Potemkin’ Donuts
This is an extended version of an article that appeared in the Nashville Scene - June 6, 2024 edition. Read that version here.
Admit it, East Nashville. We’re all thinking the same thing: What’s up with the new Dunkin’ Donuts 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.
Photo credit: Angelina Castillo, The Nashville Scene
The Letter of the Law.
In the MUG-A zone which covers the Dunkin’ site, and all of the corridor below Douglas Avenue, buildings must be built within fifteen feet of the sidewalk and the building facade (on parcels sixty feet wide or greater) must extend across at least sixty percent of the parcel’s frontage, with windows making up at least forty percent of that facade. Amidst all the seemingly arbitrary numbers is an intent to promote buildings that greet the sidewalk in a traditional urban form, with a friendly facade to define the street edge.
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—they begged for a Board of Zoning Appeals variance to allow them to use the same formulaic, four-walled rectangular building module that Dunkin’ GO site standards plop down from Boston to Bakersfield. The variance was rightly denied for lack of a hardship, but life… finds a way.
That’s the how. But the more interesting question is why did this happen? I believe that bad buildings can tell us more about our society, our rules, and ourselves than even the most beautiful buildings can. I’d even argue that the Dunkin’ GO on Gallatin is the most purely American building Nashville has ever seen—our newest future historic landmark, an embodiment of all that coalesces to create space in this great nation.
BEFORE: submittal to the BZA, without the false facade
AFTER: building permit drawing, including the false facade
Dunkin’ on the Potemkin Prairie.
There is a long and rich history of Potemkin architecture in the United States. Westward expansion brought about some of our most novel real estate promotions—essentially, every new settlement was built on a “fake it ‘til you make it” model. As little wooden shacks were tossed up to form the early makings of a town, their builders would often apply a taller, more robust facade to the cheap, temporary frame—a way to project stability and success amidst uncertainty about whether the town would last. False front commercial buildings were especially common in Old West frontier outposts and Rocky Mountain mining towns that were often little more than a flash in the pan.
Locally, false front commercial buildings sprang up along our early turnpikes—some still remain, like those near the intersection of Whites Creek Pike and Old Hickory Boulevard. Regional examples include a pair from Belfast, Tennessee.
And as the railroads converged on Nashville in the 1800s, real estate promoters planned towns around the depots along the routes. While often including false fronts on individual buildings, these towns most notably resembled a complete Potemkin Village—planned in a linear fashion, stretching out along the tracks to impress train passengers with an image of a more expansive town.
Almost certainly without realizing or intending it, the Dunkin’ developer and Metro government came together to create something referential to our American past—both in its physical form and its expression of values. Where the false facade buildings of days gone by sought to will a stronger future into being, the zoning rules on Gallatin seek to take us back to a stronger past—to replicate a way of building from a time before the automobile weakened and cheapened our public realm. In some ways, this one stupid building unintentionally represents the deepest contemporary cultural values of a nation that struggles between uncertain visions to build back better or a drive to restore greatness with a return to old ways.
And just like the false fronts of old, there is little substance behind the facade.
What’s the Net-Net(-Net)?
Of course, the Potemkin Donuts design is also an outcome of the business model of formulaic food and beverage chains—standardized to excise all inefficiencies. A Dunkin’ outpost is less a center for human nourishment than it is a corporate bond with extra steps and sprinkle icing—a financial product masquerading as a restaurant. Customers get low-quality burnt coffee and highly processed carbohydrates. The franchisee gets a proven playbook and an established brand. The land owner gets a low-effort vehicle (whether as a land lease to the operator or as a “triple-net” lease if the building and land are owned together) to convert capital presumably generated by productive endeavors into a corporate credit-backed stream of future cash flows delivering attractive tax-efficient, risk-adjusted returns. Simple exchange of values.
A typical Dunkin’ store sells for nearly $1,000 per square foot—the money isn’t in the building, it’s in the business model. And in the business model of formulaic food and beverage, there is no motivation to adapt the building module to each unique site—or think too hard about it when required.
A different, more human-oriented model of coffee conveyance coexists on Gallatin, with local brands like Osa, Barista Parlor, and Slow Hand revamping small spaces in mid-century strip malls and old auto body shops. But those little locals can’t afford new construction or a half-acre of pricey commercial land. Where humanness can’t pay the rent, financialized corporate capitalism fills the space.
Donut Density.
In order to pay the high rents that make for an attractive real estate investment and franchise operation while sending big bucks up to corporate, formula food and beverage chains must operate on vastly higher volumes than the little, low-budget locals—which means that there must be vastly more potential customers within convenient distance.
