The East Bank Bet: Why Mixed-Use Is Nashville's Next Chapter

Stand on any bridge downtown right now and you can watch it happen. Cranes over the river. Steel going up where the old stadium used to sit. Demolition crews clearing industrial buildings that had been sitting quiet for years. Nashville is placing one of the biggest bets of its history on a strip of riverfront land, and it's worth paying attention to what kind of bet it actually is.

It's not a residential bet. It's a mixed-use one.

Oracle has filed permits to tear down roughly 515,000 square feet of old industrial space across its nearly 80-acre East Bank campus, with the first phase targeting 2028. The new Nissan Stadium is on track to open in February 2027. The Tennessee Performing Arts Center is planning its own move across the river, with construction starting in 2027. Add in about 50,000 square feet of retail and a 600-room hotel going in near the stadium, and you've got a plan that's stitching a tech campus, a stadium, an arts venue, a hotel, and retail together with a pedestrian bridge.

Nobody is building a single-use tower out there. The city is betting that the places people want to be are the places where they can work, watch a game, catch a show, and get dinner, all without getting back in the car.

We think that bet is right. We also think it's not new. We made it a mile away, on Main Street in East Nashville, before East Bank ever broke ground.

The Jesse: same logic, different corridor

The Jesse sits at 730 Main Street, in one of East Nashville's fastest-changing stretches. It's 58 residences, one, two, and three bedroom, each with its own balcony. But it's also more than 5,600 square feet of street-level commercial space built directly into the ground floor. That's not an afterthought. It's the same principle the East Bank master plan is built on, just at a scale you can walk end to end in five minutes: a building works better when it's not just a place to sleep, but a piece of the block it sits on.

Upstairs, there's a pool deck, a fitness center, a sauna, and a cold plunge. Downstairs, that ground-floor commercial space just got a name: 51st Deli is opening a location at The Jesse. That's activated retail in the most literal sense, a real neighborhood spot that gives residents and everyone else on that stretch of Main Street a reason to walk in the door, not just live behind it. That's the difference between a building and a neighborhood fixture.

There's a piece of local history baked into the name, too. In 1875, after a bank robbery went sideways, Jesse James spent time hiding out in East Nashville under an alias, just blocks from where 730 Main Street sits today. We liked that story enough to build around it. Bold moves and second chances are a pretty good description of what this whole corridor has been doing for the last decade.

The residences are also STR-approved, which matters if you're thinking about this as more than a place to live. It gives owners flexibility that a lot of Nashville condo product simply doesn't have anymore, and it means the building stays active and occupied instead of sitting half-empty for half the year. An active building supports the street-level retail below it. The street-level retail makes the building worth living in. That loop is the whole point.

The pattern is the story

Whether it's an 80-acre riverfront campus with a stadium and a performing arts center, or a 58-unit building on Main Street with 51st Deli on the ground floor, Nashville keeps landing on the same answer: single-use is done. The developments that hold up, and hold value, are the ones built to do more than one job.

We built The Jesse on that bet before it had a name. East Bank is proving us right at scale.

Want to see what we mean? Check out The Jesse.