In early 2022 my company, Core Development, purchased a 9.2-acre section of an 18-acre property that was once home to Nashville Memorial Hospital.
I learned about this property when my real estate sales team, The CityLiving Group, listed for sale The Yarra, a neighborhood of 69 townhomes located behind the Memorial Hospital property. Brandon Plunkett of Forbes Plunkett Real Estate is also involved in that project, and as we learn more about each other, invited Core to partner with him at Memorial.
Ironically, the owner of the property we purchased and the remaining land is Charles Jones, a local real estate investor I met in the early 2000s. Charles had also been the owner of Werthan Mills in Germantown, an old 400,000-square-foot dilapidated structure built in 1878, which was home to Werthan Bag Industries for over 100 years. When we bought that property from him, we turned it into Werthan Mills Lofts, with 351 residential units. When we met again this year, I remembered that he had been a wily 73-year-old negotiator at that time; and now realized that he was an even wilier businessman at 90 years old. But, we enjoyed the negotiations and became the owners of this project, which had been vacant since 2005.
We worked with Nancy Van Reece, who is the awesome Metro Councilwoman of District 8, which includes Madison, TN, to develop our plan. In what we call ‘inner Madison,’ where this project is located, Nancy and the community envisioned commercial spaces on Due West, which is the corridor, and housing and office in the interior. She led the charge and got the property zoned MUL, which is perfect for our development plans. MUL, which is Mixed Use Limited, is intended for a moderate-intensity mixture of residential, retail, and office uses. During this meeting, we realized everyone involved really envisions this property as a gateway from Ellington Parkway into Madison, with easy access to greenways, businesses, and affordable housing.
In our joint statement for the Nashville Post, we summed it up by stating, “The purpose of the project is to create an 18-acre ‘urban-meets-suburban district’ that includes an emphasis on arts, music, food, commerce, social enterprise, and mixed-income housing.”
We are working with Centric Architecture to create a master plan that will serve as a template for a multi-phased buildout of the parcel. We are now in the predevelopment process of two multi-family residential projects, including one that will be for lease and the other sold as condominiums. We are working with Amazon, who has committed to using $2 Billion of their balance sheet to create affordable housing in Seattle, Northern Virginia, and Nashville, their three headquarters. We have constructed a deal, which will likely close in the first quarter of 2023, to use $10 million from Amazon as part of our financing so that we can designate 30% of a 240-unit project for residents who make less than 70% of the medium income.
Core Development is an award-winning real estate development team focused on community revitalization, dedicated to bringing energy, life, and commerce to Nashville’s urban neighborhoods with in-fill development and adaptive reuse of buildings of character. Core uses the ‘One-Mile Radius’ strategy to build walkable neighborhoods and dedicate 5% of profits to the Core Fund, which invests in the social profits in the communities that we serve.