New rezoning "tool" will take away your voice and reshape Nashville neighborhoods.
The plan to reshape your neighborhood is only one vote away. City Hall is preparing to take away your seat at the table and roll out a new zoning “tool” that reintroduces “Residential Small Scale”—a definition that includes buildings that are anything but small. We have seen this playbook before with the NEST proposal. The same agenda has returned, bigger and more polished, and aimed squarely at removing your voice from what happens on your own street.
Behind the slogans and sales pitches sits a quiet truth: once this new zoning type is applied, every future multiplex and stacked flat is pre-approved behind closed doors. No meetings. No hearings. No community say. It is a silent rewrite of your neighborhood’s future. The real question is not whether they will use this tool, but when and where they plan to unpack it.
How Nashville can actually address the affordability crisis
A real strategy must come first. Surprisingly, Nashville already has one: the Unified Housing Strategy (UHS) 2025. It identifies the actual problem—a shortage of affordable housing for the city’s lowest-income and workforce families—and recommends starting with those who are most in need.
The current rezoning push promises affordability, but rarely delivers it where it is needed most. The term is used so broadly that it often applies to housing that is priced beyond what working-class residents can afford. True affordability means homes for the workforce and those with lower incomes, not just smaller units for higher earners. The Missing Middle approach may help a narrow slice of upper-tier workforce households—but only in theory. In practice, 15 years of zoning reform have yielded more expensive units, rather than more affordable ones.
Market-rate vacancy is already over 10%, showing that supply exists, but not at the prices people in crisis can afford. Nashville should return to the UHS—a plan it already has—focusing on affordable, targeted solutions, rather than increasing density for a market already overserved.
Get all the facts
Issues around housing affordability are complex. The media often presents the perspectives of special interest groups – politicians, developers, and outside consultants. And what is reported is often purposely over simplified. We believe you should have the whole story. Below are important facts that you should know about.
Who we are
Save Our Nashville Neighborhoods, Inc. (SONNinc or SONN) is a grassroots, neighborhood-led coalition working to protect community voice, community vision, affordability, and livability across Davidson County. Formed in District 23 and now active citywide, SONN helps residents decode zoning and housing reform, challenge who actually benefits from proposed changes, and advocate for policies that reflect the lived experience of real people, especially working families and long-time neighbors, the very people who create the communities that give Nashville its unique character.
We invite residents, leaders, and policymakers alike to work with us, not in opposition, but in collaboration. SONN offers a space where shared goals can take shape, where practical solutions rise from real neighborhoods, not imposed blueprints. Add your voice. Bring your ideas. Help us build a better path forward—one that genuinely serves the people who call this city home.