Affluence and Effluence in the Favored Quarter
How seeping sewage and an absence of urban services spawned a sprawling expanse of massive mansions—and the fire that forged Nashville’s Metropolitan Government.
This is an extended version of an article that appeared in the Nashville Scene. Read that version here.
Photo credit: Gresham Smith
A great Southern philosopher once said: “I know you like to think your shit don’t stink, but lean a little closer, see, roses really smell like boo-boo-ooh.”
It is likely that those words have never blessed the ears of the median resident of Davidson County’s favored quarter. But the contemporary character and affluence of these sprawling hills—Oak Hill, Forest Hills, Green Hills, and Hillwood—are owed in large part to their original effluence.
Lean a little closer.
Scratch the surface of the manicured meadows and you’ll start to smell the roses. Dig deeper, and a story bubbles to the surface—one of sewers and septic tanks, the safety of children and the dangers of racism, and how it all flowed into metropolitan government.
Favelas of the Privileged.
Automotive subdivisions were sliced off so rapidly in suburban Davidson County during the postwar boom that developers ran out of names—there were only so many Confederate generals.
Beyond branding, the growth outside the city limits outran the antiquated structure of county government. Like in most Southern states, counties in Tennessee were originally designed as jurisdictions of rural governance and the provision of urban services—firefighting, policing, garbage collection, water and sewer, and more—was not allowed under state law.
Fire service in the county was provided by eight different private subscription companies and volunteer outfits; poor fire service earned nearly the entire county a tenth-class fire insurance rating—the worst possible rating—which resulted in massive insurance premiums. Water was purchased from the City of Nashville at wholesale rates, pumped through pipes too small for fire protection, and resold to suburban consumers at six different rates which averaged double the rate of city water. Law enforcement was also provided, in large part, by private subscription services deputized by the Davidson County Sheriff, a highway patrol with limited jurisdiction, and “fifteen constables who [were] virtually useless.”
The problems of limited government were compounded by lax regulation. The early county subdivision regulations allowed developers to construct roadways so cheaply that their surfaces soon deteriorated, with narrower widths than those mandated by the city. Sidewalks were not required. Neither were sewer systems—most post-war subdivisions relied on septic tanks, which are a poor fit for Davidson County's shallow limestone base.
In 1946, Davidson County revised its subdivision regulations to increase minimum residential lot sizes to half an acre to provide space for septic tank drain fields; areas with less suitable soil conditions, like Oak Hill and Hillwood, required one-acre minimum lots.
Soil conditions are unsuitable for septic tanks in most of Davidson County
Source: Proposed Public Sanitary Sewer System for the Nashville Metropolitan Area | Nashville City and Davidson County Planning Commissions, Advance Planning & Research Division
Accessed via Hathi Trust
The lot size requirements, as the city-county planning engineer noted, “mean that frequently subdivisions which should accommodate 1,000 families for an ideal urban development, now only provide for 500 families with lots which are too big for the average priced home...”
The regulations ensured that the form and function of the favored quarter would be radically different from the semi-urban subdivisions of the streetcar era—such as Richland, Sylvan Park, and Belle Meade Links—or the modest, gridded automotive suburbia that had begun to sprout from Battlemont and surround Lipscomb University. Instead, the estate lot style of Woodmont Estates and Belle Meade would become the norm—exclusivity would become the entry level.
Large lot sizes not only made new housing in the county more expensive, but also made the provision of infrastructure and urban services more expensive:
“As an expedient, the large lot size in the county has worked out very well for the time being. As long as the home owner with a septic tank is having no trouble he doesn’t want to come inside the city...
Under the new regulations subdivisions have increased in number because land heretofore unacceptable has been approved for development. However, as the city faces extension of its city limits it faces the higher cost of a more expensive sewer service through longer lines; the same thing applies to extension of water lines.
In the areas taken in where there are new subdivisions there will be fewer homes per acre and correspondingly more miles for garbage and trash collections and inadequate streets without curbs and gutters to be paved and improved by the city.”
The large lot “expedient” locked lower-income households out of suburban growth, even as it locked much of the county into a sprawling pattern of development too sparse to support urban services—forcing its residents into expensive, low-quality private alternatives.
And then there was the problem of the septic tanks.
Urban services and infrastructure correspond to development density
Source: Proposed Public Sanitary Sewer System for the Nashville Metropolitan Area, Nashville City and Davidson County Planning Commissions, Advance Planning & Research Division
Accessed via Hathi Trust
Black City, White County, Black Water.
