The executive director of Nashville’s Department of Planning, Arkansas native Lucy Kempf, has a genesis story that took her out of The Wonder State, to Charlotte, North Carolina, then to the nation’s capital, Washington D.C., and eventually landing her in one of the most high-profile development booms in the country, Music City.

Kempf started at the Planning Department in 2016; two years later she was made the department’s chief, a relatively fast rise. She had previously been the director of the urban design and plan review division of the National Capital Planning Commission when she was in D.C. The spark, however, for creating high-functioning communities happened all the way back when Kemp was still in Little Rock, where she grew up.

“Little Rock started to completely rethink a historic district situated right on the riverfront that had been suffering from disinvestment,” Kempf says. “At the time, there were very few people who were downtown, and I remember being energized at what was happening, that suddenly people started to come together in a way that I hadn’t seen in my childhood.

“That was probably the first time I realized that I was interested in planning, but I didn’t have the words for it,” she continues. “Then I was in Charlotte and got to be part of the revitalization of an old rail manufacturing corridor, and I thought it was so fun to see these historic spaces reclaimed for something new.”

After finishing her undergraduate degree in history from Davidson College, Kempf earned a master’s degree in urban and environmental planning from the University of Virginia. Later she would pursue a certificate in art and architectural history from Florida State University’s international program based on her time in Florence, Italy.

Metro Planning deals with land use and zoning, long-range community plans, historic preservation, neighborhoods as well as subdivisions and sustainable development. In Nashville, concerns that the city has had particularly intense growing pains are usual for a city growing at Nashville’s rate, says Kempf, and they may be preferable to the alternative.

“When I arrived in D.C. in 2004, it was growing again after decades of population decline. Like a lot of legacy cities, D.C. had a lot of varying kinds of struggles over the years, so the city learned about the psychological damage that can happen to a community when it begins to shrink.

“Nashville hasn’t experienced that in some time. In Nashville, of course, there are a lot of concerns about growth, but my hope is that we can grow responsibly and in a way that improves livability without slowing growth.”

Often asked to compare Nashville with cities in which she has lived or worked. Kempf says most large municipalities have physical assets and resources, and some have those along with a kind of disposition.

“Both Little Rock and Nashville are river cities, though Little Rock has had far fewer economic resources, but has managed to do something really superb with their riverfront,” Kempf says. “That is a natural investment, whereas D.C. is more formal, so what you really want is to understand the language of that city.”

“If you look at the East Bank or the work we are doing with the Global Mall, for example, mobility is a big foundational piece, not an afterthought,” Kempf says.

-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

Identifying those physical assets as well as assets that are culturally enriching are key to incorporating them effectively into future plans but also a way to make them sustainable, she adds.

“Things like Music Row or great restaurants, or natural features like our hillsides in Whites Creek and in Bellevue, if you take advantage and highlight those things and build on them, then the change can be really wonderful,” Kempf says. “One thing I did learn from D.C., and which is applicable here, is that often we don’t appreciate a natural setting until it’s gone or eroded.”

Planning Commission member and District 5 Councilmember, Brett Withers, who works alongside Kempf, says she has been good at nurturing the department into a high-functioning one by backing those who work for her, not a given with department heads, he says.

“She is very supportive of, and listens to, her team,” Withers says. “Sometimes you have a department director who says it’s my way or the highway; I feel like it’s pretty collaborative over there … We have a lot of new planning staff who can work on things as a planner and actually see them happen and that is not always the case in a fast-growing city.”

NashvilleNext, the city’s master plan that strategizes to year 2040, lists “fostering neighborhoods” as one of its key missions. Kempf says she believes cities are made more whole through self-sustaining neighborhoods in which functions of daily life are within proximity of their homes.

“Our vision is to be a city of shorter distances, which means that we plan the city to give residents choices to live closer to their places of business, places of worship, their hobbies, those kinds of things,” Kempf says. “You want to offer people the choice to live near neighborhood clusters, so they can walk or bike and have options to access those spaces.”

