Tom Morales Has Paid His Taxes for Forty Years. Now the City Wants to Price Him Out.
Metro Nashville's 205% reassessment of Acme Feed & Seed has triggered a Chancery Court lawsuit — and exposed a methodology that could threaten every small business on Lower Broadway.
Acme Feed & Seed has stood at the corner of Broadway and First Avenue since 1890. Tom Morales has owned it for forty of those years. This spring, Metro Nashville reassessed his property at three times its previous value — a tax bill that would cost him $180,000 more per year. He is fighting back, and he is not alone.
The notice arrived in March, tucked inside a standard Metro Davidson County envelope. Morales almost missed it. When he opened it, the assessed value of the building his family has occupied for four decades had jumped from $2.1 million to $6.4 million — a 205 percent increase driven, the assessor's office explained, by 'comparable sales in the Broadway corridor.'
Those comparables, Morales discovered, were luxury hotel conversions and a rooftop bar that sold for $28 million in 2024. 'They're comparing me to a Marriott,' he said, sitting behind the same wooden counter where his father-in-law once sold chicken feed. 'I sell hot chicken and cold beer. I'm not a Marriott.'
Acme Feed & Seed is one of the last working-class anchors on Lower Broadway, a strip that has transformed from a honky-tonk row into a $4-billion entertainment corridor in less than a decade. The building — four stories of exposed brick, original tin ceilings, and a rooftop bar that Morales opened in 2015 to stay solvent — draws tourists and locals alike. But the tourists come because of what Broadway was. The assessment, Morales argues, is taxing him for what developers want it to become.
He appealed to the Metro Board of Equalization in April. The board reduced the assessment by $400,000 — a gesture, he said, not a solution. He has now retained an attorney and filed suit in Davidson County Chancery Court, arguing that the assessment methodology violates Tennessee's requirement that commercial properties be valued based on income potential, not speculative comparable sales.
His attorney, Patricia Odom, says the case has broader implications. 'There are fourteen other Broadway-area businesses in the same position,' she said. 'If the city can use luxury hotel sales to reassess a feed store, they can do it to any small business on any corridor they want to gentrify.'
Morales has been here before — not with taxes, but with pressure. In 2018, a development group offered him $11 million for the building. He turned it down. In 2021, another group offered $15 million. He turned that down too. 'My grandfather-in-law built something here,' he said. 'You don't sell that. You fight for it.'
The Metro Council has not commented on the Morales case specifically. A spokesperson for the assessor's office said the department 'applies state law uniformly to all properties' and that the appeal process exists for owners who dispute valuations. Morales's response to that was brief: 'The appeal process gave me back four hundred thousand dollars on a three-million-dollar overassessment. That's not a process. That's a shakedown with a complaint form.'
The trial date has not been set. In the meantime, Morales is paying the new tax bill under protest — a legal requirement to preserve his appeal rights. The extra $15,000 a month is coming out of payroll reserves. He has not laid anyone off. He says he won't.
