Metro Nashville Council Member Jeff Eslick joined Thursday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy where he discussed an ordinance proposed to the Metro Council that would change the zoning laws to allow for more multifamily dwellings.
The proposed ordinance, BL2024-187, would amend the city’s zoning laws to “change the Single Family, Two Family, and Multi-family uses from being permitted conditionally to being permitted by right in the CS – Commercial Service, CS-NS – Commercial Service No Short Term Rental, CS-A – Commercial Services Alternative, and CS-A-NS Commercial Service Alternative No Short Term Rental zoning districts.”
“Basically, it’s saying you could take a commercial property and put a multi-family dwelling on it,” Eslick explained during Thursday’s interview, adding, “The reason this is happening is the push to make housing more affordable.”
Eslick added, “Does building more houses actually make housing more affordable? Not in this climate, it doesn’t.”
“There isn’t anything that says the developer has to make the definition of affordable when pricing. And the pricing, I’m not going to get into the definition of affordability, but it’s basically a percentage below market price or based on the median income of that neighborhood. What’s happening isn’t that at all. And one of the persons that was in the council race, not in mine, made a good point – everybody wants to say the developer or the seller should take less money to make it affordable, except for the seller or the developer. And if you were the seller of your home, would you want someone telling you you had to take less than what you can get so that you can make it affordable? I don’t think anybody’s going to do that,” Eslick said.
Eslick went on to note how the apartment scene is at the point where there are more units available than of those being rented, adding that the housing scene may follow suit in the near future.
“If we try to build too many houses, and especially multifamily and non-multifamily areas, we’re going to ruin the architecture in the field of our neighborhoods for no reason at all,” Eslick said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
