'Don’t move to Tennessee' requests unlikely to be heeded | George Korda
At an airport, after deplaning, I asked a young woman and her husband if it would be all right to take a picture of the statement on her shirt: in bold, large lettering. It read: “Don’t move to Texas!”
A growing number of Tennesseans share similar sentiments. With Knoxville having become a destination for people escaping big-city frustrations, blue-state politics – or both – the ongoing arrival of so many folks who “ain’t from around here” will become an increasingly important political topic.
Politicians and political officeholders everywhere frequently cite goals of economic growth and expanding the local tax base, both of which are good things. They also promise to maintain an area’s quality of life, which is a harder thing when the moving vans are arriving like stampeding cattle.
Nashvillians see city as being on wrong track. One culprit is growth.
There’s a constant tension between growth and life quality. Take Nashville, please. My wife and I moved to Nashville from Florida in 1981. We loved it: much larger than where we’d lived in Florida, Nashville was big enough to have everything you could want in a city, but it wasn’t Atlanta-ish. And the costs, while higher than our previous home, weren’t onerous in the extreme.
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I was a state government information officer, and my wife was a legal secretary; we weren’t on anyone’s list of the richest Nashvillians. In 1982, we bought an under-construction, 1,200-square-foot house in the city’s Bellevue community, about 13 miles from downtown. At closing, times being what they were, the loan’s interest rate was 14%. We bought a smaller house than we would have liked, but under the interest rate circumstances, it was one we could afford.
The house cost $57,400. Today’s real estate websites price that same house at up to $436,000. The reason? Supply and demand. Growth. Davidson County’s population 40 years ago was about 486,000; in July 2022, it was nearly 709,000, according to census.gov. Today, Nashville median (half below, half above) home price listings are $575,000, says realtor.com.
A Vanderbilt Poll released in April said that for the second straight year, Nashvillians saw the city as being on the wrong track. One reason: growth:
“For the second year running, the Vanderbilt Poll–Nashville shows more than half of respondents believe the city is on the wrong track. From the start of the Nashville poll, in 2015, until 2021, Nashvillians viewed the city as on the right track. The current trend is amplified by a plurality of respondents indicating the growth of the city is making their quality of life worse, rather than better or having no effect,” Jennifer Gramling, a Nashville real estate agent, posted in a YouTube video of the “Top 7 Reasons People are Moving Out of Nashville.” Among the top three reasons: Cost of housing and a changing way of life. Growth.
This isn’t to say Nashville isn’t a great city. It was, and is. But it’s changed, and residents are feeling and expressing their concerns.
Knoxville and Knox County are booming
In Knoxville and Knox County, the signs of growth are everywhere: new construction, new businesses arriving, more cars on the roads, more people moving in every day. In 2013 the median Knox County home sales price was $132,800; in October, it was $354,995.
In 1987, when we moved to Knoxville, we bought a house about 12 miles from downtown. I remarked to my wife, “It’s as if we’re out in the country, but not far from town.” It’s not out in the country anymore: interstates, shopping centers, new subdivisions, veritable cities of apartment complexes and commercial construction are changing things. In some ways, it’s good, because it’s nice to have a variety of stores and restaurants nearby. But it’s also a frustration getting to them, as traffic is growing worse seemingly every day – and prices are rising, particularly for real estate.
Nothing short of a national economic calamity is going to slow the trend. The economic, political, climatological and other reasons people live here are the reasons people want to come here.
In reaction, politicians will be left with promising to “work to maintain our quality of life,” while the quality of life is affected as more people pour into the area. The options are to move somewhere smaller, adjust to the emerging realities or wear a shirt that reads: “Don’t move to Tennessee” and hope people will oblige.
Don’t expect them to be obliging.
George Korda is a political analyst for WATE-TV, hosts “State Your Case” from noon to 2 p.m. Sundays on WOKI-FM Newstalk 98.7 and is president of Korda Communications, a public relations and communications consulting firm.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: 'Don’t move to Tennessee' requests unlikely to be heeded | George Korda
