy third-tier city. The post 2010 boom has brought with it thousands of cheap-looking but expensive new homes in every prewar neighborhood. It started around 2005 in the Murphy Rd. area but now it's absolutely everywhere. I took these photos on one day in September and another in November...the September photos were in The Nations and the November photos were right off of White Bridge just north of I-40 (not sure what that area is called).
So typical...total disregard for utility poles, context, etc.:
Brick is very rare:
yuppie palace:
This is a common sight throughout the city...a very small old house awaiting its inevitable teardown:
This is about as good as it gets for infill:
And this is about as good as it gets for urban-ish-looking new apartments/townhomes:
Huge utility pole right in the middle of this neighborhood:
Yuppies eat here:
Ugly and dangerous bike lane:
The zoning enables these attached duplexes:
You have won second place in a beauty contest:
No collusion:
Another attached duplex:
Another attached duplex:
A new subdivision:
Another view:
Back in town, near White Bridge Rd.:
Block foundations...CHEAP:
Is this hut actually a duplex?
A MICHIGAN flag in Tennessee:
Let's pay $400k to live right next to the highway and a light-up sign:
Yikes that is bad. Every city has its share of ugly housing stock. But there's something about your pictures - the grey skies and disrepair of the streets and generally shoddy physical infrastructure, the depressingly lifeless winter foliage. No wonder so many people suffer from seasonal affective disorder.
It's certainly an odd collection of styles and contextualization.
I see things that would be at home in the Seattle area, things that would fit on the Gulf shores, things that look like stuff going up in Houston, some that appear to be from some nationwide generic home plans. Seeing the sharply "contemporary" ones on lots with enormous lawns is just bizarre, although not as bizarre as the contemporary ones that appear to be trying for quirky but just ended up looking like the builders had the plans upside down for some part of the build.
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Not really sure what you're trying to prove here. It isn't exactly hard to find some ugly houses and take pictures of them on an ugly day, but I don't really see where it proves anything.
I'm not sure what you hope to achieve by complaining about "gentrification" in the same breath you're complaining that new development isn't fancy enough. Some of that stuff is ugly and some of it is fine, which is exactly the same as the older stuff in your pictures, which is no great shakes either. It's all the same category of roughly suburban basic vernacular for whatever decade it was built.
I don't know what your actual complaint is here. It seems like you're mostly just ranting about change itself. A forum that's broadly supportive of infill is unlikely to be sympathetic unless you can pinpoint a more specific complaint.
I don't see the huge issue. Are most of these as urban as I would like? No. Are some of these kind of ugly? Yes. But really...We're complaining that a city is so hot people are actually building houses in the city? What a shame.
These new homes are providing:
1. New sidewalks. It looks like from your pictures most of the new homes are also building much-needed sidewalks. That "trashcan pad" is actually the last part of the extension of the new sidewalk, brought to you by this development.
2. Density.
3. Tax base. You don't have to live in one of those new modern places next to a highway and billboards. But the people who do move there are adding a lot of cash into the city. Great for them and the city.
Overall I think a lot of those front yards are incredibly large for being in the city and also based on the style of homes they are built as. However, overall, I call this a win for Nashville.
I don't understand the comment about suburban forumers...
I'm not sure what you hope to achieve by complaining about "gentrification" in the same breath you're complaining that new development isn't fancy enough. Some of that stuff is ugly and some of it is fine, which is exactly the same as the older stuff in your pictures, which is no great shakes either. It's all the same category of roughly suburban basic vernacular for whatever decade it was built.
I don't know what your actual complaint is here. It seems like you're mostly just ranting about change itself. A forum that's broadly supportive of infill is unlikely to be sympathetic unless you can pinpoint a more specific complaint.
Exactly. Going through the pics(thanks by the way) I thought the title might actually be a ploy to just show off all the new development in Nashville, rather than to actually complain about it.
While I don't think all of it is awful, enough of it is, which makes for depressing future. Seeing the shoddy McMansion designs is really bad. Seeing the dominance of garages, and the need to walk up to an entrance is not attractive and in the long run, is not good if people wish to age in their own homes. A lot of the housing displayed is not going to age well.
Intensification is something urbanists support but only if it is done well. The problem occurs when these intensification projects are poorly designed and stick out like sore thumbs. There are plenty of examples in these pictures.
In my own neighbourhood, there has been a lot of infill housing, which has probably improved the housing stock but not improved the overall appearance of the neighbourhood. It is sad to see so much disjointed design. Sometimes this works and can be visually interesting, but other times, it is just plain awful. In my own neighbourhood, I would say, it is more on the negative side.
Intensification is something urbanists support but only if it is done well.
Your qualifier does not speak for all urbanists. Not to digress too much, but suffice it to say that only accepting urban development if it's "done well" is a recipe for exclusively expensive cities, and middle and lower income classes that are forced to distant suburbs against their will.
If "done well" just means pedestrian-oriented, then fine, I'm on board within cities. But if "done well" means it's made of brick instead of siding, then nope I'm not OK with cities that are only for the rich, and we need to open the floodgates for way more cheap buildings.
A forum that's broadly supportive of infill is unlikely to be sympathetic unless you can pinpoint a more specific complaint.
If there's one specific complaint I have, it's that certain natural environments lend themselves to certain architectural styles, and I just don't think any of that loud postmodern stuff works at all in an eastern woodland setting. I would like to see more traditional and modest styles here. You can achieve the same density infill in harmony with existing buildings and the natural environment. But, this is just a minor architectural critique. There were probably other considerations, the main one being cost of construction.
The new housing looks better than the original vernacular in my opinion. Only thing that's suffering is the lack of sidewalks and infrastructure in Nashville.
This looks exactly the same as the infill in all the SE/TX boomtowns. Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte, Houston, Austin, Dallas have the same stuff.
It isn't great, but it replaces absolute junk. And these neighborhoods will never be classically urban anyways, so what's the issue? Also, professionals aren't gonna live in falling-down shotgun houses, so this is inevitable. Nashville's core neighborhoods were obviously built on the cheap (limited sidewalks, no buried power lines), and occupied by the poor.
Freshman year of college, I stayed a night at a scary hooker hotel on Trinity Lane, just north of downtown (I had driven for 12 hours, was exhausted, and unwittingly just took the nearest exit with cheap hotels). That area was awful, and felt about as "urban" as a depressed small town in Alabama. I wonder if even Trinity Lane is getting this infill.
But really...We're complaining that a city is so hot people are actually building houses in the city? What a shame.
Seriously, are we really complaining because Nashville's economy is booming and development of all shapes and sizes is occurring? I'll take that over here in NJ where the state is going nowhere and any sort of new development is an oddity. When I used to live in the South and would look at houses in places like Nashville and Atlanta most seemed like they were built after 1990. But up here you're stuck with 50-100 year old houses. Generic looking growth is a lot better than no growth if you ask me. And not everything in Nashville is generic and suburban either; there's tons of new mid-rise and high-rise buildings downtown too. OP just doesn't want to show us anything that doesn't support his arguments.
the main thing that sticks out to me in these pics is the shabby state of street infrastructure - lack of curbs, no sidewalks, crumbling pavement, utility poles in yards, etc. these areas look very much like works still in progress.
the architecture is a lot of whatever, but the examples that are nothing but garage doors on the front facade facing the street are egregiously bad.
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