East Nashville, though, has only moderate suburban population density—around 5,000 people per square mile. There just simply are not enough potential customers within a 10-minute walkshed of the Dunkin’ on Gallatin to support an operation that requires a million dollars per year in revenue—which necessitates a drive-thru, which comes with costs that push required sales volumes even higher. In the South, the median drive-thru Dunkin’ generates $1.3 million per year in sales while the median non-drive-thru gets by on just under a million. The density vs. drive-thru dichotomy is apparent in Dunkin’ locations in Nashville—locations adjacent to the largest employer in the city, within a dense apartment building surrounded by a density of mixed uses, and in the central transit hub do not need a drive-thru.
There is an old maxim in the retail real estate game: “Retail follows rooftops.” It’s true, but incomplete. The density or sparsity of rooftops also reshapes retail. When the number of rooftops required for retail can only be found within an automotive radius, the retail will be designed for automotive access. When there are enough rooftops within a walking radius to support a retail use, the retailer will design for the pedestrian—and the threshold for sales volume needed for a new store is lower. In this way, proper urban density creates a virtuous cycle of abundance.
Prescriptive Zoning: Full of Holes.
Yet it is also true that the business model of formulaic food and beverage developed in the context of the rules Freedom-Loving Americans devised to divvy up, de-densify, and standardize our cities. The average American tends to think of zoning as an anodyne, technocratic tool to keep slaughterhouses out of residential neighborhoods—as it was in 1692 when Boston enacted America’s first proto-zoning ordinance. But the genes of modern American-style zoning are rooted less in public regulation of externalities and more in replication of private restrictive covenants. This DNA manifests in our extensive, overwrought zoning code, which slices and dices Nashville into 111 separate districts, each prescribing strict, HOA-style parameters for intensity, density, height controls, flag poles, the location of trees, roof pitch degrees—and hundreds more strictures, but you get the picture.
In most of the world, zoning remains that old notion of a means for public regulation of land use externalities. The entire city of Paris has just four zonal types—over 90% is zoned Urbaine Générale, which allows residences, retail, office, artisans, and others to mix with all but the most noxious industrial uses. It’s that very mix of uses that gives Paris its charm—an elegant chaos. Then, public resources are devoted to preserving and enhancing that mix. Zoning is a small part of sound urban planning in Paris.
But in modern America, sound urban planning is subsumed by zoning, which is tasked to regulate by proxy what Paris regulates directly. Zoning is the primary mechanism by which American cities manage infrastructure capacity, discriminate with various degrees of legality, mitigate the need for public services like noise and nuisance ordinance enforcement, preference certain family formations, supply or deny affordable housing, and otherwise map political power onto geography.
Potemkin Gentrifikation.
East Nashville’s residential gentrification in the 1980s and ‘90s established a more politically active and privileged population, who then turned their attention to commercial nodes and corridors.
The entire Main/Gallatin corridor was rezoned in 2007, with the then-councilmember 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 parameters 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, a small strip mall in front of a surface parking lot, and a larger strip mall in front of a big box-turned-self storage facility. And the zoning, with its direct discriminatory intent neutered by legal challenges, failed to stop the type of “unsavory” businesses that serve a segment of East Nashville—much to the chagrin of neighborhood activists.
The largest, most Parisian proposed project on Gallatin to date—the Lincoln Tech/Nashville Auto Diesel College redevelopment—is turning inward, focusing its retail uses toward an internal festival street and pocket park. If the Publix parking lot and diesel college plan were urbanist tragedies, the Potemkin Donuts is farce.
The Potemkin Donuts is not alone—while projects built on the Gallatin corridor since its rezoning comply with the letter of the code, most turn their backs on its intent and orient their active “front doors” away from the street and toward parking in the rear.
What does and does not work.
Now that quick-serve franchise site selectors’ demographic reports for Gallatin Pike are lighting up with green, the trend will only continue. A proposal for a drive-thru-only Scooter’s Coffee at Gallatin & Delmas is also requesting a façade width variance from the BZA, as has a planned Whataburger at Gallatin & Greenwood.
Why does this keep happening? Why isn’t the zoning working? Quite simply, because zoning cannot promote—it can only prevent. Zoning only restricts land use; it does not and cannot determine land use. Zoning can ban certain uses from certain places, 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.
Land use is determined, first and foremost, by everything outside the lines of the parcel. It is the potential provided by the public realm that generates economic value for the land within the lines of a parcel—the land which zoning restricts. As much as Nashville may want to develop a little more like Paris, the public realm on Gallatin 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 twenty years of futile prescriptive zoning, Gallatin Pike is set to receive a real solution—a public realm redesign is underway by smart urban planners and transportation engineers. The proposed concepts will widen sidewalks, dedicate bus lanes, add medians with trees, and create safe crossings. Sometime starting in 2025, Gallatin Pike will be humanized—and the buildings along it will follow the lead.
If we make the right decisions today, we’ll look back a decade from now and wonder why we wasted so many years on a Sisyphean effort to push a single solution—prescriptive, preventative rules for private property—up Gallatin Pike, when what we needed all along was a coordinated, positive vision for the public realm. We’ll have the Potemkin Donuts to remind us.