More homes than households: Nashville already passed metro’s 2034 forecast
Article by Christopher Remke, AIA (ret) • 12 minute read
The city’s density push rests on one number. The county’s own count already passed it. Part One of two: the count. Part Two: the pattern.
At a glance
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Metro’s two 2025 studies, the Unified Housing Strategy and the Housing and Infrastructure Study, say Nashville needs 90,000 new housing units by 2034 for a forecast of 388,000 households. The 90,000 is invoked at nearly every Planning Commission and Metro Council meeting and echoed through news coverage (three just last week), real estate headlines, and developer advertising, as the reason to advance past neighborhood concerns.
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When those studies went to print, the census count already stood within 5,000 housing units of the forecast. The May 2026 Census update crossed it: 389,379 housing units, eight years ahead of schedule.
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The real estate market tells the story. Rental vacancies run about 11% countywide, roughly double the five-to-seven percent the real estate industry calls healthy. On the for-sale side, six months’ plus of supply in July, squarely inside the range agents call a balanced market. Redfin now ranks Nashville as the nation’s No. 2 strongest buyer’s market.
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The same strategy’s own affordability chart puts the crisis deficit below $50,000 household income a year and sizes it at about 15,300 housing units, not 90,000, a hole made deeper by the 27,000 naturally affordable homes lost since the Missing Middle 1.0 began dividing parcels in 2010.
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The same strategy says supply without resident policy protections drives displacement, then lets the protections go. State law bars some tools. It does not bar the two paths the strategy names on its own pages: advocate with other Tennessee cities to change state policy and use Metro’s authority over the housing it already funds. Neither has moved at the pace of Missing Middle 2.0, the 2025 zoning reforms the Housing and Infrastructure Study proposed. The market-rate density incentives and supply bills keep passing anyway.
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Part Two follows, and like this paper it is shared with every reader: the pattern that produced the number. The full reconstruction, every lever isolated and tested against the county’s own data, is for the paid subscribers who make this work possible.
A note on purpose. This paper is a peer review of Metro’s housing forecast, conducted in public, with every source named and every page cited, so a reader can check the claims against the documents rather than take anyone’s narrative on faith, mine included. It takes no position on whether any particular program is good policy. It asks one question of all of them: do the numbers behind them hold? The work began with the publication of the Housing and Infrastructure Study in 2025 and became a formal review a year ago this month, in a face-to-face meeting with Nashville Planning where my data and observations were heard and the answer matched the one already given in writing: the department was "not convinced." I agreed to put my basis on paper, and did, at the department’s own request, in the spirit that any honest review deserves: I was willing to be wrong to make sure Nashville was right. The review was delivered. The test was never run. So, let’s reconnect to the foundational question and tie it together with Metro, State, and U.S. Census data.
Every zoning application in Davidson County now enters an ecosystem built on a single foundation: the belief that Nashville must create 90,000 more housing units by 2034. Two studies that Metro published in 2025, the Unified Housing Strategy and the Housing and Infrastructure Study, delivered that number, and it has run the conversation ever since. It justifies the rezonings, it drives Planning’s reinterpretation of the Nashville Next community plans that were supposed to guide them, and it gets named in press conferences and hearing after hearing as the urgent reason to advance past neighborhood concerns. It is also already obsolete.
Metro’s own Unified Housing Strategy provides the forecast that Davidson County will reach about 388,000 households in 2034, the target the 90,000 is measured to once a vacancy allowance is added. Now follow the timeline, because the timeline is the story. When that strategy went to print in 2025 carrying its 388,000-household forecast, the Census Bureau’s standing 2024 count was already 383,020 housing units, within about 5,000 of the target. Then on May 14 of this year the next annual count arrived: 389,379 housing units standing in Davidson County. More housing units today than the households forecast for 2034. Metro published a ten-year emergency, and the next census update ended it.
Metro's own page: the target under the 90,000.
Then comes the inevitable objection, that a healthy market needs spare units. Nashville has them, at double the healthy share. A shortage and a surplus cannot occupy the same county at the same time. The exhibit runs the study’s own version of this test, padded for new jobs and for vacancy, and the emergency fails that one too.
The real estate market tells the same story, and it has been telling it for a while. Rental vacancy stands at about 11 percent countywide, roughly double what the industry calls healthy, and for-sale inventory reached six months of supply in July, squarely inside the range agents call a balanced market. That is the exact balance the density push promised to deliver someday. The builders did their part. The boom was real, it was record-setting, and the supply target was not just met but over-delivered, on the very map the studies called too constrained to deliver it. Here is the part worth sitting with. Those conditions had already formed by 2024, the year before these studies were presented. Nothing dramatic has happened since except that Nashville kept building, and the pace is tapering now for the plainest reason there is. The demand was met. Nobody can claim Nashville failed to build, or that the code was standing in the way. The code they call a barrier is the code that set the record.
