Admit it, East Nashville. We’re all thinking the same thing: What’s up with the new Dunkin’ on Gallatin and its weird wall to nowhere?
Is it a future mural canvas to bait bachelorettes with Instagram Moments™? No. Maybe some sort of backdrop for avant-garde performance art? No.
No, the answer is way more stupid: zoning.
Zoning for the site dictates that buildings must be built within 15 feet of the sidewalk, and the building facade must extend across at least 60 percent of the parcel’s frontage, with windows making up at least 40 percent of that facade.
But get this: It turns out the zoning rules don’t require anything behind the facade. All it took was one savvy real estate attorney to read the zoning code, and we have the start of a modern-day Potemkin village. Call it Potemkin Donuts!
The Dunkin’ developer didn’t want to do this — in early 2023, they begged for a Metro Board of Zoning Appeals variance to allow them to use the same formulaic, four-walled rectangular building module that Dunkin’ plops down from Boston to Bakersfield. The variance was denied, because BZA members wanted to uphold the intent of the zoning — to encourage pedestrian-oriented forms and discourage drive-thru uses.
The Potemkin Donuts’ wall reveals a tension between the intent and the letter of the law. The BZA will have more opportunities to play this lose-lose prisoner’s dilemma: a proposal for a drive-thru-only Scooter’s Coffee at Gallatin and Delmas is also requesting a facade width variance from the BZA, as has a planned Whataburger at Gallatin and Greenwood. If the BZA adheres to the code and denies those variances, will the Scooter’s and Whataburger throw on a false facade like Dunkin’ did?
Why isn’t the zoning achieving its intent? Quite simply, because zoning cannot promote — it can only prevent. Zoning only restricts land use; it does not and cannot determine land use. Zoning is a capable means for certain ends, like keeping slaughterhouses out of areas with residences. But it cannot bring certain uses into existence, and it is ill-suited to the intricate art of designing buildings to meet boundless human desires.
That’s not how American cities treat zoning, though. With perpetually constrained state capacity and shoestring budgets, municipalities lean on zoning as a no-cost public-policy Swiss Army Knife — to manage infrastructure capacity, discriminate with various degrees of legality, mitigate the need for public services likenoise and nuisance ordinance enforcement, preference certainfamily formations, supply or deny affordable housing, and otherwise map political power onto geography.
Street View: Airbnbs Bring Safety Concerns and Raise Housing Costs
The majority of short-term rental properties are owned by investors who do little to enforce codes and standards
The gentrification of East Nashville throughout the 1980s and ’90s established a more politically active and privileged population, who turned their attention to commercial nodes and corridors. The entire Main Street/Gallatin Avenue corridor was rezoned in 2007, with then-Councilmember Mike Jameson explaining: “Gallatin Road has got more than enough title, pawn shops, cash loan facilities, adult bookstores and some other unsavory businesses. We can’t eliminate businesses, but we can lay down some zoning regulations that can prevent new ones from coming.” That’s what American-style zoning is: public provisos to coerce private action to achieve political interests.
Gallatin Avenue was rezoned — and litigated, and rezoned again — for a higher-class, more urban, pedestrian-oriented future. Less pawn shop, more Paris. But in the decades since, the handful of new construction projects on the corridor haven’t exactly lived up to that vision — a couple of banks, a 7-Eleven, a drive-thru Starbucks, a Publix behind a sea of surface parking and a few new strip malls. The largest, most Parisian proposed project on the corridor to date — the Lincoln Tech/Nashville Auto Diesel College redevelopment — will turn its back to Gallatin Avenue, focusing its retail uses toward an internal festival street and pocket park. If the diesel college plan is urbanist tragedy, the Potemkin Donuts is farce.
Lacking Infrastructure and Transit Push Retail Off Nashville’s Thoroughfares
Developers including Southern Land Company plan to build storefronts further off corridors like Gallatin Avenue
Bottom line: Gallatin Avenue is a far cry from the Rue de Rivoli. It’s hostile to humans — loud, ugly, exposed to the elements and downright deadly. Zoning cannot encourage a human, with free will and a love of life, to sit down and sip an espresso along a drag strip — it can only force buildings to pretend that they will.
There is hope on the horizon. After 20 years of futile prescriptive zoning, Gallatin Pike is set to receive a real solution — smart urban planners and transportation engineers will reshape its public realm with the Gallatin Pike and Main Street Vision Plan. The proposed concepts will widen sidewalks, dedicate bus lanes, add medians with trees and create safe crossings. Starting sometime in 2025, Gallatin will be humanized — and the buildings along it will follow the lead.
A decade from now — if we make the right decisions today — we’ll enjoy an appealing public realm on Gallatin and wonder why we wasted two decades on prescriptive, preventative rules for private property. We’ll have the Potemkin Donuts to remind us.
Alex Pemberton is a real estate development consultant with experience navigating complex rezoning efforts in Nashville.
