Does the Geometry Travel? What Nashville's Growth Is Doing to Clarksville

Subhead: Nashville's 1937 redlining map still shapes who lives where and how they fare. Our new research brief asks whether that geometry has travelled 45 miles up I-24, and what it found is not what either city expects.

Clarksville was never redlined. In 1937, when federal appraisers drew hazard grades across Nashville, Clarksville had 11,800 people, too few to rate. Ninety years later, it is the fastest-growing large city in Tennessee, and Nashville's labor market has reached into it: the number of Clarksville residents who work in Davidson County nearly doubled between 2015 and 2020, and Clarksville home prices rose 61 percent from 2020 to 2025, faster than Nashville's own.

So we asked one question. Do the zones that Nashville's old grades still mark replicate in Clarksville? And if they do not, what do Clarksville's neighborhoods organize into instead?

The answer, built from public data at the neighborhood, county, and school-district level, runs against the usual story in both directions.

Nashville's grades still mark a surface. Income fills it.

The 1937 lines hold. Across Davidson County, smoking, obesity, uninsurance, poor health, home value, and violent crime all run in order from the A zones to the D zones, and the contrast is large: violent crime is thirteen times higher in the former D zones than in the former A zones.

But the grade itself is not what carries those outcomes today. Once a neighborhood's income is taken into account, the old grade adds nothing to its health. Two tracts with the same income have the same health whether or not one of them was marked "hazardous" in 1937. What the grade still holds is who sits at the bottom of the income ladder: among Nashville's poorest tracts, the former D zones are 57 percent Black; the ungraded tracts at the same income are 34 percent Black.

Clarksville did not import the zones.

We let Clarksville's own data sort its neighborhoods, with no map, no location, and no race variable in the mix. The result looks like a 1930s appraisal grid: an old, rental, poor core two kilometers from downtown and a new, owned, affluent ring fourteen kilometers out. The HOLC logic is present without the HOLC map.

What is missing is the racial inscription. No Clarksville tract is majority Black; Nashville has 22. The old poor core is majority White. Black residents in Clarksville live mostly in mid-income, newer, veteran-heavy subdivisions, which is Fort Campbell's off-post geography, not an inherited line. Clarksville has a price geography without a racial geography. Nashville has both, and they are coupled.

What Clarksville got instead

What traveled is the surface, spread across the whole county. Age-adjusted Black mortality in Clarksville is the same as Nashville's. Chronic-risk health is worse than Nashville's at every income level, not just at the bottom. Clarksville has one primary care physician for every 2,560 residents; Nashville has one for every 1,080. More than half of Montgomery County's revenue comes from other governments; in Nashville it is one-sixth.

And the schools

This is the part that should worry every family that moved for affordability. Property values in Clarksville nearly doubled between 2015 and 2023. School funding did not follow. A Clarksville student was funded at 79 cents on the Nashville dollar in 2015. In 2023 it was 60 cents. State aid per pupil is nearly equal in the two districts; the gap is entirely local, and it widened while the district absorbed 6,700 new students and Nashville's enrollment fell.

Nashville kept the wealth and shed the students. Clarksville gained the students, gained the prices, and gained less than half the money per child.

Why the brief matters

We wrote this brief with the Spatial Echo framework as the lens, not the claim. Every number is public and reproducible, the method is spelled out, and where a hypothesis failed, the brief says so. The receiver city's context- a federal installation, a tenth of Nashville's employment base, and a non-consolidated government- turns out to decide what shape the sender's growth takes when it arrives.

If you live in either city, work in one and sleep in the other, teach in either district, or sit on a county commission, this is the twenty-minute read that explains what the last ten years have done to the ground under your feet.

Read the brief: Does the Geometry Travel? Zone Replication, Receiver Context, and School Wealth in the Nashville–Clarksville Sender–Receiver System

Cite it: Smart, R. E. (2026). Does the geometry travel? Zone replication, receiver context, and school wealth in the Nashville–Clarksville sender–receiver system [Research brief]. Tennessee Educational Funding and Policy Center. https://doi.org/10.66981/tnefp.geometry-travels.2026

All briefs are at tnefp.org/briefs. Questions and data requests: info@tnefp.org.