Now look closely at the promise. The public pitch was teachers, nurses, and first responders, and it was not vague about it: the council member who filed Nashville’s first middle-housing package, the 2024 bills known as NEST, named those professions as the people she and her cosponsors had in mind, and Metro’s own publications name the same list. NEST stalled, but the effort did not end there; it was replaced by the Housing and Infrastructure Study, and its substance returned in the 2025 reforms. The pitch survived the handoff. Prices did moderate, exactly as the theory said they would. But moderating is not the same as arriving. Neither study ever says what arriving would look like. The obvious test, the median home price back within reach of the median household income, appears nowhere in either document. The housing was delivered. The promise lived at the podium, not on the page.
One definition before we go further, because the vocabulary hides it: everything that building boom delivered is market-rate housing. That is what the missing middle means out in the wild, homes priced at whatever the market will carry. And the study’s own chart tells you who all that building was for. Page 146 of the Unified Housing Strategy, working from 2022 census data, the newest it offers, counts 113 affordable rental homes for every 100 households earning under $100,000, and just 77 for every 100 earning under $50,000. The deep, urgent deficit lives below $50,000 a year, and the study sizes it at roughly 15,300 homes. Not 90,000. Fifteen thousand three hundred. That is their number, on their chart, not mine. And the chart stops in 2022. The losses it was tracking did not.
Where did that deficit come from? The companion study answers in a chart of its own. The Housing and Infrastructure Study’s Figure 7 shows rentals affordable below 50 percent of median income falling by roughly 27,000 homes between 2010 and 2023, while the price bands above them grew by 15,000. The affordable stock did not vanish. It filtered up. That is fifteen years of the theory now being sold as the cure, graded by the city’s own chart, and page 9 concedes the count does not even include teardowns.
And before anyone reads that surplus as comfort for the middle, look at what that chart counts: rentals, and only rentals. Turn to the ownership side of the same study and the picture inverts. Only one in three homes sold is affordable to the median household, and the strategy’s own ownership chart shows owner households shrinking in every income band below $75,000 household income while growing at the top. Builders are busy and some of those products sell, but homes that once built family wealth through a mortgage payment are being repriced as products. The middle is not being priced into ownership; it is being converted into subscribers. Which makes the aim of the density policy stranger still: the city took a deep, specific deficit facing its working people, inflated it into a general emergency, and aimed the fix at the one segment that already had extra.
Which returns us to the political pitch. Teachers, nurses, first responders. When the consultants priced the new middle-housing products, they measured who could actually buy one and reported the answer: a household earning roughly 230 percent of the area median income. In a county where median family income runs about $100,000, that is a buyer earning north of $200,000. The pitch named the teacher and the nurse. The housing plan behind the rezonings priced the house for neither. And that is not something the studies failed to mention. It is something they disclosed. It was presented to Metro Council in March 2025, in the same breath as the savings claim, and no one on the Council asked about it.
So how does 15,300 become 90,000? The study’s appendix shows its work. The short version: a jobs-based projection that the authors themselves describe as "a more aggressive population forecast," their words, one that counts projected jobs as new resident households as if all roads end at the county line, multiplied through an average household size, padded with a vacancy target, and measured from a demand starting line frozen in 2020, before the construction boom was counted. And that last lever closes the one remaining exit. If the answer is that the 90,000 has always been measured from 2020, then more than half of it was already built and standing when the studies printed, and the remaining need was a fraction of the number being announced at the hearings. There is no version of the timeline in which the 90,000 was true on the day it was spoken. Every step of that arithmetic leans the same direction. Update any one of them to the county’s own current numbers and the manufactured emergency disappears. The real one never moved. Nashville hit the forecast count, and the households below $50,000 are as short of homes as the day the studies were printed. A target the county could hit without housing them was never measuring them. The full line-by-line walk is in the exhibit.
Metro's own words, operative lines highlighted.
Here is the part the loudest advocates skip, and it comes from the same document that carries the 90,000. Page 44 calls resident protections critical to mitigating displacement and concedes they "do not create new homes, but they can soften market pressure that can lead to displacement." Page 111 adds that 30 percent of the county’s income-restricted homes lose their affordability protections within the next decade, concentrated along the very corridors where redevelopment runs hottest. The strategy’s own authors say supply without protections drives out the vulnerable. The supply bills keep passing.
