The ratio of iPads-to-people surrounding the pushed-together wedge of tables was surprisingly high for this early on a Saturday morning.

It was Day Two of the Crazy Busy Weekend (Taylor’s Version), and the patio outside the Cooper Branch cafe attached to the downtown Nashville Public Library was just starting to wake up.

Amid the technology that surrounded him, Mark Hollingsworth was decidedly analog, arranging his pages of notes alongside the stack of local media printouts, while greeting people as they popped out of the cafe with beverages or ascended the stairs from the street level of Sixth Avenue North.

Hollingsworth

It was the monthly UrbanPlanet Nashville gathering Hollingsworth has helped shepherd for the past several years, grown out of an online community of like-minded folks fascinated, be it casually or professionally, with the increasingly complex world of development projects.

Or, as one of the group’s local founders John Mathieson puts it, “It really just grew off of a couple of nerds who like tall buildings.”

Slightly more than a dozen of these folks came together on this partly cloudy but pleasant Saturday morning, to not only socialize but get up to speed on the dizzying array of building projects slowly crawling to the sky throughout Nashville and Davidson County.

Some, like Mathieson, who works for building technology, software and services provider Johnson Controls, have a professional interest in the group that grew from family history working construction.

“My great-grandfather helped build the Empire State Building,” Mathieson says. “My father’s cousins, they topped off the steel at the World Trade Center. So I always had an interest, even if I thought that there’s not another person like me who likes this stuff.”

Other interested parties included an architect, a data scientist and a demographer/statistician, which explains the presence of the high-end tablets and webcam capturing the meeting via Zoom for attendees from Dallas and Delaware, who would chime in via chat.

The overarching UrbanPlanet site, urbanplanet.org, grew out of the Charlotte-based UrbanPlanet Institute, which seeks to “become a force against uneducated sprawl and environmentally unfriendly projects plaguing the world,” according to the institute’s LLC website.

For Hollingsworth, his participation in UrbanPlanet’s Nashville presence came from a lifelong interest in the buildings themselves.

Ascention St. Thomas’ name will be attached to Nashville Yards’ open plaza and green space.

-- Render Provided By Aj Capital Partners

“When I was in elementary school in Columbus, Ohio, I loved architecture,” he says. “I was a weird kid; at 9 years old, I had a subscription to Architectural Digest. So I was constantly designing new stadiums and skyscrapers and laying out city planning.

“When I was really young, I thought I’d become an architect someday, but somewhere along the way other things came along that were more interesting, and so that remained a hobby of mine.”

Those “other things” that captured Hollingsworth’s attention included music, so he crafted a multifaceted career in the world of artist management, as well as a two-decade stint with the child-advocacy organization Compassion International.

In certain circles, Hollingsworth also is known as one of the linchpins behind the volume and efficacy of Cellblock 303, the die-hard Nashville Predators fan section whose chants have been the bane of NHL goalies for a quarter century.

(Yes, Preds fans, Hollingsworth helped bring about “He shoots…he scores…YOU SUCK.”)

But even while traveling around the world as a profession, his fascination with the slow elevation of Nashville’s core ramped up when he settled here for good in 1991.

“Every city I’ve lived in, I’ve kept track of what new things are coming down the pipeline, and I’ve always been fascinated by interesting architecture, the world’s tallest skyscrapers and other things going on around the globe,” Hollingsworth says. “I lived in Nashville from ’82 to early ’86, but from the time I moved back, I just started keeping a file, and that file has grown into numerous file drawers.

“In 2014, I discovered this thing called UrbanPlanet Nashville, which had apparently been around for about 10 years at that time,” he continues. “There was another website called Skyscraper City, and they had a page for Nashville on there, but it was just one continuous page, a blog kind of thing, hard to scroll back and find things.

“Whereas UrbanPlanet Nashville, they would start forum subjects for every new building or every new trend. And then there were, for smaller projects, it’s divided up for different parts of the city.”

