Nashville Near Me
Type a Nashville address and see the rezonings, zoning appeals and building permits around it, straight from Metro Nashville's public records, with upcoming hearings first. No AI-written text: Metro's own words, on one page for one address.
The brief
Most residents learn about a rezoning from a sign in a yard, a week before the hearing. The records are public, but they're spread across Metro Planning's Development Tracker, the Board of Zoning Appeals and Metro Codes, each with its own map. This puts them on one page for one address. Live at nathanaelhub.github.io/nashville-near-me, with a mirror on Vercel.
The build
- Address to parcel through Metro's parcel layer, then four public ArcGIS layers queried around it: open planning cases, zoning appeals, permit applications in review and permits issued in the last year.
- Upcoming Planning Commission and zoning-appeal hearings first, soonest at the top, with dates shown in Nashville time.
- Linked to the Nashville Council Digest: a planning case that became a council bill links to that bill's fact-checked, plain-language page.
- Static site, no dependencies: plain HTML and ES modules, tested with Node's built-in test runner.
What I learned
The privacy rules matter more than the features. The page never requests owner, appellant or contact fields from Metro's layers, and a test fails if a query asks for one. Phone numbers and emails in free-text permit notes are blanked, which first also blanked 10-digit permit numbers until the pattern required separators. And a section that's usually empty (about 50 zoning appeals a year countywide) needed checking to show it was the data, not a bug.
Stack
JavaScript (ES modules), Metro Nashville ArcGIS REST services, Node test runner, GitHub Pages, Vercel.