By the numbers: who really benefits from Nashville’s zoning reforms? 

This refinement reveals the true scale of the need for the "Missing Middle" segment. After accounting for commuters and the needs of lower-income households, the remaining market-rate need is only 15,906 units over ten years. The overwhelming majority of Nashville's actual housing need is for households below the 100% AMI threshold, yet the city's production strategy remains fixated on this least burdened portion of the population.

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The 91,000-household headline figure includes housing units that will not serve the majority of those most in need. Households earning below 100% AMI make up 83% of the targeted "crisis" population, the H&I Study claims to support, yet this detail is downplayed from the core production focus.

Filtering (downward)—the idea that new supply will trickle down into affordability—has instead become what economists call "upward filtering," better known to communities as gentrification. This outcome is documented in the UHS, which found that over the last fifteen years, Nashville's market has put "pressure on these moderately priced units to become more expensive, removing the primary source of housing for low and moderate-income households." Yet, the H&I movement continues to rely on the discredited assumption that the hyper-high-end focus will be reconciled through filtering—the idea that affordability will eventually trickle down through market turnover, despite consistent evidence that this process fails to reach lower-income households. Academic research has shown that, in the rare instances where filtering does occur, it can take up to fifty years or more for units to reach deeply affordable levels, rendering it an irrelevant solution to Nashville's crisis, both in terms of timeliness and practicality.

 

The public narrative often declares a housing crisis to justify emergency upzoning and the promotion of Missing Middle Housing. This narrative has gained traction nationally and is usually associated with the elimination of single-family zoning. Nashville’s Metro Council instructed its consultant to base its recommendations on the Missing Middle concept, a narrow framing that shapes the outcome. However, we must be cautious: crises often invite sweeping solutions, and too frequently, political trends override data and overshadow genuine community needs.

By contrast, the Unified Housing Strategy was not politically directed. It focused purposefully on the affordability crisis, drawing on a broad base of community members and housing experts. It concluded that prioritizing the Missing Middle approach would worsen displacement and recommended against making it the central strategy. Despite this, Metro has chosen to sideline the UHS as a guiding framework, selectively drawing from its recommendations when they align with pro-development zoning strategies. The broader thrust of the UHS—centered on preventing displacement and prioritizing affordability—has been largely ignored in favor of advancing Missing Middle policies; the UHS itself warns that new development in the county's "weakest housing markets" often "leads to loss of older and more moderately priced homes and the creation of new, more expensive housing that is priced out of reach of the typical long-term neighborhood residents" (upward filtering or gentrification).

Equity is promoted in the H&I Study through language that highlights underserved communities of color. However, the report provides no actual solutions for these communities. The very policies it promotes are likely to exacerbate their challenges. Most notably, the report obscures the fact that a large share of single-family neighborhoods in Nashville are historically Black or Hispanic. Upzoning those areas based on a national anti-single-family narrative misreads local conditions and risks displacing the very communities it claims to uplift.

With these issues acknowledged, what do the numbers tell us? A clearer picture emerges when we resist blending all categories of need into a single projection. By isolating and clarifying the data, we move from a sweeping 91,000-unit headline to a focused and much smaller 15,756-unit estimate for households above 100% AMI. This refinement is not only more realistic, but it reveals a vastly different outcome. The overwhelming majority of housing need lies below this threshold, yet the city's production strategy remains fixated on the least burdened segment of the population.

Of the adjusted 40,040 units Davidson County needs, the 15,756 units allocated for households above 100% AMI represent just 17% of the projected housing demand for workforce housing. However, this 17% figure is not evenly distributed or inclusive. It applies solely to the upper tier of what is considered workforce housing and excludes the overwhelming majority of residents who fall below 100% AMI.

In fact, 83% of the households identified as being in housing need—that is, the very definition of the crisis—are not served at all by the proposed production strategy. Worse still, Nashville’s development history suggests that a significant portion of the 15,756 units will go to households earning well above 200% AMI. Thus, even the 17% that is ostensibly being served is unlikely to benefit the target income band. This conclusion is powerfully supported by the UHS report itself, which shows that Nashville's most significant "rental housing gaps are among the lowest-income households earning 30% of the AMI or below."

This is not affordability trickling down. It is gentrification filtering up.

The H&I Study creates the appearance of a crisis that only Missing Middle zoning can solve. But the data does not support this. Nashville already has the capacity for more than 70,000 new housing units under existing zoning, even before factoring in the new allowances for housing in commercial zones in 2024. We do not lack zoning. We lack alignment.