Hollingsworth had found his tall-building loving tribe and threw his free-time energy into bolstering the site’s content, driving around the area on weekends, chronicling projects from ground-break to ribbon-cutting, shooting more than 45,000 photographs in the near-decade he’s been an active contributor and now de facto leader.

And still, he insists, “I’m a fanboy. I don’t make money at this at all, it’s just something I enjoy doing.”

Behold … The Map

As Hollingsworth brings the group up to speed on the various aspects of what he calls the “Nashville’s Hot” section of current activity – including details of some of the 45 construction cranes currently up in Davidson County, with total of 58 on the year – Ron Brewer sits to his left, ready with more facts and stats regarding the seemingly torrid pace at which structures are emerging from the ground in the area.

Thirty-one buildings scheduled to be more than 100 feet tall are under construction in Nashville, with eight those destined to be more than 300 feet. There are 17 more anticipated building starts in 2023 more than 200 feet, 12 of which are supposed to be 300 feet and higher.

The ease with which Brewer rolls out these numbers becomes evident when you take a look at his ongoing work that most UrbanPlanet Nashville members know simply as The Map.

The Map looks fairly unassuming when you visit the UrbanPlanet site and click on Development Maps, and then Nashville. It’s a Google Map embedded on a simple landing page.

It’s when you expand to a larger map, take a look at the categories detailed along the left side (Proposed, Under Construction, Complete 2021-, and a half-dozen other filter categories), and then zoom into the heart of Nashville to see the overlay of hundreds of projects (the map lists 590 “proposed” projects alone), you get a sense of the kind of resource for developers, state and local government officials, and data nerds alike The Map is.

An overhead look at the May Hosiery development in WeHo, spearheaded by AJ Capital Partners.

-- Render Provided

And while The Map is owned by the larger organization that facilitates the UrbanPlanet brand, it well and truly is Brewer’s baby, starting off as a spreadsheet detailing his own big building interests and expanding as the consumer-facing mapmaking technology got more advanced and easier to use.

“Basically, it’s every major development – plus a lot of the minor developments – in Davidson and Williamson counties, from the year 2000 right on up to now,” Brewer says, while also noting its usefulness not only for professionals and for research, but also for other groups interested in aspects of city growth and planning.

“The Civic Design Center posts the map, I know the WeHo community shares it on their page, I’ve seen it now on YIMBY, which is the nationwide ‘Yes In My Backyard’ page (yimbyaction.org),” he says. “So it’s sort of a gift to the city not only as a tool, it’s also a history lesson, basically, of the city’s development that has happened since 2000.”

Mathieson, who helped spearhead the growing local version of UrbanPlanet with Brewer, journalist William Williams and others in the mid-aughts, before the Great Recession and Nashville’s subsequent It City ascension, also points to the site’s utility as living history of the area’s growth.

“Really, UrbanPlanet is a historical document for the city,” he says. “You can see the trends in development, the trends in architecture styles, trends in neighborhood development.

“And that has sparked other groups, including a group I went to last week that focuses specifically on neighborhood improvement,” Mathieson continues. “So when you get people talking about things and get them interested in their own city, it creates a lot of civic pride.”

Perils of New Nashville

A rendering of the proposed Nashville Warehouse Company redevelopment, the city’s first large-scale mass timber project, another AJ Capital Partners endeavor.

-- Render Provided By Aj Capital Partners

Hollingsworth, Brewer and Mathieson all point to different aspects of Metro’s administration over the past three decades (Phil Bredesen’s backing of multiple high-profile projects in the ’90s, Karl Dean’s support for Music City Center and John Cooper’s home stretch effort for a new Tennessee Titans venue as part of a broader East Bank revitalization) as spark points for the current wave of developer interest in the area.

Along with the plaudits from the greater business community comes the pans from groups and individuals who don’t necessarily see a new skyscraper project (and the taxpayer resources that often go along with them) as good progress for the city and its residents.