East Bank’s importance

The most ambitious neighborhood overhaul is the city’s current plan for the East Bank, hundreds of prime acres along the Cumberland River across from downtown. It would be the largest development in the city’s history. The plan introduces several mixed-use developments, a public greenway along the riverfront and a boulevard providing multimodal access.

But much of the East Bank development centers on the construction of a new stadium for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, a project that will involve the largest amount of public spending on a stadium in history and which was approved by Metro Council late last month.

“The fact that the East Bank is centrally located meant that, as we began to re-imagine possibilities with guidance from the community, we realized we could build an outstanding neighborhood that could also be a linchpin for a lot of other features that would improve the livability of the whole city,” Kempf says.

The cultural and economic climate of that area, she adds, has struggled, in part, due to the East Bank’s industrial past.

“If you look at other cities, it is normal for there to be a slow progression toward transit,” Kempf says.

-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

“It’s kind of a concrete moat that separates downtown and one of our best neighborhoods, East Nashville,” she says. “But it’s a missing link through all of Nashville’s connective tissue, so by opening up greenways, by opening up human access to these assets, the East Bank is a link. It’s part of an answer; it’s not a whole answer, but it is an important piece of that puzzle.”

Work on River North, adjacent to the East Bank, is already underway. The tech company Oracle bought more than 60 acres in 2021 for a campus that will feature many of the 8,500 workers the company expects to bring to the state. The move is expected to bring thousands through the East Bank daily.

Kempf says the both long-range NashvilleNext plan and the East Bank plan are examples of how Nashville is developing far-reaching strategies as opposed to having to address issues on the back end. Kempf is not a fan of provisional planning.

“So, the question is how much is the city going to guide that development or are we going to allow the private sector to do it in sort of an ad hoc fashion,” Kempf says. “My answer is no more ad hoc development.”

Mobility options, she adds, are now being incorporated into all plans for the city.

“If you look at the East Bank or the work we are doing with the Global Mall, for example, mobility is a big foundational piece, not an afterthought or how we are structuring those visions.”

The Global Mall at the Crossings, formerly the Hickory Hollow Mall in Antioch, was bought by the city in April 2022. Planning staff are working with community members to understand how they would like to see the site developed, which could include health care space, a performing arts center and mixed-use development that includes retail and residential.

The planning department also performs ongoing studies on transitioning neighborhoods, as well as studies on specific site issues. They are now studying Second Avenue, 88 Hermitage, Downtown Code Bonus Height Program, East Bank, Edgehill and Global Mall.

Transit key to setting priorities

In terms of Nashville’s struggles in getting the effective transit systems strong growth requires, Kempf says Music City parallels other cities.

“If you look at other cities, it is normal for there to be a slow progression toward transit,” Kempf says. “I feel optimistic; I just think that the life cycle of our city is where it is. Some things that we are doing really well now, we didn’t do 10 years ago. As in most cities, Nashville’s planning department must work with nearly all other Metro departments.”

Navigating politics, Withers says, adds an extra layer of complication to Kempf’s job, and she navigates it well.

“She knows how to walk a fine line when trying to get things done,” Withers says. “We have a strong mayor system, and in Metro a lot of our departments sort of run themselves. But you do have to get buy-in from all those departments.”

Nashville’s master plan, NashvilleNext, which was adopted in 2016, projects that Davidson County will have 200,000 more people by 2040. When asked if those numbers still feel on target, Kemp says the actual numbers may be higher, but the plan’s numbers are still usable.

“When we talk to research analysts about whether or not they are on pace regarding projections, what they have said is that Nashville’s growth is exceeding the projections right now, today,” Kempf says. “But I do think they are still relevant, and I think they do mean that focusing on those neighborhood centers is really important.”

The concept of prioritizing neighborhoods over the use of cars is evident when Kemp talks about her time in Italy.

“Everything about Florence makes you excited about urban planning. What Florence does, is it shows well how to give people access to public spaces. They have a very old tradition of surrounding those spaces with a mix of uses with retail and restaurants on the bottom and residential on the top. It’s an old science, but it is the blueprint of what lots of cities need to do. And, you know what? The cars, they come last.”