Nashville office market information

[BrandonTO416]

This thread is mostly centered around the downtown and west end office market; however, I don't have all the data. Please add to the discussion by bringing in any links or stats that I haven't found yet.

Nashville's center city is not defined like any other southeastern metro except maybe Atlanta. West End and Downtown are two distinct office markets, and downtown's numbers look small because Nashville isn't as concentrated downtown. Nashville's downtown is more of a tourist, club, government downtown that most cities and office space is certainly high in number, but it doesn't define it. With the advent of the condo towers, Nashville is now posed to become one of the south's largest urban residential neighborhoods after being relatively small.

With that said, lets focus on the employment numbers. I'm also creating this thread as a statistical thread to prove that STAR Commuter Rail is not only viable, but that a central city transit circulator is key to its success.

Downtown Nashville proper east of the I-40 loop and west of the Cumberland River has 46,867 workers.

Source: http://www.nashvilledowntown.com/work/2005...ess_census.html

However, Nashville's central city office market is not centered around just this area, and the central city appears smaller on paper than it is in reality.

The question is, how many workers does West End have?

Vanderbilt University and Medical Center along with its Health Science research centers is the largest single private employer in Nashville and it lies in West End (however numerous other businesses reside in the district).

Vanderbilt alone has 17,700 employees.

Source: http://chronicle.com/jobs/profiles/3467.htm

Obviously all the office towers in West End from 2525 to the hospital corridor with Centennial, Baptist, etc has much more. Caterpillar financial is headquartered in the West End area. So many other businesses that are going unnamed.

Nashville has a unique entertainment industry with thousands of jobs in the West End corridor.

Here is the closest data I found regarding square footage, but its imcomplete.

http://www.nashvillecommercial.com/newslet...r2005Office.pdf

If you use this document from 2005, you see they break it up into two districts and include everything out to Green Hills. "West End" (which is not what I consider it to be traditionally) is 3.7 million sq ft (for 2005) and Green Hills/Music Row as they define it has 2.4 million sq ft. MetroCenter, another relatively close area, has 1.3 million.

Here are images taken from the PDF:

Obviously there is more office space outside downtown than inside for Nashville's central city. It makes it uncommon.

Basically there is more than enough demand for the STAR service - SO LONG AS WE HAVE A CENTER CITY CIRCULATOR THAT IS FREE TO TRANSFER TO.

There isn't a population or "census" of workers that I found using google. But given the data, I believe there to be well OVER 100,000 workers between Downtown, MetroCenter, and West End.

The many thousands of workers in Vanderbilt aren't considered to be in "office space" because its an educational and medical research center.

The problem is finding hard data. Its too hard to find with a google search that I've seen.

You see "West End" data and it only includes the Charlotte Ave/Church St corridor? That's pathetic.

They need to count this whole area as one office market or two distinct markets with data for both included:

[eusebius]

Basically there is more than enough demand for the STAR service - SO LONG AS WE HAVE A CENTER CITY CIRCULATOR THAT IS FREE TO TRANSFER TO.

...

The many thousands of workers in Vanderbilt aren't considered to be in "office space" because its an educational and medical research center.

I know MTA took Vandy into consideration -- there's a bus that goes from the Riverfront station to the Med Center. It's free for MC STAR riders. Route 93: http://nashvillemta.org/setpage.asp?page=r...;routenumber=93