Efforts to improve the “septic tank problem” in suburban Davidson County—limited as they were by an archaic system of governance—stood in stark contrast to the decadeslong civic disinterest toward sewerage in Black neighborhoods of the central city.
In the postbellum period, racialized topographies emerged along railroad tracks and low-lying bottomlands around the city center, where poor physical conditions were breeding grounds for disease—though Nashville’s white civic sphere pinned the blame on the “improvidence” of Black residents. Middle- and upper-class Black city-dwellers moved out to communities at the then-fringe of the city, concentrated in Edgehill and around Fisk University; although housing conditions were better, these areas were also unsewered. When a sewer system was first laid, beginning in the 1880s, the costs for property owners to tap into the lines were out of the reach of the lower classes in deepening slum districts; extensions to the system were directed to white streetcar suburbs and skirted the Black edge enclaves.
In the turn-of-the-century age of machine politics, sewerage was a political football. According to historian Benjamin Houston, the City Hall political machine led by Boss Howse “sent municipal workers and quantities of pipes to black neighborhoods on election eve, creating anticipation that new sewers would be laid—with a quick overnight withdrawal of the workers and materials after the election.”
The results were devastating to Black Nashville, which suffered death rates double those of whites from diseases associated with improper sewage disposal. The “tubercular Negro” was studied, scorned, but mostly ignored—except to the extent that their plight impacted whites.
In 1945, as concerns about unsewered white suburbs mounted, the Tennessean shared a series which noted that “approximately 850 tubercular Negro domestics annually, and some time during their illness, spread havoc among their contacts in the course of employment. Thus their welfare is the serious concern of every citizen of the State of Tennessee.” The quote—from the Black physician and surgeon Dr. W.A. Beck, as part of a drive for a tuberculosis ward at Meharry Medical College—underscores the extent to which concern for Black wellbeing required a framing that centered the welfare of whites.
In 1946, a sewage disposal survey—sponsored by the federal government to the tune of $3.5 million adjusted to 2025 price levels—found that twenty percent of the city of Nashville, covering tens of thousands of housing units and thirty-thousand residents, remained unsewered; another nineteen-thousand residents were not tapped into the system despite sewer availability. The report stated, “Approximately 48 per cent of the total population in the entire urban area are not at the present time using public sewer systems. This is a considerably higher percentage of the total population than is found in other comparable Southern cities.” The vast majority of unsewered city territory covered areas of Black concentration—including most of Edgehill and Hadley Park-College Heights.
The disparity is further clarified by an understanding of the inverse relationship between class and interracial contacts in Nashville, as described by Benjamin Houston and Bobby L. Lovett, and elsewhere in the South during Jim Crow. Lower-class white and Black Nashvillians often lived in mixed neighborhoods, even though blocks and buildings were segregated. Elite whites were in regular contact with Black residents of those neighborhoods, who worked as servants in the homes of affluent whites, cleaned the laundry of wealthy whites in their own homes, and provided menial labor to white businesses; the ever-present danger of disease transmission from Black laborers spawned charitable efforts and reform movements, often led by white women’s organizations. Lower-class whites, on the other hand, interacted with both lower-class Black neighbors and upper-class Black professionals—such as dentists and doctors, who provided service at much lower cost than their white professional counterparts—as well as whites of all classes. In the book Water, Race, and Disease, Walter Troesken concludes that Black households were more likely to enjoy sewer access when mixed with whites.
Thus, a cruel irony emerged in the relationship between Black neighborhoods and sewer service. Edgehill and Hadley Park were settled largely by the Black elite, as their high ground helped to mitigate the problems of wastewater from pit privies—which was often washed up by even the slightest rainstorms, then left standing for days on end by poor drainage—that plagued low-lying, lower-class areas like Black Bottom, Trimble Bottoms, parts of North Edgefield, and the area north of the Capitol. But as sewer lines were extended to white streetcar suburbs, the logical route for gravity-based trunk lines to the river ran through the bottomlands. Once trunk lines were run along natural drainage routes like Browns Creek or the Sulphur Dell basin, the public investment math made sense from extension of branch lines to the blocks of surrounding Black slums.
Even when Black neighborhoods received sewer access, it was an incidental benefit—an accident of geography that Black slum districts, with their racialized topographies set within otherwise dangerous drainage basins, happened to be in the path of privileged white access to public goods provision.
The dynamic in Nashville aligns with the consensus of urban historians and sewer scholars—including Troesken and Vanderbilt University economist Brian Beach—that cities allocated sewer infrastructure largely, but not exclusively, on the basis of race.
