Who Lives in East Nashville?

February 19, 2026

The honest answer to this question depends on which decade you’re asking about, and which block you’re standing on. East Nashville has hosted at least three distinct resident populations in the last thirty years, and all three still exist here in overlapping, sometimes uncomfortable proximity.

The Longtime Black Community That Built the Neighborhood

Before the restaurants and the murals and the think pieces about walkability, East Nashville was predominantly Black. After the Civil War, Black Nashvillians established communities east of the Cumberland River when segregation blocked them from most of the city’s desirable land. For decades, the neighborhoods around Cleveland Park, McFerrin Park, and Cayce Homes were home to multigenerational Black families who built churches, businesses, and community organizations that still function today.

That history did not disappear with gentrification. Sam McCullough, who founded the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Association in 2002, has lived in East Nashville for over fifty years. As he told NewsChannel 5, residents like Brenda Ross watched the rent triple in five years and longtime neighbors get forced out. “It was a lot simpler than it was now, and you didn’t have to worry about some monstrosity being put in your neighborhood,” Ross said. The Cayce Homes public housing development, Nashville’s largest, sits inside East Nashville’s boundaries and houses hundreds of residents who never left, and who exist in a neighborhood that now markets itself around craft cocktails and vinyl record shops.

The Artist and Musician Wave

Beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s, East Nashville became where Nashville’s creative class settled. Rents were low, the Victorian housing stock was architecturally interesting if structurally uncertain, and the neighborhood had a tolerance for eccentricity that West Nashville suburbs lacked.

Musician Mike Crecca, who graduated from Belmont University in 2017, moved to East Nashville specifically for more affordable housing after school. He represents a pattern that repeated itself for two decades: young creatives, many of them Belmont or Vanderbilt graduates, chose East Nashville because it was the only Nashville neighborhood where someone making $35,000 a year could rent a house with a yard. By the mid-2010s, that wave had produced a genuine community, with the Five Points corridor serving as its commercial center and venues like The 5 Spot and Grimey’s Records as its gathering points.

Most of those people are still here, but they are no longer the economic baseline. They are now long-term residents who bought homes when prices were manageable and are sitting on significant appreciation, or they are renters who have watched their rents climb to levels that would have seemed implausible in 2010.

Young Professionals and Transplants

The most recent wave, which accelerated after roughly 2015, is harder to categorize but easiest to spot. These are the 25-to-40-year-old professionals who moved to Nashville from other cities, heard that East Nashville was the cool neighborhood, and arrived with incomes that reflected Nashville’s expanding healthcare, tech, and professional services economy.

Census data from Flyhomes puts the median household income in East Nashville at $71,659, and the median individual income at $45,680. About 46 percent of residents have at least a bachelor’s degree. The average household size is 2.33, which is small, and 43.6 percent of the population falls in the 25-to-44 age bracket. These are numbers that describe a neighborhood dominated by young professional couples and singles, not families with children.

This population has the highest purchasing power and is largely responsible for the restaurant explosion that made East Nashville nationally notable. They are the primary customers at Cafe Roze, Folk, and Bad Idea. They fill the Saturday morning brunch lines that form before 8 AM. They support the boutique fitness studios and the specialty coffee shops that have multiplied along Gallatin Pike and Fatherland Street.

The Tension Between Groups

Fortune described the situation accurately when it noted that “visitors wanted to stay where the locals live, although not all the locals were crazy about it.” That sentence applies equally to the relationship between the neighborhood’s newest residents and those who arrived before them.

East Nashville is a neighborhood where a musician who moved here in 2008 because it was affordable now owns a house worth $550,000 and has feelings about the newcomers who are pricing out the artists who came after them, while a Black family that has lived on the same block since 1975 has complicated feelings about everyone who arrived after 1995. These tensions exist on the same streets and sometimes at the same bars.

What connects these populations is physical proximity and, for now, a shared investment in the neighborhood’s identity as something other than downtown Nashville. East Nashville has always defined itself against the neon-and-bachelorette-party version of the city. That shared opposition is increasingly the only thing holding a genuinely fragmented community together.

The Numbers

Population estimates vary by boundary definition, but the core East Nashville ZIP codes show approximately 28,000 to 65,000 residents depending on how broadly the neighborhood is drawn. The median age consistently comes in around 33 to 35. Owner-occupancy runs roughly 50 to 51 percent, which is unusually high for an urban neighborhood with significant renter displacement, and suggests that many longtime owners stayed put even as renters were pushed out.

The neighborhood’s racial composition has shifted substantially since 2000. The NCRC’s 2025 study, which ranked Nashville as the most intensely gentrifying city in America from 2010 to 2020, documented the displacement of lower-income and Black residents from East Nashville’s core. What remains is a neighborhood that is majority-white, majority-college-educated, and majority-employed in professional fields, which describes the inverse of what East Nashville looked like twenty-five years ago.

Sources

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