Hendersonville’s Growing Pains: Too Many Apartments or Just Too Many Cars?
If you’ve tried to drive Gallatin Road at 4:30 p.m., you already know the truth: traffic in Hendersonville isn’t just bad, it’s the kind of “I could’ve walked there faster” bad. Now, the city is debating whether hitting the pause button on new apartment construction might help keep things from getting worse.
The Board of Mayor and Aldermen recently voted 11–1 in favor of a nine-month ban on approving new high-density apartment complexes. In city-speak, that’s called a “moratorium.” In everyday language, that means “Hold on, we need a minute before this place turns into downtown Nashville at rush hour.”
Mayor Jamie Clary explained the challenge pretty clearly:
“We’re a growing community of professionals… That’s a wonderful situation to be in, but it also causes a wear on infrastructure. That’s everything from classroom space to parks to police calls to fire calls to the number of cars on the road.”
Translation: Hendersonville is awesome, people keep moving here, but now your kid’s teacher has 32 students, the playground swings squeak from overuse, and you’re stuck at the same red light on Indian Lake Boulevard for the third time in a row.
Hendersonville: From Small Town to “Y’all Got Room for One More?”
The U.S. Census Bureau says Hendersonville’s population nearly doubled in thirty years, from 32,671 in 1990 to 63,947 in 2020. If that pace keeps up, by 2050 we may have to stack people on top of each other just to fit. (Good thing we’re pausing the apartment building before that happens.)
Mayor Clary says Hendersonville has 34 apartment complexes right now, with anywhere from 16 to 400 units, plus 40 subdivisions under construction. If you’ve ever wondered why it feels like your GPS is constantly rerouting you around bulldozers, that’s why.
The pause, he says, gives the city time to study impact fees, develop smarter growth plans, and finish projects like traffic light synchronization. Yep, the mayor says traffic lights are about “90 percent” synced up. Of course, that last 10 percent is the part that makes you catch every single red light between Rockland Road and Maple dr.
Not Everyone Agrees
Not surprisingly, not everybody is cheering for the apartment timeout. Alderman Mark Evans was the lone “no” vote on the ban. His concern? That new businesses might look at Hendersonville, see the pause, and instead head over to Gallatin, Goodlettsville, or, heaven forbid, Nashville.
He argued that the city already has systems to handle new development and worried that growth could stall. The mayor, however, insists that when the nine months are up, Hendersonville will “pick up right where we left off.”
So basically, we’re hitting “pause,” not “stop.”
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The Big Question: Can Hendersonville Handle the Heat?
As someone whose family moved here in 1969, and moved away in 1986, and came back in 2017 to start a business, I can tell you, this place has always been special. Hendersonville has beautiful homes, lakeside fun, and a community spirit you can’t beat. But let’s be honest: it’s getting crowded.
If you think traffic is better today than ten years ago, you might be fooling yourself. Just ask the folks parked (I mean, “driving”) on New Shackle between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. every weekday.
So, is this traffic too much for Hendersonville and Sumner County? I guess we’ll have to wait for the final outcome. In the meantime, grab a Iced coffee, turn up the radio, and get comfortable, because that red light isn’t changing anytime soon.
