The 10 Most Dangerous And Worst Neighborhoods In Nashville, TN

The 10 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods In Nashville For 2024

Talbot’s Corner sounds like a small town. Like the kind of place where a kindly old grump runs the general store and the local police spend most of their time getting kittens out of trees. Sounds nice. What you actually get is an urban neighborhood dominated by highways, including the junction of I-24 and I-65.

Besides the lack of small-time charm, the area falls short in a lot of basic functions as well. Employment, safety, and schools are all suspect.

Still, there are benefits to life in Talbot’s Corner. Sure, no quaint country store. But the neighborhood is littered by amenities. This means plenty of restaurants and parks. It’s also a short ride to Nissan Stadium, home of the Tennessee Titans NFL team.

Hadley Park has a bunch of selling points. Most of all, there really is a Hadley Park, offering lots of potential outdoor fun. The neighborhood also houses Tennessee State University.

However, if you’re not a college kid getting an allowance from mommy and daddy, making ends meet in Hadley Park becomes a chore. The unemployment rate stands at the relatively healthy 5.3%. But the available jobs pay very little. The median income hovers just below $25,000. As a result, it’s tough to make ends meet. Even the relatively cheap $96,233 median home price becomes difficult to swing with salaries that low.

You’d expect a place with the phrase “College Heights” in its name to have a significant focus on education. Bustling lecture halls and deep philosophical conversations while sitting on the sun-dappled quad. Not quite. In fact, one of the challenges of living in College Heights-Clifton comes from its substandard schools.

The underlying problem, though, stems from financial troubles. Just look at the unemployment rate, standing at 11.9%. Or check out the median income, a paltry $24,859.

Still, there are benefits to life in College Heights-Clifton. Located along I-40 in the western part of the city, the neighborhood sits along Boyd Park.

The Haynes Area sits in the northern part of the city, built along a bend in the Cumberland River. However, this isn’t the kind of spot that features a manicured tree-lined riverwalk. Rather, think run-down streets and unkempt trees.

The neighborhood suffers from significant economic hardships, with an unemployment rate of 8.6% and a median income of $50,822.

Haynes does have plenty of amenities, from restaurants to churches. If you want a special night out, the downtown attractions are just a short 15-minute drive away. Meanwhile, the neighborhood also sits along the border of the Hartman Park Regional Center.

Set in the northeast part of the city, Heron Walk is sandwiched into a bend in the Cumberland, bounded on two sides by the river. The name hints at natural splendor and leisurely strolls in search of stately birds. And, in fact, the neighborhood sits near plenty of green spaces, including Stones River Park to the southeast and a couple of nearby golf courses. A little further down the road, you’ll hit Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, the former home of the 7th President of the United States.

But none of these attractions are actually within Heron Walk. Here’s what you’ll find in the neighborhood itself: an elevated unemployment rate of 4.7% and an anemic median income of $46,396.

Methodology: How we determined the most dangerous Nashville neighborhoods in 2024

To figure out how bad a place is to live in, we only needed to know what kinds of things people like and then decide what places have the least amount of those things. We plugged the following criteria into Saturday Night Science to get the worst neighborhoods in Nashville:

• High crime (Estimated)
• High unemployment (Less jobs)
• Low median income (Less pay)
• Low population density (No things to do)
• Low home values (No one’s willing to pay to live here)

Then, we ranked each neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee for each of these criteria from worst to best.

Next, we averaged the individual rankings for each criterion into a “Worst Score.”

The neighborhood with the lowest “Worst Score” ranks as the most dangerous neighborhood of Nashville.

The article is an opinion based on facts and is meant as infotainment. We updated this article for 2024. This report is our time ranking the worst neighborhoods to live in Nashville.

Skip to the end to see the list of all 78 neighborhoods ranked from worst to best.