Where sewer infrastructure was easy to install and beneficial to whites, Nashville made a reluctant investment in Black neighborhoods; where sewer extensions were challenged by topography and benefited only all-Black neighborhoods, Nashville did not invest. Class did not outweigh race in the allocation of public goods—and may have even imposed an inverse relationship—which left the Black elite neighborhoods lacking sewers for decades after the introduction of lines to the downtown fringe districts the upper class had escaped.
As sewage conditions worsened and desirability diminished in the Black elite districts of the city, professional families decamped again for automotive suburbs across the river—built “by and for” Black families across the Cumberland River in Bordeaux and the Haynes area—in a pattern of affluent flight that corresponded to, but was separate from, that of whites.
Challenging topography provided a neutral pretext for racialized rationalizations about rationed infrastructure—but that does not mean that disparities in sewer service were the inevitable outcome of topography. Physical conditions did not provide enough challenge to preclude the extension of sewer lines to the rocky, lilywhite highlands of Belmont or Richland nearly half a century earlier than in Edgehill or Hadley Park.
Sewer service was segregated by design. Nashville planners modeled their work on the Neighborhood Unit concept, which divided the city into sections defined by “similar ethnic groups” to enable “more effective planning”—a bureaucratic euphemism for the allocation of public goods in privileged places and the rationing of public goods in disfavored districts.
The type of “effective planning” enabled by the Neighborhood Unit model was underpinned by racist ideas of fiscal efficiency typified by a five-part series written by former Vanderbilt University economist Dr. Roy L. Garis for the Nashville Banner in 1946.
Side Note:
Roy L. Garis was a Vanderbilt University economist, eugenicist, and equal opportunity racist—his contributions to American public policy included the design of the racial quota system to cut off migration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the Immigration Act of 1924, an anti-immigration book that prefaced the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of American citizens during the Mexican Repatriation, and anti-New Deal activism that led to his appointment to head the Tennessee state welfare department during the Great Depression.The veneer of economic analysis to champion the system of segregation as a means for Black uplift was an evolutionary adaptation for Garis, who two decades earlier in 1926 had written in more basic terms, “Even the most enthusiastic advocate of the transforming power of environment must grant that the negro possesses certain racial qualities which make him inherently incapable of the intellectual development of the white man. He must further admit that in the vast majority of those rare cases where we have high mental development in the negro it is due to racial intermixture.” In a separate journal article published the same year, titled Misconceptions About the South, Garis stated, “The negro had a useful and definite place in the South’s economic system prior to 1860. However, when the race conflict began after that time, industrial coöperation between the races became almost impossible and the blacks rapidly became a heavy burden and danger to the communities in which they lived.”About Mexicans, Garis wrote: "Their minds run to nothing higher than animal functions—eat, sleep, and sexual debauchery. In every huddle of Mexican shacks one meets the same idleness, hordes of hungry dogs, and filthy children with faces plastered with flies, disease, human filth, stench, promiscuous fornication, bastardy... These people sleep by day and prowl by night like coyotes, stealing anything they can get their hands on, no matter how useless it may be... Yet there are Americans clamoring for more of this human swine to be brought over from Mexico."Garis was not only an asshole in an academic sense—he put it into practice in his daily life. In 1934, the daughter of his neighbor—and colleague, fellow Vanderbilt economist E.J. Eberling—died when Garis' Studebaker sedan rolled over her in the steeply sloped driveway of his home in Green Hills. Garis refused to settle with Eberling for damages, despite knowledge that his brakes were faulty before the incident—blaming the five-year-old girl and claiming no responsibility for her safety on his property on account of the neighborly relations between the two families. Eberling sued and won a judgement of $10,000. Garis challenged the judgement and had it reduced to $6,500—over $150,000 today.It is impossible for me to express how deeply I came to despise this man in the course of my research for this article.The first installment of the series—which ran under the header “The Negro in Nashville: An Asset or a Liability?” and was expanded and published in the academic journal Social Science two years later under the title The Negro in Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee—charged that Black Nashvillians contributed an impossibly low share of tax revenues; Garis acknowledged that the City and County did not keep separate records of taxes paid by Black and white residents, which he waved off with a conclusion that “the methods used in computing the… estimates seem to be reasonably valid and sound.”
In the third installment, which covered hospitals and health disparities, Garis outlined three essential measures of a tuberculosis control program; each solution was focused on treatment after infection, rather than prevention. Garis made no mention of the near-total absence of sewers from Black neighborhoods.
Garis later tallied the various public amenities—parks, libraries, theaters, recreational facilities, and the like—accessible to each race and again elided the inherent inequality of the separate-but-equal system: “Nashville has gone far to promote the interests of its negro citizens. The negro himself has shown little or no initiative in the promotion and development of such facilities in his own behalf.”
