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Nashville is a city on the move but running in place • Tennessee Lookout [1]

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Date: 2025-07-11

In May Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell wrapped up his 2025 State of Metro address with a call for Nashvillians to “give ourselves some more choices about how we move into our future together.”

Let’s grant off the top that political State of The Whatever speeches inevitably amount to ritually upbeat exercises in civic fantasy with a news making shelf life of about an hour. But parking the cynicism for a few minutes (a heavy lift for me) I found myself chewing on hizzoner’s yen for a promising future as I scanned recent news items on the city’s economic trajectory:

A story chronicling how Nashville over the last decade has parlayed its Music City branding into an unstoppable tourism growth juggernaut that “catapulted us to where we are today,” according to the head of the city’s Chamber of Commerce.

News that aggressive development of tall gleaming apartment buildings has gifted (some might say saddled) the city center with a large inventory (some might say glut) of unrented tall-gleaming-apartment-building apartments, with vacancies said to number in the thousands.

Word that the design of a new boulevard down the heart of the Cumberland River’s East Bank may turn out to be just another six-lane car-centric pike rather than the multimodal transit dreamscape we were invited to imagine when the East Bank vision thing went down three years ago.

Numbers showing that Nashville’s downtown office vacancy rate well exceeds the national average, with many of the city’s largest non-government buildings losing significant value.

Reporting that the downtown convention center is pondering a massive expansion because, according to Music City Center CEO Charles Starks, “we simply don’t have the space to accommodate every group, and we’re turning away business daily.”

Taken together the picture these and similar dispatches paint is a paradoxical one: a city that manages to be simultaneously vibrant and stagnant. There’s a lot going on, yet it somehow feels like Nashville is running in place.

To be sure, indicators of economic vim abound: rising population with job growth to match, relentless tourism, low unemployment, new hotels, pricey apartments, added BNA destinations, and let’s not forget expanding options for hot chicken and (finally!) good Italian. It all makes for an impressive array of signals of a certain kind of urban vitality, but these are markers of growth itself, not necessarily development or advancement (except maybe the good Italian part).

Growth doesn’t automatically make a city a better place, and it certainly doesn’t by itself spark us to “move into the future together.” I’ll admit that’s a pretty pedestrian observation, but apparently not pedestrian enough to penetrate the collective crania of the forces driving economic Nashville. If music is Nashville’s cultural house of worship, growth for the sake of growth is its civic religion, propelled by its lead divine commandment: more is better.

This may have made some sense ten or fifteen years ago, as outside attention to Nashville’s blossoming cosmopolitanism grew and the city began to imagine itself flourishing into something that might rate the adjective world-class. But taken to extremes, more-is-better means a shortage of forward-looking adults in the room ready to tap the brakes when the thing spins out.

That spin has produced for us the opposite of world class: a city center that is principally a lucrative theme park of intoxication in which corporate operators profit off synthetic music celebrity branding, culinary mediocrity, and exploitation of talented musicians hustling for a subsistence living as country-rock human jukeboxes.

It is also a downtown that many Nashvillians want little to do with. The same apparently can be said about business. The concerning downtown office vacancy rate I mentioned above isn’t just an artifact of post-Covid hybrid work; it’s in part due to some enterprises choosing to escape the theme park and relocate outside the heart of downtown.

We have, quite simply, lost control of our downtown, with no relief in sight: the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp’s strategic plan gleefully projects significant growth in visitor spend and hotel occupancy through the mid-2030s. Those who profit off of it will inevitably insist that given how taxation works around here, a theme-park downtown is the price we must pay to fund everything else.

Nashville’s city center is principally a lucrative theme park of intoxication in which corporate operators profit off synthetic music celebrity branding, culinary mediocrity, and exploitation of talented musicians hustling for a subsistence living as country-rock human jukeboxes.

My rejoinder: a city without an active core that can commercially and culturally engage both locals and visitors is an uninteresting city, and a theme park for inebriated visitors doesn’t qualify. The idea that untamed growth makes all the other good stuff possible would be more compelling if we had more to show for what we have let tourism become over the last 15 years beyond incremental improvements in generally mediocre regimes of education, transportation, and attainable housing.

I don’t want to suggest there has been an absence of forward-looking thinking in and about the city. Last year’s Imagine Nashville project, self-described as a “community-led process to unify the city around a set of priorities and actions to guide Nashville over the next decade,” is an ambitious example. Its final report—subtitled “A Vision for Nashville’s Future”— offered a large array of goals, metrics, and action ideas in four buckets: standards of living, transit, housing, and neighborhood quality of life. It’s a strong document, but their ambit apparently didn’t include much attention to the city’s commercial and geographic center.

It has become fashionable to put untethered growth on notice. “Growth brings mostly benefits and advantages if it is more carefully managed,” reads the Imagine Nashville report. The challenge is to grow “in a smart way … showing duty of care of the city and that we want to protect it,” says Convention and Visitors Corp CEO Deana Ivey.

Charming thoughts but it’s all lip service, and it’s getting old. Many look around downtown Nashville and think: Well, better this than the hollow shell of commercial decay it was thirty years ago. That’s not an insane position. But you can also look around and ask: Who did this to us and how do we make it stop? And by the way does anyone seriously think that doubling the size of the Music City Center and building more hotels so we can stuff more conventioneers and bachelorettes into more cookie-cutter celebrity bars is the answer?







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[1] Url: https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/07/11/nashville-is-a-city-on-the-move-but-running-in-place/

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