In 1970, liberal neighbors organized against white flight and transformed Nashville’s inner city. Today, teardowns are selling for more than a million dollars.
How seeping sewage and an absence of urban services spawned spacious lots in Nashville’s white suburbs.
What an archway tells us about the links between neighborhood development and school segregation.
The East Nashville neighborhood serves as a bridge between two eras of suburban growth.
Development has become concentrated along corridors and in low-income areas.
A nearly 100-year-old complex demonstrates how the affluent suburb has maintained its exclusivity.
The first of Nashville’s turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs is lost to history—but one home tells its story.
A humble landmark on Jo Johnston Avenue tells the story of how Nashville's Black neighborhoods have been erased and redrawn.
How Gallatin Avenue’s zoning requirements led to the fast-food outpost’s peculiar facade.
Building a parcel-level chain-of-title database linking 286,000 properties to trace covenants, migration, zoning succession, credit access, and demographic change across Nashville’s history.
Decomposes conservation overlay regulation in Nashville to identify dimensional restrictions as the dominant channel suppressing two-unit housing, spurring reversion to single-family development on duplex-zoned land and suppressing approx. 1,500 housing units.
How Tennessee’s Horizontal Property Regime law catalyzed family-sized, ownership-oriented housing in Nashville — and why it could be a model for other states. Co-authored with Charles Gardner.
An independent feasibility analysis of Missing Middle housing in Nashville’s hyper-gentrifying Edgehill neighborhood. Nine development prototypes tested against 222 potentially viable parcels reveal that the neighborhood has largely outgrown Missing Middle as a tool for moderately-priced housing.
A comparative atlas of Nashville’s major zoning codes from the 1920s to the present, organized by district standards, use permissions, and ordinance context.
A peer-reviewed study of how Wichita lured a minor league baseball team with a downtown stadium—and the political deal-making behind it. Co-authored with Stephen Buckman.