Nashville Yards (Southwest Value Partners)

The Spark

Nashville Yards is a 19-acre mixed-use campus in the heart of downtown Nashville, developed by Southwest Value Partners. The walkable, urban community features over 2 million square feet of Class-A+ highly amenitized office space across four office towers (anchored by Amazon, Pinnacle Financial Partners, Bass Berry & Sims, PwC, and CAA), plus two hotels, 673 residential units, a music venue, and retail. As early tenants and residents evaluated the campus, the developer kept hearing the same thing: downtown child care was scarce, and the shortage was a daily logistics problem for the very employees these companies wanted to recruit and keep. Southwest Value Partners committed to doing everything it could to address this problem by adding high-quality childcare on campus. That promise, made before a provider was signed and before Metro Nashville had approved the use, set the project in motion.

The Solution

Putting a licensed child care center in a downtown high-rise is notoriously difficult, which is part of why so few have opened in Nashville’s urban core. Southwest Value Partners had to clear two separate approvals: state licensing for the center and Metro’s sign-off on the use—neither guaranteed when the developer first committed.  But ingenuity and persistence prevailed. The 20,000-square-foot center opened in September 2025 in the base of the Pinnacle Tower, with 16 classrooms and a creatively designed indoor-outdoor playground for up to 260 children ages 6 weeks through 6 years and roughly 50 teachers. It is run by Goddard School franchisees Leisa Byars and Del McSpadden, who operate six Middle Tennessee locations and spent three years planning in lockstep with the developer.

For families, the design erases a commute-within-a-commute. Parents can park in the garage, walk their child to the Goddard School, and ride the elevator to the office; at pickup, the process reverses. For someone who would otherwise drive to Green Hills, fight traffic, and race a 5 or 6 p.m. closing time, that is transformational. As Charles Robert Bone of Southwest Value Partners puts it, in an environment where employers are doing everything they can to bring people back to the office, on-campus child care is a super important piece of that—especially for younger employees just starting a family.

The Goddard School is open to Nashville Yards tenants, residents, and the broader downtown community. Security is managed campus-wide, with heightened protocols around the child care facility. Southwest Value Partners structured the lease differently from a standard retail tenant, recognizing that the center’s value is not measured by rent per square foot but by its ability to attract and retain office tenants across the entire campus.

The Results

The Goddard School is well into its 260-child capacity in its first year, and child care is now a standard stop on the campus tour—Southwest Value Partners walks prospective tenants down to the Goddard School the way it shows off the on-campus theater or bowling alley. Bone calls it a clear differentiator against competing office and mixed-use projects in Nashville. Anchor law firm Bass Berry & Sims is the clearest proof: it made on-site child care a condition of its lease and cited the developer’s commitment as a meaningful factor in choosing Nashville Yards before the Goddard School was even finalized.

The return-to-office context amplifies the impact. Nearly all Nashville Yards tenants have implemented strong in-office policies and view their workspace as a tool for recruiting, retaining, and mentoring younger employees. For those employees, many of whom are starting families in one of the most expensive housing markets in the Southeast, on-campus child care removes the logistical barrier that would otherwise pull them out of the building by mid-afternoon. The center also created approximately 50 child care jobs in the urban core, a secondary workforce benefit that aligns with Mayor O’Connell’s emphasis on expanding child care access in Nashville.