Asking which Nashville neighborhoods are gentrifying is almost the same as asking which neighborhoods are changing at all, because the city’s growth has been that pervasive. A 2025 report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition analyzed American cities for the period 2010 to 2020 and ranked Nashville as the most intensely gentrifying city in the country. No other large American city displaced longtime residents at a higher rate during that decade.
East Nashville: The Established Case Study
East Nashville is the neighborhood most people think of when they think of Nashville gentrification because the timeline is so visible. A decade ago, it was cheap enough to attract musicians, artists, and young people who couldn’t afford other neighborhoods. Those early residents created the culture, the restaurants, the bars, the music venues, the coffee shops, that made the neighborhood desirable. Rising desirability brought higher rents. Higher rents pushed out the original residents. The neighborhood is now populated largely by people who were drawn to the culture created by people they’ve displaced. The original Black community of East Nashville, which was centered around Historic Edgefield before highway construction disrupted it, was an earlier layer of this same pattern.
North Nashville: The Most Fraught Displacement
North Nashville carries the sharpest edges of Nashville’s gentrification story. Jefferson Street was historically one of the most culturally significant Black commercial corridors in the South: a complete community with its own music scene, economic base, and social infrastructure, until the construction of I-40 in 1968 cut through it, displacing thousands of residents and dismantling the economic fabric that had sustained the area. The current gentrification wave is in some ways a second displacement: longtime residents who stayed through decades of disinvestment are now facing a development boom they can’t afford to stay in. The arrival of the new NFL stadium and the proximity to downtown have accelerated investment. Rosetta Miller-Perry, founder of the Greater Nashville Black Chamber of Commerce, was quoted saying directly: “The long view for development in this area is this is going to be white. Gentrification is here. And it’s going to move fast.”
The Nations and Wedgewood-Houston: Recent Conversions
The Nations transformed from a working-class industrial corridor to a trendy neighborhood with boutiques, restaurants, and expensive new construction faster than almost anywhere else in the city. A Metro Council member representing the district acknowledged that longtime residents feel like outsiders in their own neighborhood while also describing the commercial growth as exciting. Wedgewood-Houston followed a similar path from industrial to arts district to increasingly expensive residential.
The City-Wide Context
Gentrification in Nashville is inseparable from the city’s overall growth trajectory. Nashville has been forecast to grow 7.6 percent over five years, four times the national population growth rate. That growth requires housing somewhere. The neighborhoods closest to downtown, where the land was cheap because the investment had been withheld, are where the pressure has been most intense. The result has been rapid price increases, significant displacement, and a pattern of cultural loss in communities that had sustained themselves through years of being ignored.
Sources
- Save Our Nashville Neighborhoods, citing NCRC 2025 report: sonninc.org/gentrification
- WKRN, “How is gentrification impacting longtime Nashville residents?”: wkrn.com
- WKRN, “The Nations Nashville: gentrification” (August 2024): wkrn.com
- Nashville Post, “Not a black-and-white thing; a green thing”: nashvillepost.com
- Tennessee Tribune, “Gentrification in North Nashville”: tntribune.com
- Felix Homes, “Up and Coming Neighborhoods in Nashville”: felixhomes.com