In his review of educational institutions, Garis praised the presence of Fisk University as “further evidence of the desire of the people of Nashville to do everything possible to promote the welfare of its negro citizens” but omitted the fact that the institution was founded by Northern philanthropists during Reconstruction.
As in other expressions of scientific racism, disparities in infrastructure and public investment were given airs of legitimacy with dispassionate—and disinformative—analyses of tax revenue, death rates, and park acreage. Causal factors of inequality were ignored, blame for inequities was assigned to Black Nashvillians, and praise was heaped upon the white civic elite:
“Almost without exception more is being done on a relative basis for negroes than for its poorer white citizens. This willingness has persisted even when there has been little or no cooperation from its negro citizens to promote their own welfare, even when they have been able to do so. Nashville has done and is doing far more than is necessary to allay any charges of racial discrimination in the promotion of the welfare of its negro citizens… It is a record of which Nashville can be proud.”
The driving thrust of the series was to paint Black Nashville as a burden upon white taxpayers—another brick in the construction of a “taxpayer citizenship” trope that materialized in resistance to Reconstruction, supported midcentury school segregation, and redounds in present-day urban development discourse. Within the ideology of taxpayer citizenship and its expression in the Neighborhood Unit planning model, the provision of public goods were akin to private goods—purchased by the tax dollars of those thought to carry the greatest economic and social worth. The economic accounting mattered less than the social ledger—a “reasonably valid and sound” computation was more than enough to support biases disguised as common knowledge.
The credence given to race scientists like Roy L. Garis and the systemic racism of rationed infrastructure reinforced by the Neighborhood Unit planning model were not unique to Nashville:
“Local governments throughout the United States used residential segregation to deny Black and other less privileged communities access to public goods like sewers. In cities that were less segregated by race and class, sewer access was also less segregated. This is an artifact of the way that sewer lines are laid. It is much easier to deny whole neighborhoods access to sewers, than single blocks or houses.”
In her book, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities, Vanderbilt University political scientist Dr. Jessica Trounstine argues that the segregation of public goods like sewers reinforced other means of segregation, with disparate impacts on health, wealth, and social mobility that last into the present day.
The 1951 mayoral election marked a turning point, as Ben West—a forty-year-old upstart attorney who had quickly risen to vice mayor—challenged the longtime incumbent and once-upon-a-time reform progressive, Thomas Cummings. While Cummings executed a style of conservative, good ol’ boy politics centered on downtown business interests who slept in the suburbs, West sought support from “those who could vote… Negroes, renters, and those who lived in deteriorating neighborhoods.” West charged the Cummings administration with “rank discrimination” against Black Nashvillians in government employment and promised to direct improvements to Black neighborhoods that had “been forgotten so far as municipal services are concerned.”
West won the election by fifty-five votes. His administration soon set out to sewer the entire city, which it accomplished before the end of his first four-year term. Overall rates of death from disease dropped precipitously in the following decades and racial disparities finally narrowed, proving that the problem all along was the racist rationing of sewer infrastructure—but only after Nashville’s Black community suffered thousands of excess deaths across more than half a century of intentional neglect.
Ben West, left, defeated Thomas Cummings, right, to win the 1951 Nashville mayoral election. The former mayors are pictured here with Beverly Briley, who was elected county judge (the chief executive of Davidson County government) in 1950 and served as the first mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville-Davidson County. West and Briley each marked a shift toward a moderately progressive approach to civil rights and away from the fiscal and racial conservatism of old guard politicians like Cummings.
Source: Joe Rudis / The Tennessean
For the Health of the Children.
Even as vast swaths of Black neighborhoods in the city remained unsewered into the early 1950s, the problem demanded the attention of the metropolitan elite only when it grew unmanageable in the suburbs—where it collided with half a century of ideas about the family, the home, and the neighborhood.
Pre-war suburbanization, like the phenomenon of Black ghettoization in Nashville, was owed in large part to sewer segregation. As the electrified streetcar made it practical, middle-class white families sought a home in the suburbs as an escape from the disease of the city and its unsewered slums. According to historian Don Doyle, “At the heart of this common suburban culture was a new concern for health and child nurture. Suburban domestic life was celebrated as a wholesome, moral refuge from the city… The answer was to leave the city behind, to remove the family and especially young children to a clean, spacious semirural suburban home.” Streetcar suburbs like Richland Place were advertised as “elevated and healthful… a matchless playground for the children.”
