Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸@aaron_renn
For the first time in almost 20 years of visiting Nashville, the city no longer strikes me as an attractive place to move. Don’t be surprised if the buzz starts fading soon.
Nashville has been a boomtown for over 25 years, and on previous visits I’ve been known to kick myself for not moving there and buying in earlier. Not that I really wish I’d done it, but I felt the pull. While a city with low quality urbanism and architectural bones, it had a great vibe and seemed to be leaning into its uniqueness with music, hot chicken, and anything else they could figure out. It felt like you were part of something when you were there.
First the good: the city continues to boom. I’d estimate they’ve built somewhere between five and ten times as much urban infill as Indianapolis. This is transforming the city. In a place notable for its paucity of walkable urbanism, it’s created a number of new nodes basically from scratch. The 12 South district, for example, was basically built from nothing.
But the 12 South district also illustrates Nashville’s conundrum. What’s been built is extremely generic. There’s essentially no vernacular architecture. And what’s gone into the buildings from a commercial perspective is also generic. 12 South is basically chains. And the things that aren’t chains might as well be because they are independent shops that are just implementing a formula.
Some of this is not Nashville’s fault. American urbanism is more commodified than I can remember it. Amenities have spread out such that every city basically has the same suite of high quality but very similar amenities. The unbearable sameness of the independent coffee shop has been talked about for over a decade. But this has metastasized to almost everything.
The net result is that Nashville feels more generic now, even to an outsider. This is the same complaint about every city that gets hot. People wanted to keep Austin weird, but it didn’t happen. Just because the complaint is common doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of truth.
Housing prices have also gone through the roof there. Anything proximate to a walkable district is now priced at insane levels. In East Nashville, prepare to spend $1.4 million on a craftsman. For that money, you can buy a two bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side of New York. There are houses in the 12 South area pushing $4 million.
I like to compare Nashville to Indianapolis. Both are overgrown small towns. Nashville has some chains and items that Indy doesn’t have yet (e.g. Rag & Bone). But I’d estimate the lifestyle in Nashville at this point maybe 20% better while the prices are at least double. And even Indy’s price/value is a bit out of whack at this point compared to say, Chicago. It’s hard to see the appeal unless you’re trying to make it music or something.
Nashville’s urbanism is improving but still generally low quality. The city passed an infrastructure tax, but it’s made little progress in fixing things. In fact, it’s remarkable how little the infrastructure of Nashville has changed in the last 20 years. The state is starting to widen I-65 north to the Kentucky border, and there’s a big widening project underway on Nolensville Pike, but those are the only two major highway improvements I can remember in the last 15+ years. Traffic is terrible. Much of the city lacks sidewalks, etc.
And don’t get me started on the suburbs. I’ll do a separate thread on Williamson County, but the lack of attention to the public realm is astonishing. Nashville is a city that is almost entirely about the private domain, not the public one.
Add it all up: the genericizing of the city, the big runup in costs, and the poor infrastructure and public realm, and you have a recipe for a fading of the city’s draw.
I would not be surprised if we start seeing articles about Nashville similar to the one’s we’ve been reading about Austin: people moving back to California, fading tech dreams, etc.
Of course, Austin is still a boomtown and Nashville will be too. Outside of California, I don’t think a single Sunbelt boomtown has yet stopped booming.
Nashville also has economic opportunities that places like Indianapolis does not. The vibe is still very different, in part because Nashville is a national draw with a different demographic base.
But cities get hot and have their moment in the sun, then the world moves on to something else. Portland is exhibit A here. I think the Nashville buzz is about to dissipate.
