TND for Tennessee

Carothers Crossing called “precedent-setting project” for the Nashville area. Nashville Metro Council has approved the city’s largest traditional neighborhood development (TND) to date, the 603-acre, 2,300-unit Carothers Crossing, to be developed by Don Smithson and Ed Richey. The project will include four villages and a town center. Approximately 60 percent of the land will be retained as parks and open space, says project designer Seth Harry, AIA, of Seth Harry & Associates Inc., Architects and Planners, of Woodbine, Maryland. The plan has interesting features, including a town center that is at the geographic center of the project (many TND centers are off to one side to take advantage of traffic passing by). In this case, Harry says, an existing rural road “that was destined to become a typical suburban collector/minor arterial” passes through the heart of the site. The design team tamed this thoroughfare, “allowing us to achieve a high level of neighborhood retail in a market context that would have otherwise only supported typical highway strip commercial,” he explains. The town center is planned to include up to 150,000 square feet of commercial space. traffic calming and enclosure A half-dozen deflections and a modified turbine square at the heart of the community calm traffic on the thoroughfare, setting the stage for a five-block-long main street. A turbine square is a pinwheel-shaped public space. All four streets that enter the square feature vistas terminating on buildings, providing a strong sense of arrival and enclosure. One side of the square is designed with wide steps leading up to a civic plaza — a takeoff on Leon Krier’s well-known drawings of a theoretical city called Atlantis, Harry says. Carothers Crossing is located in the fast-growing southeast sector of Davidson County, which needs examples of good development, says Keith Covington, manager of the Metro planning department’s design studio. “We are supporting the developer on this,” he says. “It’s an important precedent-setting project for the county.” Davidson County already has a successful TND in Lenox Village, but Carothers Crossing takes the concept a step further with a stronger mix of housing types, Covington says, and the plan works well with the natural features of the site including several streams and steep slopes. It will probably break ground in the fall, he adds. The project required complete rezoning — accomplished in less than 120 days through an urban design overlay (UDO). The issue of narrow streets is still unresolved, according to Covington. The developer is pushing for four new street sections, including a residential street measuring 25 feet curb to curb (two 9-foot travel lanes and one 7-foot parking lane). Public works officials would like to see a 28-foot-wide street (10-foot travel lanes and an 8-foot parking lane). While three feet may not seem like much, it could make a big difference in the character of the community, Covington says. Metro planners are supporting the narrower streets as well as smaller curb return radii than called for by Public Works. “There is definitely a difference in philosophy, but we are trying to work through it,” he says. Public Works officials must sign off of the plan prior to building permits being issued. Smithson and Richey have hired two new urbanist engineering experts, Rick Hall of Hall Planning & Engineering in Tallahassee, Florida, and Tony Sease of Civitech in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to work through the street and civil engineering issues. “It’s a strong team and a lot of expertise to hopefully make the case for alternative standards,” says Covington. Another experienced new urbanist, Bill Allison of Allison Ramsey Architects, is providing architectural services. u