Dr. Karen Benjamin, author of the forthcoming book Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools: Selling Segregation Before the New Deal, notes that the extension of sewer lines to streetcar suburbs—and, in contrast, the absence of sewers from Black neighborhoods—connected racialized real estate practices to racialized concepts of child-rearing:
“At the turn of the twentieth century, residential developers urged affluent white parents to build a house in the suburbs for the sake of their children. By the early twentieth century, their advertisements mimicked the language of social science experts, doctors, and educators to suggest that it was bad parenting to expose children to urban areas and multifamily housing. Tying public resources such as modern sewers and new schools to white child-rearing increased the demand—and, thus, the price—for suburban home lots in racially restricted developments, despite the inconvenience of living farther from the city center. In the process, Black children and others excluded by deed restrictions experienced greater exposure to environmental harm so that affluent, white children could experience greater upward mobility.”
While streetcar suburbs were often additions to urbanization, with sewer lines extended upon annexation, post-war automotive suburbs were fundamentally different—isolated from all urban services. Yet, even as the Davidson County health director warned of an imminent epidemic outbreak from faulty septic tanks, white families only flew faster to new subdivisions in the county.
Almost 150,000 Davidson County residents—over 95% of them white—lived in unsewered subdivisions by the mid-1950s. Only a decade into mass suburbanization, one in ten septic tanks were discharging sewage onto suburban lawns and a quarter presented a “danger to public health.”
More than a danger to the health of the broad public, the suburban septic tank problem was often framed as a hazard to white children. Newspapers ran stories about white children robbed of backyard play, photos of white children fetching softballs from open drainage ditches, and profiles of the white suburban housewives who took up the cause of sewer system expansion as “the only remedy” for the dangers to their children.
The framing of the suburban sewage problem was one of “racial innocence” as defined by Harvard cultural historian Robin Bernstein. White children were portrayed as innocent “kids being kids” who needed—and deserved—protection by parents and elders. When the impact of lacking sewerage on Black children earned mention at all, it was portrayed as a moral failing on the part of their parents, who were judged incapable or uninterested in providing proper care for their children.
Bernstein describes the evolution of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel, in popular culture—in particular, how the juxtaposition between Topsy, an enslaved young girl, and Eva, the angelic daughter of a wealthy slave owner, both embodied contemporary stereotypes and forged new notions of racialized childhoods over the following century. In contrast to Topsy, who is depicted as a wild and unruly child, Eva is presented as the epitome of purity and innocence. While Topsy "just growed" without guidance or consideration, Eva is raised in an attentive home environment and grows to embody the ideal of delicate, white childhood.
Water, Earth, Fire, and Change in the Air.
These themes hit a fever pitch when Hillsboro High School—then a segregated, all-white school under the control of the county school board—was destroyed by a fire on Halloween 1952. The blaze was battled by the ad-hoc suburban fire departments and assisted by City fireman, who said “the fire probably could have been controlled with a much smaller loss had there been an adequate supply of water” from the nearest first hydrant more than half a mile away. The county school board had a policy to insure its buildings for only fifty percent of the value “because the rates on our schools which are away from the protected areas are so high.”
The effort to rebuild Hillsboro High School, with no lack of determination, soon ran into familiar roadblocks.
Source: The Nashville Tennessean | November 1, 1952
Advocates in the civic elite immediately seized upon the event to support the case for consolidation made earlier that year by the Community Services Commission—a joint city-county survey agency which first proposed the merger of city and county governments into a single metropolitan. The Hillsboro High School fire was excoriated as the “price of disunity.”
The school board by the following month approved plans to rebuild in a midcentury architectural style, with a goal of opening the new school by the fall semester, but soon hit a stumbling block: city-county health director Dr. John J. Lentz refused to permit rebuilding on the site “unless some system is found for proper disposal of sewage.”
Side note:
Both the planning commissions and health departments of Nashville and Davidson County operated in close coordination for many years before the city and county consolidated into Metropolitan Government. The city and county health departments were formally consolidated under county control in 1952 following a recommendation in the Community Services Commission report, A Future for Nashville. The City Planning & Zoning Commission, which started work in 1932, was designated as a regional agency in 1936 and empowered to plan (but not zone) within a five-mile extraterritorial area. That power was superseded when the Davidson County Planning Commission was established in 1940 with zoning powers; members of the City Planning & Zoning Commission served on the county’s commission in an ex officio capacity, technical staff were shared between the two commissions, and meetings on important matters were often conducted jointly until city-county consolidation in 1963. The absence of sewers in the county not only threatened the rebuilding effort, but imperiled the entire 7th Civil District. Affluent homeowners battled faulty septic tanks. The developers of The Mall at Green Hills weighed whether to bear the tremendous expense to extend city sewers to the project or cut down on the size of the shopping center, while the county planning commission refused commercial rezonings and smaller enterprises began to avoid the area entirely, unable to support the costs of increasingly stringent health department conditions. The Hillsboro High School sewer line needed to weave nearly three miles through the rolling hills of residential subdivisions to tap into the city trunk line, prompting a hasty search for alternative school sites.
