Parking News from Nashville

[Dashing Dan]

Here's an article from the Nashville daily paper about emerging parking issues in their trendy urban fringe areas.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111212/DAVIDSON/312120048/Parking-tight-squeeze-Nashville

Nashville and Jacksonville are very similar with respect to overall size, density, and availability of transit, but Nashville seems to be recovering more quickly from the "Great Recession." 

[thelakelander]

^Over the last 20 years, Nashville has done a pretty good job and bringing in new pedestrian scale development.  Jax hasn't.  It also appears that less demolition of historic urban fabric has taken place in and around downtown Nashville than what has happened in Jax.  I believe these two things have helped Nashville in areas where Jax still struggles.

[Dashing Dan]

Also, Nashville is home to a major university. 

Gainesville is a little too far away for Jacksonville to get a similar bounce from UF.

[thelakelander]

^Yes. Definitely can't overlook the economic benefit of being home to Vanderbilt or being considered the Athens of the South for all the colleges and universities located there.

[simms3]

Nashville is really doing some amazing things.  It is a market that is now shopped by institutional capital and is right up there with Charlotte and Austin in terms of new development and urbanization.  Very interesting place.  It is definitely on a whole different level than FL cities, especially when looking at booming intown submarkets like the Gulch, West End, Hillsboro Village, Sylvan Park, Green Hills, and their Midtown.

They are stealing convention business from Atlanta, and they are doing this by majorly expanding their current convention center and building a massive new convention center hotel.  It helps to have a strong tourist and cultural identity.

Certainly Vanderbilt is also one of if not the largest economic driver there, underlying the importance of having a strong world class research university with a graduate school, med school and a multi-billion dollar endowment.  I absolutely love Nashville.  I love the hills, the brick look, the industrial look, the 4 seasons, the people, the nightlife, and the level of activity there.  It's a surprisingly dense town, though like Atlanta and other hilly Piedmont region cities, it doesn't register as well on a map or just looking at city/county numbers.  It has "corridors" of density unheard of in Jacksonville, and then hills/ravines with nothing in between.  It also concentrates all of its wealth in one area south of town from Green Hills through Bell Meade down into the country's 11th wealthiest county: Williamson County.  This ensures more "attractive" neighborhoods with upscale shoping and without "riff raff."  As charming and nice as Avondale is, we had friends move from La Due near St. Louis (the Bell Meade of the Midwest, per se), and they bought a condo in Ponte Vedra and a house right off Saint Johns in Avondale.  They loved their area of Avondale, but did not like being a "couple blocks from riff raff and tatoo parlors."  Whether justified or not, cities like Nashville pack ALL of their wealth on one side, and that also helps to attract the young professionals and Vanderbilt students, too.  The Mall at Green Hills, like Southpark in Charlotte and The Domain in Austin, is a very high end mall that can compete with some of the best...far more upscale than SJTC.  I have many friends who went to college in Atlanta and then either went on to grad school in Nashville or moved there for work.  I never here of anyone going down to FL...the high paying jobs are in Nashville!

The other cool thing about Nashville and many of the Piedmont/Appalachian cities from Birmingham up into Pittsburgh is the village set up.  Within Nashville are all sorts of cool, hidden, and almost isolated neighborhoods with dense centers.  This continues in the suburbs with Franklin especially (VERY cool place), Murfreesboro, and other 19th century townships.  The added charm really helps the area.

This thread makes me want to drive up and take pictures and visit friends!  Only 4 hours away from me   We may be selling something up there soon, so I may have opportunities to drive up for business' sake.

[thelakelander]

Funny enough, at their height, Jacksonville was denser than Nashville.  Unfortunately, we detonated a significant chunk of our building fabric.

[simms3]

I'll have to consult a report I have done in my spare time, but I have mapped metro populations across this country decade by decade since 1900.  Birmingham and New Orleans (and Louisville) were always the south's leaders until about 1960, but Nashville wasn't tremendously far behind in terms of population.  Jacksonville, as old and large as we think it is, was never as large as Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, obviously New Orleans, Richmond, Memphis, or Louisville.  We were larger than the Carolina cities, though surprisingly Greenville-Spartanburg and I believe the Piedmont Triad were way larger than Charlotte/Raleigh for the longest time.  Jacksonville was obviously king of Florida for a very very long time (Tampa-St. Pete never surpassed it until about 1960, Orlando until about 1980, and SoFla until about 1930 or 1940).  But Florida is such a young state.

Nashville always had old towns around it...like Franklin.  These are major suburbs today, but were built up as mill towns in the late 1800s.  Aggregated together, all of the towns in what is today Nashville's MSA and the city of Nashville itself were a lot larger than Jacksonville's 5 county area throughout history.  It had a slow spurt from about 1950 to 1980, allowing Jacksonville to catch up significantly, but it has clearly taken off again.  As old as St. Augie is, it only added like 13,000 people to the area and SJC never became significant until 1990.

I'd say that if Nashville were flat and able to build a grid, it would be denser than Jacksonville.  It has very dense, narrow corridors, and a lot more infill where it can be built.  Its topography is closer to Pittsburgh than the coastal lowlands...too difficult to utilize all the land in the Piedmont/Appalachia regions as opposed to FL, SC, TX, etc.  Most of the hills are granite, too.  The inner ring of housing neighborhoods like Bell Meade and the like are definitely not dense at all, but inner Nashville is.

[thelakelander]

It would be inaccurate to count small mill towns in Nashville's MSA today as being in that city's MSA in the early 20th century.  With the transportation network at the time, some of those places were a good days drive away with nothing inbetween.  Jacksonville surpassed Nashville in city population sometime during the 1930s, a good 30 years before consolidation.  Nashville was significantly smaller than cities like Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, and Louisville 90 years ago.

[Dashing Dan]

Demolition was an issue for downtown Nashville back in the Eighties and Nineties, but Nashville turned away from demolitions at about the same time that LaVilla was being destroyed here.  When Springfield was going down, East Nashville - an equivalent neighborhood - was being rediscovered and gentrified.

Also at around the same time, Nashville chose a location for its convention center that put it nearly in the middle of downtown, and they built a new high rise hotel right next to it.

[Dashing Dan]

It would be inaccurate to count small mill towns in Nashville's MSA today as being in that city's MSA in the early 20th century.  With the transportation network at the time, some of those places were a good days drive away with nothing in between. 

Where's Ock?  There was a busy interurban line back then that ran between Nashville and Franklin, along with another interurban line that ran north and east from Nashville out to Gallatin.

[thelakelander]

^Since the LaVilla debacle, Jacksonville we've quietly taken out Brooklyn and Sugar Hill too.  Durkeeville, on the other hand, still has a significant chunk of its older building fabric in place.  I guess nobody cared enough about the neighborhoods on the opposite side of I-95 to "restore" and "clean" them up.  Sometimes, being overlooked and ignored can turn out to be a good thing.

[thelakelander]

It would be inaccurate to count small mill towns in Nashville's MSA today as being in that city's MSA in the early 20th century.  With the transportation network at the time, some of those places were a good days drive away with nothing in between. 

Where's Ock?  There was a busy interurban line back then that ran between Nashville and Franklin, along with another interurban line that ran north and east from Nashville out to Gallatin.

I'm sure he'll pop up some time tonight.  There were busy rail connections between Jax and other communities as well but I'd think it be a stretch to call them as single urban centers a century ago.  I suspect Franklin was less influenced by Nashville than it is today.