Nashville Lifestyle Living | Monique Flores

A newly completed real estate deal clears the way for Nashville to build a pedestrian bridge linking two of its hottest neighborhoods — and potentially spark mixed-use development on one side of that crossing.
The long-awaited breakthrough comes more than two years after former Mayor Karl Dean and Metro Council approved a plan to fund an $18 million bridge over the train tracks between the Gulch and SoBro.
The former, once a rail yard, now boasts 1,800 residential units; four dozen bars, restaurants, stores and entertainment venues; a pair of new office buildings that can hold at least 1,500 workers or more; and a luxury hotel that opened last month. SoBro, meanwhile, is the epicenter of the city's frenzied real estate market and home to the massive Music City Center convention hall. More than 1,900 hotel rooms are proposed, under construction or newly opened steps from where the SoBro end of the bridge would be located.
On Dec. 9, Metro paid $2.66 million to Zach Liff, the owner of the Cummins Station office building in SoBro, for the right to build one end of the bridge on property Liff owns adjacent to Cummins Station. As part of the arrangement, Liff paid $7.56 million to Metro for a nearly 3-acre property bordering the office building. That land, at 1011 Demonbreun St., is currently a carport.
Those deals consummate a plan Metro Council approved in October with a 34-3 vote. Per the deal struck during the Dean administration, the bridge will be funded using tax revenue generated by seven Gulch buildings— almost all of which received public aid to help spur their creation.
The timeline for building the bridge is unclear. Metro redesigned the bridge this fall, scrapping a more ambitious S-shaped look in favor of a straight-shot across the train tracks. Still, Metro's Department of Public Works has said that newest look is "preliminary," and the department said it would "begin working to engage the community on the final design of the bridge."
Liff's land purchase means he now controls 13 acres clustered in this slice of SoBro, positioning him as an influential developer for the future of that part of the urban core. Images newly published by Metro depict mixed-use development that Liff could build surrounding the SoBro end of the bridge. Through a spokesman, Liff has declined comment on those images, which are dated February 2015.
 

Source: The NBJ