Preemption is the answer that usually follows, and it is half true. State law does bar some tools. It does not bar the two paths the strategy names on its own pages: advocating with other Tennessee cities to change state policy, and using Metro’s authority over the housing it already funds, where page 120 lists protections ready to adopt. Neither moved at the pace of the zoning work. Metro’s 2027 budget, passed this June, put real money on the table, a record $23 million into the Barnes Fund and $2.1 million for eviction right to counsel. The record should show that, whatever one thinks of any line in it. But it arrived fourteen months after the strategy and after the new zoning tools were adopted, and it buys production and legal aid rather than the two things the strategy said only Metro could do: press the state and write protections into the homes it funds. The strategy’s own pages read as a what-not-to-do list, and Nashville skipped the first item on it.
None of this arithmetic is new to Metro. A year ago this month I delivered a peer review of these same numbers to Nashville Planning, and it was set aside; the managing planner of the H&I study called it a model they could not support because they disagreed with the findings. I walked it through in person last August. I sent it again in October as a formal analysis memo to the Planning Director, received and confirmed. I requested the consultant’s report in that August meeting. It was never produced, though the public paid for it. No revisit was ever offered, and no rebuttal was ever written.
The fastest answer to the questions has been to file the questioner under disinformation, or into the "not in my backyard" camp, and consider the matter handled. A city confident in its shortage would have answered the math.
So let me say plainly what this is for, because every argument in this series will be measured against it. Nobody here is against growth, and saying so out loud has become a way to end arguments instead of having them. So take the positive version. I am for protections that arrive before the pressure, for infrastructure carried before capacity is piled onto it, and for zoning that sets the terms rather than handing the keys to the market, which is what inflates the land and the tax bill together. None of that is radical. A plan should rest on what is true, not on what has been repeated. The goal is to house the people this city runs on. Households below $50,000 the study itself says are 15,300 homes short. Everyone from there up to the median and past it, for whom ownership has quietly stopped working. The seniors and single parents the study names as the most cost-burdened owners in the county. Any policy that serves that goal deserves support, whoever proposes it. Any policy that merely wears the goal as a costume deserves the arithmetic.
The question worth carrying out of this piece is not whether Nashville built enough. The count settles that. It is how a city talks itself into a 90,000-home emergency that its own count and its own charts contradict, and keeps repeating it after the official count arrived and said otherwise. That answer has a playbook and a paper trail, and we will walk it together in a few days. That is Part Two: the pattern. Until then, one question is already on the table, and it is not mine. It is the one constituents keep asking at hearing after hearing, the question their commission and council members should have been asking for them.
Who is representing the community?
A closing note. The invitation that opened this work still stands: any rebuttal, any consultant’s report, any correction of the record will be received and published in full. Until one arrives, this series continues, because the count is only the first ledger. Overzoning does not stop at the neighborhood line. Every approval sets obligations in motion, for infrastructure, services, and debt, and those obligations arrive later, in Metro’s budget and on the tax bill. Making sense of that handoff is the work ahead.
Source Note. Figures in Part One come from Metro’s Unified Housing Strategy (April 2025), pages 44, 111, 120, and 144 through 149; the Housing and Infrastructure Study (Draft, March 2025), pages 9 and 13, Figure 7, and its consultant feasibility findings as presented to Metro Council in March 2025; U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates Program, Vintage 2024 and Vintage 2025 (county housing unit estimates released May 14, 2026), for Davidson County; Realtracs July 2026 market data; Redfin’s June 2026 buyer’s market report; Metro’s FY2027 operating budget as passed in June 2026; Axios Nashville, January 31, 2024, on the intended beneficiaries of the middle-housing legislation; Nashville Scene and WSMV reporting, March 2024, on the NEST package, its sponsors, and its withdrawal pending the infrastructure study; and the Metro Human Relations Commission, Understanding Nashville’s Housing Crisis, Part 1. The full page-by-page reconstruction is in the exhibit for paid subscribers.
About Built to Think · Chris Remke
Built to Think is a working laboratory for civic sensemaking, founded by Chris Remke, RA (Lic. Ret.). It follows evidence across the full life cycle of place-building, from public promises and development rights through finance, design, construction, operations, market price, infrastructure, taxation, and neighborhood life. Drawing on more than forty years of leadership across those disciplines, Chris tests whether promised outcomes survive the handoffs, who creates and captures value, who carries the costs, and what each decision preserves, consumes, or leaves others obligated to repair. The work is strengthened by professionals, scholars, nonprofit leaders, and neighborhood stewards whose knowledge helps reveal what no single report, dataset, or discipline can see alone.
Built to Think follows not only what a decision says, but what it sets in motion.
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