Getahn Ward, and Joey Garrison

The Tennessean

LifeWay Christian Resources' plan to move its headquarters to the North Gulch accelerates progress on the 32-acre Capitol View development, bringing 1,100 workers to the vast, mixed-use campus.

More broadly, the nine-story, 250,000-square-foot building, announced Thursday by the Southern Baptist Convention's publishing arm, extends downtown's growth farther north.

"The idea of all of these additional people in the neighborhood on a daily basis is exciting," said Chris Cobb, co-owner of the Marathon Music Works concert hall and events space. "It means a lot for the neighborhood. It means the neighborhood gets busier."

The 2.7 acres LifeWay will buy to build the new headquarters sit across Clinton Street from Cobb's business in a Marathon Village area that has lagged behind districts such as Germantown and the Gulch in terms of growth.

"Personally, I hope there are some restaurants, some grocery stores," Cobb said about his wish list for the overall Capitol View project, which he considers a major step for the north side of Charlotte Avenue. "We're on an island over here. We don’t have some really good options for lunch that are close or in walking distance."

Jeff Haynes, a partner in Boyle Nashville LLC and chief overseer of the overall Capitol View development project, sees LifeWay's planned headquarters giving a boost to the soon-to-start second phase of construction.

Northwestern Mutual funded assemblage of the massive 32-acre Capitol View site and brought in both Boyle and Charlotte, N.C.-based multifamily developer Northwood Ravin as partners.

Publishing ministry LifeWay is the second major Nashville employer headed for Capitol View. Development kicked off in fall 2014 on a 16-story, more than 500,000-square-foot headquarters building rising at Charlotte and 11th avenues. Hospital chain HCA plans to begin moving as many as 2,000 employees of two subsidiaries to the building by year's end.

The roughly $215 million second phase at Capitol View, which doesn't include LifeWay's new headquarters, is expected to add retail, office space and apartments to the campus.

"LifeWay's 1,100 employees just affirm the daytime population and allows us to reach out to more retailers that are going to be interested," Haynes said. "Retailers are going to base their decisions on daytime population in the office buildings and nighttime population in all of the apartments being built in the North Gulch and other areas such as Germantown."

LifeWay is expected in early April to complete buying the 2.7 acres at Capitol View for its headquarters, which will face Jo Johnston Avenue. The publishing ministry plans to use some of the proceeds from selling its nearly 15-acre downtown campus for $125 million in the fall.

Construction could start in early May on the new building at Capitol View, with completion expected late next year or in early 2018. The new headquarters building will include the LifeWay Conference Center and 9,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor along Jo Johnston.

"This property feels like LifeWay," LifeWay CEO Thom Rainer said shortly after Thursday's announcement. "It's community, it's walkable, it has a sense to it that this is a place that we can stay for a hundred years."

In remarks Nashville Mayor Megan Barry said keeping LifeWay in downtown Nashville where the company has had a presence for 125 years was critical.

“They had a lot of options,” she said. “They could go a lot of places. There are a lot of folks who would love to have LifeWay in their community."

Though some details are still being worked out, Metro has committed to $3.5 million in infrastructure work that includes sidewalk paving and street work, as well as the extension of the Gulch Greenway to connect to Capitol View. In return the city will get rights to a 2-acre park to be built a block from the new LifeWay headquarters.

Under the arrangement, LifeWay will not receive any property tax discounts or tax-increment financing — the types of Metro incentives that other companies, including Bridgestone, have received in recent years to remain downtown.

With the LifeWay deal, Barry called Metro’s financial contribution “an investment in the community” that goes beyond incentives for a company. She also said it represents “the best of the private-public partnerships that we’re always talking about.”

Rich Riebeling, chief operating officer in the mayor’s office, said the infrastructure work in the Capitol View area was something that was needed anyway.

“You always negotiate and you end up at a place that everyone’s comfortable with, and that’s where we ended up,” he said.

Downtown's Metro Councilman Freddie O'Connell sees the park meeting a need for green and open space, the lack of which he's heard as a top complaint of Gulch residents.

"Anybody who moves to Capitol View and the North Gulch area, including Hope Gardens, will have access to another nice new park with Greenway connectivity," he said, adding it should boost the quality of life for residents.

O'Connell said the overall Capitol View project is important because it would bring more residential living to that area of downtown in addition to being a significant workplace.

Sale of the 2.7 acres to LifeWay would leave roughly 16 acres for development at Capitol View. That includes 5 acres each in two blocks, totaling 10 acres, for which the Capitol View development team previously announced plans for the $215 million second phase.

Construction plans should be completed in mid-April for a $90 million, six-story, mixed-use building across 11th Avenue North from where headquarters for the HCA subsidiaries are rising. That building, which will sit on the former Hansen Chrysler Plymouth Jeff-Eagle car dealership site, is expected to include up to 60,000 square feet of ground-level retail space, up to 50,000 square feet of second-floor office space, up to 375 apartment units and a roughly 1,000-space parking garage.

A 10-story, 300,000-square-foot Class A office building is also planned at 11th Avenue North and Nelson Merry Street. It's expected to include 20,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, a 1,200-space garage and a 150-room limited-service hotel. That office building and the hotel, which will be a separate building, will wrap around the garage.

Beyond those two 5-acre parcels, 6 acres between the railroad tracks are also eyed for future development in a final phase of Capitol View.

LifeWay sold its nearly 15-acre downtown campus that stretches from Broadway to Church Street and from Ninth Avenue to the Gulch for $125 million cash in November.

Under that agreement with San Diego-based buyer Southwest Value Partners, the publishing ministry is consolidating its operations from space in nine buildings on the sold 1.1 million-square-foot campus to two buildings with 350,000 square feet of space, until its new headquarters at Capitol View is ready.

LifeWay, Middle Tennessee's sixth-largest information technology employer, also recently leased 53,259 square feet of warehouse space at the Cowan Industrial Park north of downtown for storage use.

Capitol View was in the initial running when LifeWay first decided to buy an acre and a half of city-owned land at 400 First Ave. S. near Rolling Mill Hill to build a new 216,000-square-foot headquarters. The publishing ministry, however, changed those plans and ended its contract with the Metro Development and Housing Agency on that site.

"We continued to pursue them and came up with a creative design, and at the end of the day they made the decision to come here," Boyle's Haynes said about LifeWay. "We feel blessed."

Reach Getahn Ward at 615-726-5968 and on Twitter @getahn.