Court rules against city’s sidewalk ordinance

The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Nashville on Wednesday, overturning a lower court’s decision and setting up potentially expensive claims from property owners against the city’s sidewalk fund. Judges Eric Murphy, Alice Batchelder and Helene White sided with property owners’ arguments that Nashville violated plaintiffs' protections guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment’s “Takings Clause,” which prohibits the federal government from seizing private property without just compensation. Murphy, a Trump appointee and member of the Federalist Society, authored the ruling.

Amid widespread development in neighborhoods across the city, the Metro Council took a first pass at a sidewalk ordinance in 2017, updating it in 2019. The legislation laid out rules that require a homebuilder to pay for a sidewalk on their lot or pay equivalent costs into a sidewalk fund that paid for sidewalks across the city. The ordinance helped facilitate much-needed, sometimes disjointed sidewalk construction, occasionally leading to isolated construction mocked by critics as “sidewalks to nowhere.”