By January 1953, the county government, school board, mall developers, and other Green Hills property owners agreed to financial arrangements for a $190,000 sewer line—rumors circulated that a powerful local insurance company, which made loans to the mall developers, played an instrumental role in the deal. The project was delayed by a lawsuit from nearby homeowners over the location of the pumping station, but work commenced by June 1954.
Reconstruction of Hillsboro High School, in its celebrated midcentury modern style, began concurrently with the sewer extension. As the Hillsboro building reached 40% completion, a sewage overflow flooded the playground at Inglewood Elementary on the opposite fringe of the city limits. When the Tennessean visited the school, a reporter found a teacher “cleaning [the] shoes and clothing of a child who had fallen into a sewage pond while playing.” Twenty of the schools under county control—from Inglewood to Burton and back to Madison—had similar, critical sewage problems.
A 1956 Planning Commission plan for a comprehensive, city-county sewer system noted that 53 of the 77 county schools used septic tanks; eleven more relied on pit privies. Fewer than one-in-four of the 33,773 pupils in the county system attended a sewered school. The report noted that “it is certain that the school sewage disposal problem will continue to increase unless public sewers are installed” and concluded that the project of metropolitan sewerage required not only extensions into the county, but also upgrades to a “hodgepodge” and undersized city system the public works director described as “one of the most garbled in the country.”
Annexation, Incorporation, Consolidation.
As effluent conditions across the county worsened, local leaders pushed for annexations to enable the extension of sewers into the affluent, white suburbs and their segregated schools. Lentz, the city-county health director, urged, “An epidemic is no respecter of corporate lines. You can’t build a fence against diseases.”
In 1949, Mayor Thomas Cummings guaranteed sewer lines to any unincorporated area of the county that agreed to be annexed into the city. It had been two decades since the last substantial annexation, as successive mayors held to a pledge of “no annexations without approval of the people to be annexed.”
Though civic elites considered a reconstituted relationship between city and county inevitable by the 1950s, each side remained at an impasse. Beyond the enticement of infrastructure, Mayor Cummings put the onus on suburbanites to ask for annexation, as “the city [was] in excellent shape financially and… any further expansion would only be deadweight, as no residential area is self-supporting in taxes.” Suburbanites, in turn, saw little reason to join the city—their taxes were low, and yet they availed themselves of free city amenities and paid generous rates for city water and electric services despite their inefficient sprawl.
But as the decade wore on and other suburban services strained under the pressures of sprawl, suburbanites grew to reconsider their traditional opposition to higher city taxes and political leadership deferential to urban interests. As piecemeal talks of annexation ramped up, a key concern—and source of resistance—emerged among parents. At a 1951 public meeting, parents in the Urbandale area “were interested in knowing what schools children in Urbandale would go to if that section were annexed.” Both the city and county school systems remained segregated at the time, but integration was being agitated nationally; the Urbandale area was uncomfortably close to Hadley Park and other all-Black sections of North Nashville.
A short skirmish over annexation boundaries ensued among the councilmembers whose districts bordered Urbandale; ultimately, a compromise was reached with the commercial portion of the annexed territory going to Councilman Wesley Dixson’s district, while the residential area would be annexed into the district of Councilman Glenn Ragsdale, who said that “he wanted the votes of Urbandale for his district to offset the growing Negro vote.”
The Urbandale annexation came at great cost to the city, which expected “only $6,987 [in tax revenues] annually… against an average of $45,626 the city will spend in services for the new area.” It was a better deal for residents, who would see an average $100 per year savings—over $1,200 today—by joining in for more efficient city services. Although some councilmembers balked at the cost of the referendum, there was little mention of the ongoing imbalance of costs and revenues—and the local newspapers did not commission multi-part series to beg the question whether all-white Urbandale was an asset or a liability to Nashville and its taxpayers.
Urbandale residents voted 57-20 in favor of the annexation referendum on January 3, 1952. In its Sunday coverage, the Tennessean declared that “Nashville, like Topsy, grew pretty fast yesterday with the official annexation of the Urbandale subdivision in West Nashville.” With whispers of one-government already circulating among the civic elite, the pro-consolidation Tennessean positioned piecemeal annexations as the wild, unplanned opposite of its idealized Eva—a single, unified and orderly metropolitan.
