The carve-out was not an oversight

Drafting an express exclusion for “deed restriction, or homeowners association rule or bylaw” requires deciding to write it. The Community Associations Institute's Tennessee committee monitored the bill rather than opposing it, and its end-of-session report records that the version it tracked preserved association authority notwithstanding the state preemption.³

The question the carve-out answers is not whether accessory units are desirable; it is whether a legislature willing to override a municipal ordinance is also willing to override a recorded private agreement. The 114th General Assembly's answer, on the face of the bill, was no — and it wrote that answer into the text rather than leaving it to implication.

What an ADU restriction looks like in a Tennessee community

Tennessee has no general planned-community statute, so an association's authority over an accessory unit comes from the declaration. In practice the restriction is rarely labelled as an ADU provision at all. It is typically some combination of a single-family-use covenant, an occupancy or subdivision limit, an outbuilding or accessory-structure restriction, and an architectural approval requirement covering any new construction.

For a condominium the analysis runs through the Condominium Act of 2008, where the physical boundaries of a unit and the allocation of limited common elements ordinarily foreclose the question before a use restriction is reached.

Whether a particular covenant reaches a particular accessory unit is a matter of construing that covenant, and Tennessee courts apply established covenant-construction rules to it. The failed bill would not have altered any of that.

The gap it would have opened

The practical consequence of passage would have been a divergence between two Tennessee neighbourhoods a street apart.

In an unrestricted subdivision, the city would have been obliged to approve a conforming accessory unit ministerially within 60 days, with deemed approval if it did not and a fee-shifting action if it refused. In a covenanted subdivision a street away, the same application would have run into the declaration, with no state-law answer to it and no preemption available.

That divergence is the ordinary result of a covenant carve-out, and it is the reason the carve-out is contested in states that have debated removing one. Tennessee has not debated removing one, because it has not yet enacted a preemption to carve out of.

What to watch next

ADU preemption has been filed in Tennessee and did not clear a subcommittee, so a refiled bill in the 115th General Assembly starts from the same place. What is worth watching in any new draft is whether section 13-7-705 survives in its current form.

Separately, Tennessee's largest metro has moved on accessory units through its own zoning rather than through state law. Nashville's Metro Council adopted two zoning measures in early December 2025: one allowing detached accessory dwelling units in the Urban Services District without a DADU overlay, and one creating two new districts permitting quadplexes and courtyard apartments. Neither applies automatically — as WPLN reported it, “councilmembers or property owners can seek to rezone properties using the new options.”⁴

A municipal upzoning of that kind does not reach a recorded covenant either, for the same reason the state bill would not have. A Nashville owner whose lot is rezoned to permit an accessory unit still holds it subject to whatever the declaration says.