Nashville’s tall-and-skinnies didn’t arrive because someone “planned” them.

They arrived because the system rewarded a blueprint: find the loophole, file the paperwork, build through it.

Episode 2 The Machine traces the rise of the HPR loophole—from the 1963 Horizontal Property Act (written for condos), to the 1990 tweaks that made it easier to “turn the key,” to the 2001 Attorney General opinion that officially declared HPRs are not subdivisions—meaning the biggest chokepoint for public pushback and cost could be bypassed.

Then the economics catch up.

COMZO’s zoning legacy keeps Nashville neighborhoods low-density, but downtown demand flips when a mayor bets on an arena and changes what it means to live in the core.

With legal keys in hand and demand in the market, developers begin iterating—neighborhood by neighborhood—until the HPR becomes the dominant unit type reshaping Nashville’s infill development

This episode follows the timeline. Ultimately discovering what we gained, what we lost, and why the loophole that was once “affordable” drifted into something else entirely.

Primary Research: A Note on Sources

The analytical framework for this episode — including the four-era structure of Nashville's HPR development, the legal mechanics of the Horizontal Property Act, the significance of the 1990 amendments, and the data showing more than 20,000 HPR units built from 2010–2023 — draws substantially from the research of Charles Gardner and Alex Pemberton. Their work represents thousands of hours of original research, including analysis of over 300,000 Davidson County property records. This episode would not have been possible without it.

Charles Gardner and Alex Pemberton, "Tennessee's HPR Law and Its Transformation of Nashville's Housing Market: A Model for Other States," Mercatus Center at George Mason University (Mercatus Special Study), September 24, 2024 — Link

Charles Gardner and Alex Pemberton, "Tennessee's HPR Law and How It Enabled an Infill Boom in Nashville," Mercatus Center at George Mason University (Policy Spotlight), 2024 — Link

Full a full list of primary and secondary sources used to build this episode - ⁠Follow this Link ⁠ for the complete show notes for every episode