Early attempts at a solution for metropolitan sewage and urban services problems centered on annexations, with little success.
Source: Population Report, An Analysis of Estimated Population Changes of the City of Nashville to 1958 | Nashville City and Davidson County Planning Commissions, Advance Planning Division
Accessed via Hathi Trust
In the favored quarter, residents rejected the annexation-or-consolidation binary and sought a third way. Under the influence of affluence, residents of the section often valued zoning controls over urban services, were not as compelled by cost savings, and were more confident in their ability to sustain an independent government with palatable levels of taxation.
Amidst moves in the state legislature to ease annexation or enable a complete city-county consolidation, an “incorporation entrepreneur” named Ewing Clouse stirred several sections of the southwest hills to hold referenda to incorporate as splinter cities. Clouse, who had successfully led the incorporation of Berry Hill in 1950, first struck paydirt with Oak Hill in 1952. A bid to incorporate much of the area as Westwood failed by a 10-to-1 margin four years prior, in part because the City of Nashville threatened to cut off free fire, water, and sewer services.
The second time around, with Oak Hill pressured by industrial and commercial development from the expansion of the Radnor railway switchyard, residents advocated incorporation to “have our own zoning board comprised of citizens in our locality” against the warnings of county planners that the move would “[tear] the community asunder.” Proponents acknowledged the problems of splinter cities but chose to splinter nonetheless, stating in a pro-incorporation circular that they “certainly do not wish to stand against the progress of our mother city of Nashville. Many of us are in business and earn our living there. But we feel that the law of preservation should certainly begin with our homes and families.”
After a twelve-vote winning margin—and a court battle and the withdrawal of the 8-0 vote to incorporate Thompson Hill, a city-within-a-city comprised of six families who did not want to be included in the Oak Hill incorporation—the small city crafted a zoning ordinance to lock in the large-lot legacy of its unsewered origins, with most of the area subject to two-acre minimums.
Clouse stirred a number of annexation pushes in the favored quarter—most of which, like in Green Hills, failed. His bid to incorporate an area under the moniker of Harpeth Hills also failed in late 1956, though it was reconstituted—with slightly different boundaries to align with state law and the new name Forest Hills. With an 81-vote majority on January 15, 1957, the city of Forest Hills was incorporated. The first move of the city commission, as in the other favored quarter incorporations, was the passage of a zoning code which mandated large lots and prohibited commercial or industrial uses.
By the late 1950s, with moves for splinter city incorporations only escalating and worsening suburban services, the problem had grown too great for halting efforts at piecemeal annexations—for the civic elite, the only solution was a consolidated, metropolitan government for Nashville and Davidson County.
A first vote for consolidation failed in 1958, though it garnered a majority of city voters and enjoyed strong support among the “cosmopolitan” residents of the county’s 7th Civil District. The City of Nashville, under the leadership of Mayor Ben West, mounted an aggressive response—mass annexations that ignored the long-held consensus that such action required the consent of county residents and various moves to tax suburbanites for their use of city services and infrastructure. As Tennessean publisher and journalist John Seigenthaler put it, “[Mayor West] scared the hell out of them. On [the day of the annexations], Metro government became a reality.”
The imminent threat of consolidation spurred two more splinter city incorporations—Goodlettsville and Dupontonia, which soon changed its name to Lakewood and carried the moniker until its charter was dissolved in 2011—on the belief that consolidation would increase tax rates without an attendant improvement in urban services. Through incorporation, Goodlettsville and Dupontonia could start their own water and sewer districts immediately, rather than wait for the city system to be extended out to their locations on the fringe of the county.
A plan for metropolitan government was approved by voters in Nashville and Davidson County in 1962. The plan split the county into an Urban and a General Services District, combined city and county school systems, and instituted a 40-member Metropolitan Council. While Nashville-Davidson County is widely considered a successful model of metropolitanism, the consolidation of school districts and diminution of Black political power—overwhelmed by suburban interests—helped to stall integration and bolstered projects to remake urban spaces through Urban Renewal and highway construction.
Same Old Shit.
In 1967, as inner cities exploded in riots and the Open Suburbs movement reached its apex, the Nashville Tennessean ran a syndicated column that noted a fundamental challenge to residential integration:
“By a fantastic coincidence… the proliferation of zoning has kept the Negro from by-passing the central city in his particular quest for a refuge from the mechanized cotton plantation which can no longer offer him a living. Nobody just out of the Mississippi delta farm life has the money to pay for a home on a plot zoned for an acre-and-a-half.”
