As football season kicks off and a new $2.2 billion Tennessee Titans stadium rises in Nashville, the city is running an experiment few others have dared: building the neighborhood around it with affordable housing first.
Developers of stadium-anchored megaprojects typically lead with market-rate housing, retail, hotels and entertainment. The goal is to pack in enough scale upfront to make a stadium district feel like a real neighborhood, game day or not.
Nashville is doing it in reverse as it tries to revive a neglected area across the Cumberland River from downtown.
On a 30-acre stretch of city-owned land across there, right near the Nissan Stadium site, the first building that broke ground earlier this year isn’t a hotel or a sports bar, it is Eastpoint Flats, an apartment complex reserved for renters priced out of one of the country’s fastest-growing economies .
Fallon, the Boston-based master developer, agreed with the city that the project would launch with an affordable housing component.
“What a remarkable thing if the people who either help build or work in the stadium someday actually have the opportunity to live in the neighborhood adjacent to the stadium,” said Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell.
The plan is to begin with a building that includes 323 affordable units, about 20,000 square feet of retail and a daycare center. The units in the building will be leased at below market rents to households earning 80% and less of the area median income.
Fallon hopes to follow with an array of commercial development. The first phase will include a 600-room hotel, 380 market-rate apartments and about 100,000 square feet of retail and dining.
This is an unusual approach.
“For these projects to be successful, you typically want to see the first phase be as large as possible, so you’re getting critical mass,” said Jonathan Fascitelli, chief executive of Seregh, a developer of real estate around sports venues.
Eastpoint Flats sits on a stretch of the Cumberland’s east bank that spent decades as an unbroken expanse of surface parking, hemmed in by an elevated highway. The area is a textbook case of how interstate-era urban renewal gutted American neighborhoods.
Nashville already has a Nissan Stadium there, built in the late 1990s, but it is surrounded by a moat of parking lots, not a neighborhood. Game day fans use a pedestrian bridge to cross the river and reach Broadway’s honky tonks and rooftop bars.
The new stadium with the same name is rising near its predecessor and scheduled to open next year, this time with a neighborhood being constructed around it.
O’Connell, elected in September 2023, pushed hard for the affordable-housing-first sequencing after opposing the new stadium as a council member five months earlier. That vote approved a $1.26 billion public subsidy, at the time, the largest ever awarded to a stadium project in U.S. history.
The city had little leverage. A 1996 lease to lure the Titans from Houston obligated Nashville to keep the older Nissan Stadium in “first-class” condition through 2039, a commitment estimated to cost $1.75 billion to $1.95 billion.
“The lease that governs [the existing stadium] puts a good chunk of the burden on the taxpayers of Nashville to maintain the building,” said Titan Chief Executive Burke Nihill, in a 2023 interview.
Facing that bill, city officials opted for a new, team-and-state-funded stadium. Nihill promised to turn what he called a “sea of asphalt” into “a new town center” with green space, housing and retail.
Affordable housing, when it is built, tends to follow construction of market-rate housing around stadium megaprojects, according to Judith Grant Long, associate professor at the University of Michigan. But these projects have a checkered record nationally.
Take Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. The developer promised 2,250 units of affordable housing as part of the arena’s surrounding Pacific Park project, a pledge that helped win over skeptical neighbors and elected officials.
More than a decade later, many of those units still haven’t been built. When the state set a deadline and financial penalties for the missing housing, it ultimately let the developer skip the fines rather than enforce them.
In Nashville, Fallon CEO Michael Fallon said his company’s commitment isn’t just a first-phase gesture. The company must hit affordable-housing milestones or risk losing its development rights, and the units themselves are locked in as affordable for 99 years.
“You have a defined period of time by which we must meet milestones, if not, then our development rights become at risk,” Fallon said.
Stadium megaprojects have also drawn criticism for falling flat or failing to deliver on promised jobs and broader economic impact, even when they attract bars, restaurants and other commercial development. These are complex and costly projects where very long timelines mean factors like economic downturns, high interest rates and inflation can spoil lofty goals.
Nashville currently has some momentum: a booming economy that is already helping produce more growth than the Cumberland’s east bank has seen in years.
Oracle is relocating its world headquarters from Austin, Texas, to Nashville’s growing River North neighborhood, also on the east bank, with plans to build a campus with 8,500 jobs by 2031. There is also new activity and interest in a nearby parcel being redeveloped by RMR Group, a Newton, Mass.-based real-estate manager, and in Carl Icahn’s former scrapyard nearby.
The city needs more housing to keep pace with soaring demand. Average asking rents in the Nashville metropolitan area are $1,715 a month, more than 14% higher than in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to CoStar. Nashville will need 90,000 new housing units over the next decade to keep pace with growth, well beyond the roughly 70,000 homes zoning rules would allow during that period, according to a 2025 Nashville Planning Department study.
Fallon said he hopes to break ground on the hotel next year, with a residential building and possible office space to follow soon. The development is expected to get a boost from the planned relocation of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, which is expected to move to the East Bank near the Fallon project. Fallon noted that projects of this scale often take two decades or longer to complete.
City officials said they are hoping to make significant progress on the surrounding district by the time Nashville hosts Super Bowl LXIV in 2030. A winning Titans season after several rough years wouldn’t hurt.
“It’s certainly more exciting to visit any stadium when the team is winning more regularly,” O’Connell said.