Is East Nashville Gentrifying?

February 19, 2026

East Nashville is not gentrifying. East Nashville gentrified. The present tense suggests an ongoing process with an uncertain outcome. What happened in East Nashville is largely complete in the neighborhoods closest to downtown, and what’s happening now is the second wave pushing into the outer zones.

The Evidence

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition released a report in 2025 ranking Nashville as the most “intensely” gentrifying city in America between 2010 and 2020. East Nashville was at the center of that finding. The Eastwood neighborhood within East Nashville was at one point named by Redfin as the second “hottest” neighborhood in the country. In the last five years, an explosion of luxury condos and half-million-dollar houses referred to locally as “tall and skinnies” has appeared on lots previously occupied by smaller post-World War II homes. Developers have been able to fit two units on lots where one house previously stood.

What Happened to the People Who Were There

For decades, many East Nashville neighborhoods had large Black populations who worked to maintain and stabilize their communities. The residents who did that stabilizing work generally did not benefit from the increase in property values, because they could not afford to stay once prices rose. Rents tripled in some cases over five years. Longtime residents were priced out of neighborhoods they had lived in for decades. Longtime East Nashville resident Sam McCullough, who started a neighborhood association and has lived in the area since the 1950s, described watching the neighborhood association he built lose its older members as they died or moved away, replaced by newcomers more interested in property values than community institutions.

“Something has to change in order to get the dynamics where everyone can have a shot to live in the inner city,” McCullough told NewsChannel 5 in 2023.

The Policy Failure

Tennessee prohibited rent control in 1996. In 2023, the state’s Republican supermajority voted to prevent local municipalities from adopting policies requiring developers to set aside affordable units. Nashville’s metro government has limited tools to address the affordability crisis that gentrification has produced. The result is that market forces operate without the policy friction that other cities have used to slow displacement.

Metro Nashville social services analysis has found that gentrification doesn’t eliminate poverty; it relocates it. As affluent newcomers moved into East Nashville, the socioeconomic pressures and the people who face them moved outward to areas at the neighborhood’s edges and beyond.

What Remains Incomplete

The gentrification of East Nashville’s core, Five Points, Lockeland Springs, Historic Edgefield, is largely complete. Home prices are at levels that make the neighborhoods inaccessible to the income levels of the people who lived there twenty years ago. Cleveland Park and McFerrin Park are mid-process, with recent zoning changes allowing detached accessory dwelling units (DADUs) that have attracted investor and short-term rental interest. Inglewood is earlier in the cycle, with home prices still lower than the core but rising.

The outer rings of Greater East Nashville, particularly in ZIP codes 37207 and 37216, are where the displacement pressure has moved. Families priced out of Five Points are now in those areas; if the same pattern continues, they will eventually be priced out of there too.

The Artists Who Started It

The first wave of gentrification in East Nashville was led by artists and musicians who moved in because the rents were low. Many of them have now been priced out of the neighborhood they made attractive. A 2024 Music Census of Greater Nashville found that affordability was the top concern of the city’s music community, with over 4,000 respondents. The pattern where creatives revitalize a neighborhood, raise its profile, and then get displaced by wealthier buyers attracted to the creative atmosphere has run its course in East Nashville.

Sources

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