Adriane Harris has deep roots in Nashville’s planning community. She worked for the Metro Planning Department, the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA), The Housing Fund, and as the Director of Housing in the Mayor’s Office. In 2018, she left Nashville and settled in Baltimore to gain national experience.
Now, as an urban planner and affordable housing guru, Harris is back in Nashville to work alongside ThinkTennessee as a researcher, advisor and facilitator of affordable housing conversations. Harris is also the principal and owner of HarCo Consulting, LLC, a consulting firm that is connecting people, projects, and communities to resources, which she founded in 2022.
“That might mean I work with organizations to think about housing policy or if they received some recent funding, how to structure it in a way that it feeds back into the communities in which they serve,” Harris explains. “I also coach housing and community development leaders across the country. So folks who are deep in the weeds of how to do housing, how do we make sure that they are staying visionary and imaginative in their approach to addressing affordable housing.”
You are working with ThinkTennessee, which has done some significant research on housing. What is ThinkTennessee and how do cities benefit from them?
ThinkTennessee is a nonpartisan results-oriented think tank that uses research, advocacy, and engagement to build a state where all Tennesseans are civically engaged and economically secure. We might research best practices and there’s a “State of our State” dashboard that comes out every two years that assesses how Tennessee ranks compared to other states across the country. But then also this year, for the first time, there was a “State of our Counties” dashboard. Now you can also take a look at all the county data to see where the counties rank across different topics. So, ThinkTennessee provides data and evidence-based policies for organizations and cities across the state.
You were part of a summer series ThinkTennessee co-lead called the Nashville Faith & Housing Initiative. What was that series about and did it achieve its goals?
We think we were able to achieve its goals by providing resources.
Amazon is a recent addition into the affordable housing market in Nashville and as a part of their investments across Nashville, the Puget Sound region, and the DC area, they began some research with the Urban Institute in each of those places. The Urban Institute in Nashville focused on how institutional land can be a contributing factor in affordable housing.
In November of last year, the Urban Institute in partnership with ThinkTennessee and Amazon released a report on institutional land and how that could be used for affordable housing development. The report focused on faith-based institutions, healthcare institutions as well as academic institutions. Essentially, the question is, how can all of that land that is owned by institutions be used for greater use?
During the research phase of the report, the Urban Institute and ThinkTennessee hosted meetings with different groups throughout Nashville, including the faith-based community. We noticed that there was quite a bit of interest from those faith-based institutions to understand how they could contribute to affordable housing development, and how they could use their land in a different way.
Earlier this year, ThinkTennessee, the Urban League of Middle Tennessee, and Holland & Knight developed the Housing Resource Guide that’s available on ThinkTennessee and Urban League’s websites. That guide defines common affordable housing terms. There’s also a deeper dive on what the legislation is that supports faith-based institutions, the real estate development process, and it includes some context information.
The Housing Resource Guide, or 101, is one part of this series that we were working on. The 201 guide is about helping faith institutions think about some of the land context and how it could be a contributing factor for that particular community. Lastly, the 301 [offers] a deeper dive on how to have the conversations with faith leaders.
The next step is really to provide them with the technical assistance they might need going forward.
Compared to those in other states, Tennessee cities have been extremely limited when it comes to promoting housing development that is affordable. Do you see that trend changing?
I’m an optimist. I always say that yes, I see that trend changing. It may take a little while for it to change, but I do see it changing. I’ll say that because I do think that folks are starting to recognize that housing is a human right. I think that communities hopefully will recognize that no longer can we say, “Not in my backyard!”
It has to be, “Yes, in my backyard!” if you want all of the different amenities to operate as they are. In order for Nashville to be a successful city, it needs the hospitality industry, it needs tourism. The people that work in those industries need somewhere to live. So, when we think about Nashville as Music City, we have to really be thinking about who is creating the music. How do we make sure that they have an easy way to be accessible for that particular industry. But also, our neighbors deserve to live affordably. Hopefully, communities can see how important it is for all of us to live together and not be segmented by race, class or whatever the divisions might be.