Hollingsworth says those concerns are often reflected within the nearly 1,000 active members of UrbanPlanet Nashville’s community, as decidedly pro-development as the group can be as a whole. As with any group of any size, especially online, nothing comes with a rubber stamp.

“If somebody is contrary and comes on and says, ‘I really hate this development, here’s why,’ we’ll have a good conversation about it and sometimes people’s minds will change,” Hollingsworth says. “Probably over half the people on our board don’t really like the Titans stadium concept. They feel like it’s a better deal than we’ve had; in other words, the Titans and the state and other people are ponying up a lot more. But the city is still on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Hollingsworth says developers tend to get an undeserved bad rap, that their efforts are tone-deaf for the people who’ve known Nashville as the prototypical big small city.

A street-level rendering of proposed retail activations for Paseo South Gulch, the Eighth Avenue South development by SomeraRoad, a previously New York-based company now establishing headquarters in Nashville.

-- Render Provided

“The reason so many developers are high on Nashville is just an incredible amount of free land and, when I say free I mean available and terribly underutilized,” he says. “A lot of people complain about, ‘oh, the developers are ruining Nashville and they’re buying up all the old stuff.’ It’s a pretty small percentage when you really look at it of old things that have been taken away. It’s mostly parking lots and one-story, cinder block manufacturing facilities or a one-story dental office in Midtown. It’s not architecturally important stuff.”

As far as preserving the things and places that endear many who moved to Nashville pre-21st century, or the perceived diverting of resources away from affordable living within Davidson County, Hollingsworth says the city’s situation is not unique.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love history. I love commemorating things, but I’ll give a little bit of a pre-answer in saying this is happening all over the world,” he notes. “I’ve been to 54 countries because of my work with Compassion (International), and even in New Delhi or Rio de Janeiro or Bogota, Colombia or wherever, it’s the same thing.

“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, or at least the poor aren’t able to keep up as much.

“Now, there is a growing middle class worldwide, certainly in some of the poorest countries. That’s really exciting,” Hollingsworth continues. “But it’s a common issue if you go to Louisville or Memphis or Birmingham, other cities near us as well as if you go to Denver or Phoenix. It’s the same thing.

“There’s a growing homeless population because people just haven’t been able to keep up. Different industries have undergone so many iterations over the past 20 years,” he notes. There’s been a decline in the manufacturing realm that seems like it’s starting to rally again and come back in some ways, but it’s a problem nationally as well as internationally.

“But since we’re here in Nashville, we have to deal with the hand we’re dealt.”

The vertical city

The group also knows their forums are valuable not only for city leadership, but also developers looking to take the temperature of how people are reacting to projects all over the region.

“Developers definitely come on our site and they watch the conversation,” Hollingsworth says. “A lot of ’em are lurkers, but we find out later. A developer will come on and say, ‘gee, I’m curious what they’re thinking about this new three-story thing that’s going on the Cumulus lot, because I’m thinking of doing something a block away.’

“We also hear from (Metro) Council people that it’s part of how they measure the pulse of what’s going on.”

Mathieson also notes that famed local developer Tony Giarratana’s push for Nashville to become more of an example of 21st century “vertical city” thought, along with retiring Nashville Convention & Visitor Corp. CEO Butch Spyridon’s work in attracting visitor attention to the city has been crucial, it’s an ongoing shovels-in-the-dirt project that’s going to define the city’s reputation for decades upon its completion.

“I think what Nashville Yards has proven is that the city is now to the point where we can do these types of big urban developments,” Mathieson says. “For a long time, it was like, one tower here, one tower there. People couldn’t get two towers done, and now they’re doing, what, nine or 10 towers over there?

“What was interesting is, (former Mayor) Dean helped people realize that Nashville is a brand name,” he continues. “A lot of big cities, there’s no branding. I mean, like all due respect, but what’s Charlotte? Oh, NASCAR and banking, and right now, banking’s splitting up.

“So it’s like we have a brand here that everybody in the world wants.”