It was a coincidence less fantastic than facile.
Since the Industrial Revolution, sewage has profoundly shaped cities. Some trace the origins of geographic information systems—and both modern epidemiology and modern Anglo infrastructure planning—to an 1854 cholera outbreak in London caused by sewage contamination of a public water fountain. And just as the public water fountain, in the American South, is inextricably linked to segregation, so is the form of the suburbs shaped by septic tanks and sewage problems.
The southwest hills—with large lots “too big for the average priced home” from the start—remain far wealthier and whiter than the rest of Davidson County. In the 2020 Census, non-Hispanic whites made up 89% of residents in the section, compared to 51% of the rest of the county. Each Census Tract in the area boasts six-figure median household incomes, with all three of the favored quarter Satellite Cities eclipsing $200,000 annually—more than two-and-a-half times greater than the median household in Nashville. The most diverse sliver is the thin strip along Hillsboro Pike, from I-440 just past Hillsboro High School, where the earliest sewer line enabled the construction of modestly dense apartments and condos that put residence within the reach of a more representative cross section of the county.
The massive, countywide project to extend sewers throughout the suburbs started soon after consolidation and lasted into the early 1990s. But the large lots that started as an unsewered expedient soon became central to concepts of community character, which residents of the favored quarter have reinforced with “the law of preservation” even as the original purpose was obviated.
In 1987, just three years after single-family zoning was first enabled in Nashville and Davidson County amidst a countywide panic over duplex construction, more than three-thousand parcels were downzoned to ban duplexes in the entirety of Hillwood and West Meade. A mass downzoning of Woodmont Estates followed a few months later.
The remainder of the sprawling sector is a patchwork of high-end infill amidst vast swaths virtually unchanged from the original, segregation era subdivisions. As the housing market tightened into the new millennium, builders increasingly sought to capitalize on the high property values in the Green Hills area through various methods of densification. The introduction of sewers obviated the purpose of the large-lot expedient and much of the area had been zoned for residential lots of a quarter-acre or less; builders subdivided these lots to the regulatory minimum and added fee simple houses. Others exploited longstanding two-unit zoning to add “horizontal property regime” houses, either through teardowns or additions.
District councilmembers, at the behest of neighborhood homeowner groups, in the 2000s embarked on a series of downzonings that covered around half of Green Hills. In some areas, minimum lot sizes were increased to preclude resubdivision; in other areas, duplex permissions were traded for single-family zoning. The councilmembers “would spend a tremendous amount of time and money… to allow people to opt out” of the downzonings on a lot-by-lot basis, according to Tom White, a prominent local land use attorney, because mass downzonings remained novel and politically fraught at the time. White notes in an interview that the moves to downzone the favored quarter broke open the pro-property rights taboo against mass downzonings—others soon followed in areas like Hillsboro-West End and across the county.
Today, Metro subdivision regulations enforce compatibility requirements in suburban areas of the county that effectively prohibit resubdivision for lots smaller than the predominant form of the original plat.
With much of the favored quarter locked into a single-unit maximum and large lots that impose no geometric impediment to expansive footprints, the current trend is toward ever-larger mansions. Since 2021, at least 83 properties in the area have sold for seven figures—only to be scraped and rebuilt with a house many times the square footage of the original. This relentless upscaling has overturned—in the richest enclaves, at least—the old argument about the fiscal inefficiency of sprawl and bolstered a “taxpayer citizenship” claim that residents vociferously defend.
But the problem of “deadweight” residential subdivisions remains in areas like southeast Davidson County and Madison. A fiscal impact analysis, conducted by Smart Growth America in 2013 to support the Nashville Next comprehensive plan, found that the sparse, post-septic tank subdivision of Bradford Hills generated higher service costs and lower tax revenues per unit than modern infill developments or dense downtown urbanism.
In southeast Davidson County, where soil conditions were suitable for septic tanks on smaller lots, suburbia sprawled swiftly in a leapfrog pattern of modest, middle-class ranch house subdivisions interspersed among large tracts of renitent farmland. This pattern would prove amenable to the development of lower-cost housing types—and attendant racial and class transitions—in the decade after consolidation.
The merger of city and county as a unified metropolitan government marked a great triumph of pro-growth progressive governance, but the larger challenge to unify physical and social structures loomed. The new metropolitan government was not only faced with massive infrastructure projects and bureaucratic reorganization, but also a tenuous union of Black and white amidst the backdrop of a momentous civil rights movement that exposed its separate—and unequal—peace.
The solution—and the boom and backlash it sparked—would reshape the urban structure of Nashville’s nascent metropolitan for the next half-century.