Living in Midtown

The signature project remaking Midtown Nashville is the Jim Ayers Tower, a new patient-care high-rise rising on Vanderbilt University Medical Center's main campus above 21st Avenue South. Construction began in the summer of 2022, and VUMC describes it as the largest facility expansion in the medical center's history. The tower stands 16 stories and totals about 495,000 square feet, and its cost has been reported at approximately $500 million. The architect is Blair + Mui Dowd of New York.

The tower is being phased into service rather than opening all at once. Its first patient floor, Level 7, opened on October 1, 2025 as a 28,000-square-foot, 30-bed pulmonary stepdown unit serving adult patients with complex pulmonary conditions, the first of six inpatient floors of about 28,000 square feet each. Depending on final configuration, the six inpatient floors will hold roughly 180 to 187 patient beds, with additional floors available for future expansion. Full completion is expected in early 2027. The tower also houses expanded radiology services, a street-level lobby, twelve elevators, and a two-story bridge connecting to The Vanderbilt Clinic at levels 3 and 4, plus a three-story parking garage adding 600 spaces.

Separately, the long-discussed Reed District redevelopment of the former Jim Reed Chevrolet site along Broadway, a Midtown assemblage of roughly 5 acres that earlier plans pitched as a multi-tower mixed-use district of up to 2.7 million square feet, remains unbuilt. Hines and Barings, which acquired the site in 2021, abandoned the project in early 2026 and the assembled land was put back on the market amid stalled negotiations and litigation, so it is a stalled proposal rather than an active project as of mid-2026. Midtown's recent completed additions include the two-tower Broadwest development at 1600 West End Avenue, whose taller tower (about 404 feet) is the tallest building in the neighborhood, and the 161-room Tempo by Hilton Nashville Midtown hotel at 110 20th Avenue North, which opened in 2026. Also under construction is 1740 Division Street, a 20-story, 396-unit residential tower developed by LG Group that topped out in April 2026 with completion expected in the fourth quarter of 2026.

For relocating buyers, the most concrete fact about Midtown is that Vanderbilt's medical campus, already the area's largest employer base, is expanding its clinical footprint and adding hundreds of patient beds in the heart of the neighborhood through 2027, while several of the larger private high-rise proposals nearby remain on the drawing board and other residential towers such as 1740 Division are actively under construction.