When Britnie Turner discovered Salemtown a few years ago, the neighborhood was considered by many developers and homebuyers to be a “fringe development” slightly beyond downtown’s more desirable districts.
Now Salemtown is one of the city’s fastest-growing urban neighborhoods, where townhomes with rooftop hot tubs and skyline views are quickly replacing overgrown vacant lots and residents walk to restaurants in next-door Germantown or to the nearby Farmers Market.
“It’s a funky, cool place to live,” Turner said.
Her company, Aerial Development Group, has 50 homes under construction or in the planning stages in Salemtown. She is one of a trio of developers, including Miken Development and H.R. Properties, planning to construct Salemtown Cottages, a development of 24 single-family homes along Rosa L. Parks Boulevard.
Other developments planned or underway in the neighborhood include Evergreen Real Estate’s 92-unit apartment building at Rosa L. Parks and Hume Street, SWH Residential Partners’ 282-unit Flats at Werthan Mills apartments, Jim Creason’s Fifth & Garfield development and Robin York’s Sixth & Garfield project.
“We’re faced with a pace of change,” said neighborhood association President Freddie O’Connell. “After six years (in Salemtown) I feel like an old-timer.”
With so much new construction, Salemtown and the area around it are experiencing some of Nashville’s fastest-growing home values, according to the city’s recent reappraisal. Homes in the Salemtown Cottages development, for example, will be priced from $249,000 to $279,000 and range in size from 1,450 to 1,750 square feet.
Ground has not yet been broken, but buyers already have reserved seven homes in Salemtown Cottages, Turner said.
Her new townhomes under construction on Fifth Avenue North, with 2,200 square feet of space, rooftop decks, second-floor porches, marble, hardwood and kitchens with pantries, will be in the $350,000 range.
Turner made sure that her new homes appeal to a segment of the population that is a growing force in the real estate industry — single women. “We actually had girls sit down and design the homes,” she said.
Homebuyers drawn to Salemtown range from young professionals to empty nesters moving from Franklin and Brentwood, said Michael Kenner, principal of Miken Development. They share a desire to be close to downtown but want a house and a yard, not a high-rise condo in the Gulch.
“Salemtown has all the amenities of a condo, but you have your own space. And no elevator,” Kenner said.
The neighborhood extends from Hume Street north to Dominican Drive on the edge of MetroCenter. It extends west from the Cumberland River to Rosa L. Parks Boulevard. The area fell on hard times as nearby manufacturing jobs disappeared over the years and streets became dotted with vacant lots and deteriorating houses.
Now Salemtown, like the city’s other urban neighborhoods, including Lockeland Springs and Inglewood in East Nashville and the Nations west of downtown on Charlotte Pike, is attracting homebuyers who want to live, work and play in the same location.
“It’s the ‘here and now’ mentality,” Turner said. “We don’t want to commute. We don’t want to drive. We want to walk.”
The recession strengthened those attitudes even as it put the brakes on new home construction in Salemtown and other neighborhoods. As the economy improves, developers are racing to satisfy pent-up demand, she said.
New restrictions
Molly McCluer, who moved to Salemtown from Memphis after living in Boston, Seattle and other cities, isn’t surprised that the neighborhood is in such demand. In fact, she wonders what took so long.
“I’m amazed it didn’t catch on a decade ago,” she said. “The trees, the landscape, the birds. Small children playing. It seems to have a small-town feeling. Honestly, this is my favorite place.”
She hopes new development rules will protect that feeling. After spirited neighborhood debates, the Metro Council last month approved conservation zoning regulations that will guide new construction and restrict tear-downs of historically significant houses on about four and a half city blocks.
O’Connell hopes that will strike a balance between the new development that is drawing so many homeowners and the ambiance that makes Salemtown unique.
“It’s a great pocket neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown,” O’Connell said. “The challenge will be to ensure that Salemtown remains a neighborhood and a community.”
— By Bill Lewis, The Tennessean
This article was originally published in The Tennessean on June 2, 2013.
Online article: http://www.12thandbroad.com/story/news/2013/11/27/salemtown-neighborhood-nashville/3642647/