But, Does Nashville Really Need 90,000 New Housing Units by 2034? Will More Units Solve the Problem?

by The Pamphleteer, Oct. 9, 2025- Chris Remke takes a pickaxe to Metro's claim that we need 90,000 new housing units by 2034. As Chris reveals, the city's Unified Housing Strategy vastly overestimates population growth over the next ten years and thus, anticipated housing needs.

The UHS projection anticipates an additional 175,000 people moving to Nashville between 2020 and 2034 – that comes out to 12,500 residents moving to town per year. In actuality, over the past four years, the city has added only 13,621 residents, which translates to approximately 3,205 residents per year.

Read the whole story from Chris below and finish it over on his Substack.

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Nashville’s housing debate has turned into a numbers game. Big projections, big promises, and bigger development pipelines dominate the conversation. Yet behind the spreadsheets and zoning maps lies a much simpler truth: the supply is there — the affordability is not.

For fifteen years, the city has chased the idea that if we build enough market-rate housing, affordability will follow. That theory, once plausible, now collapses under its own data. The Unified Housing Strategy (UHS) and the Housing & Infrastructure Study (H&I) — the two cornerstone planning documents guiding Metro’s decisions — do not tell the same story. In fact, they reveal the gap at the center of Nashville’s housing crisis.

Nashville is still shell-shocked from a decade of runaway growth. The roads, schools, and storm drains tell the story better than any policy brief. People see it, feel it, and no longer buy the idea that “more growth will fix what growth broke.” Until Metro leaders face the reality that the problem is not a shortage of rooftops but a shortage of affordability and infrastructure, the public will keep tuning them out. Voters have learned the difference between building a city and just building on one — and they are done being told that the cure for congestion, displacement, and rising costs is simply to build more of the same.  (Continue Reading)

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