My hope is that over time people will see that affordable housing is not a bad word. It’s just basically saying we need housing that’s affordable for people to live, work, play, and provide all of the amenities that we take for granted in Nashville.
You have worked in the Mayor’s Office and lead and promoted collaborative efforts to address housing needs. What do you think cities are doing well, and how do you think private partners need to come alongside to make a dent in the affordable housing crisis?
There are some cities that are doing some incredible work. [Let’s start with] Nashville, I do think Nashville is doing a great job continuing to focus on the Barnes Housing Trust Fund. That is one way in which nonprofits are really taking a lead in the affordable housing work that’s needed. Then there is the [new] Nashville Catalyst Fund. It is a public-private partnership to some degree, including philanthropy that allows for developers to have a fund to use to acquire property and also preserve affordable housing in Nashville. So, Nashville is really thinking above and beyond of how to make sure that there are funding opportunities and increasing the toolkit for future housing development.
When we look across the state, Memphis has done a really good job with the missing middle and figuring out how there can be housing opportunities between home ownership and rental. I think in Nashville there are multifamily units, and then there’s homeownership. But there’s not the duplexes, the quadruplexes, the opportunities that are kind of in the middle that allows folks to also take advantage of affordable housing development. And then there is Chattanooga with their ADU (Accessory Dwelling Units) development. They allow for ADUs [to be built] across many different zoning districts, which allows for people to really think about how they can have an ADU in their backyard and also charge reasonable rent for folks to be able to access affordable housing. Those are great examples across the state that each one of them can learn from.
But when we think about what’s happening across the country, a lot of places are looking at Montana as the gold standard. By the governor outlining what he sees as the future for affordable housing for his state, it sets the tone for the state and for local jurisdictions in that state to really think about what some policies and some things are that they can do on a local level that would allow for greater affordability.
So, I think there is some opportunity for the state of Tennessee to think about what their goal is in working with local jurisdictions to expand their housing tool kit and to work with communities to make sure that there is more affordable housing across cities.
How, in your opinion, can the built environment influence how communities like Nashville address poverty and homelessness?
This is my opinion only. To go back to the whole NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) piece, poverty and homelessness is more than what we have considered homelessness to be in the past. There are people who are living paycheck to paycheck, and we hear this all the time. If something goes wrong with them that month where they have more bills than they have income, they may not have a home to go back to. This is testing families. And if we were to look at the numbers, you can see an increase in family homelessness.
And so, there is a serious and grave issue at play with folks who are not even at the extreme low income level. This is happening for middle income as well. This is affecting a lot of people.
If we were to think about it from that perspective, communities can think about what would actually work for our community that allows for us to still have the market value that we want for our homes, but also recognizes that there is some value in having different people and different types of housing in our neighborhoods.
I often talk about this just being a spectrum of housing. If I grew up in a neighborhood, I go off to college, I come back, and I want to live in the neighborhood in which I grew up in, could I actually afford it now? Could I actually buy a home in that community and also have my children live there? There should be some continuum of housing in the community that allows for every type of person to enter across that community. So [I’m talking about] apartments, mixed middle units, while also having home ownership opportunities that are not at the highest level but also allows for first time home buyers – having that amount of diversity in housing is incredible.
Anything else you would like to add?
I do think that this housing issue is not a conversation that should just happen with nonprofits or with just the philanthropic community. This is starting to affect the employers. They may not be able to recruit and retain the level of employees that they want because there’s simply not enough affordable housing. In order for this to get solved, it’s going to require all hands on deck from the public to the philanthropic to the private sectors. The more that we can make sure that folks are educated about the need and what it will take, the better they can jump into the conversation. It’s for all of us to try to figure out how everybody can add to solving the affordable housing crisis that is happening in Nashville and across the country.