I made this exact move in 2015, moving from the Upper West Side to the Belmont-Hillsboro neighborhood in Nashville. Our first kid was 3 months old, we had spent a decade in SF and NYC, and I was ready for lower cost-of-living, lower taxes, and a slower pace of life.
Or so I thought.
We made it a little shy of 3 years before moving back to NYC in the early part of 2018. We're back on the Upper West Side again and I couldn't be happier. Unless it's to move internationally, I doubt we'll leave NYC again.
Don't get me wrong, Nashville is a great city. One of the better up-and-coming cities in America, I'd wager. The people are nice and the food is awesome.
But there were some things that just made it untenable for us long-term:
1. The cost of living isn't as low as you'd think, and it's constantly getting worse. We almost bought a house several times while we were living there, some of the smallest in our neighborhood, and they were still more space than we wanted or needed, and cost $500k to $700k. Two fell through randomly and we were outbid on the other. Our budget now is higher, but it's like 20% higher, not 100% higher.
2. You have to drive everywhere. The little walkable strips like 12 South in Nashville are a complete joke if you come from SF or NYC or Chicago. And they're completely slammed with people all the time now, despite the fact that there's only about 10-20 combined coffee shops, restaurants, and retail shops in a quarter-mile strip. And a very large portion of the city doesn't even have sidewalks if you wanted to walk, not to mention the huge cars whizzing by at 40mph a few feet from you. Very unpleasant.
3. Nashville is not ready for their growth. The traffic is horrible, everything is getting way too crowded, there's no public transportation (and they voted down even doing a rapid bus transit plan, so I don't see it happening anytime soon). Housing isn't being built fast enough and so prices are shooting up. Amazon is going to make it all much worse.
4. This might seem dumb, but the airport is a mixed bag, especially if you travel internationally. It was amazing to be able to leave our house and get to the gate in 25 minutes (seriously), but there are basically zero international flights and a lot fewer options to many parts of the country than I'd like. I love living next to three airports with tons of flights, even if the airports are some of the worst in the US and hard to get to. I hate connections. That's just me though.
5. Being land-locked annoyed me more than I realized it would. I love the ocean.
6. There's not a ton to do in Nashville actually. I don't like live music, craft beer, or anything "country" so that's 90% of the activities out the window for me.
7. There's basically nothing within a 2 hour radius of Nashville, so day trips or weekend trips are either a lot of car time to get to Louisville, Memphis, Knoxville, or Huntsville (none of which have that much to offer that Nashville doesn't, imo), or getting on a plane.
8. The people are nice...but there's something else there. It feels polite but not genuinely warm or something. I always felt like an outsider. Maybe because I wasn't from the south? Could have been my imagination, but what definitely isn't my imagination is that "southern charm" is generally reserved for straight white christians. Not always, but more than I'd like.
9. Speaking of which, it's uber-christian, in a way that's hard to understand unless you've been there. It just permeates the ground you walk on somehow. Not that everyone is christian, but a lot of people are, and people will ask you if / where you go to church, and my daughter's non-religious preschool taught her a bunch of christian songs, etc. And it's ironic because I was christian (my wife is even a minister), but I don't love living around it like that. Especially since my views on the intersection of faith and politics have radically evolved over the last few years.
10. This might be controversial: Nashville is fairly progressive for the south...but it's still very much the south. And the 2016 election really brought this home for me. Nashville is a little blueish purple dot in a deep, deep red state. If you drive 30 mins in any direction you'll see plenty of confederate flags, nasty bumper stickers, etc. And just like with christianity in nashville, not everyone is racist...but there's just a level of comfort and shrugging about the deep roots of racism in the south that I find disturbing.
Random example: there's a huge mansion there called Belle Meade...and it was formerly a plantation. They have weddings and other events there. At a plantation in the south where people were bought and sold and raped and murdered for decades. And no one thinks anything of it. It's just a nice building. There are also a bunch of streets and other things named after the big slave-holding families from Nashville's history.
To each their own, but ultimately, I don't think the south has ever really reckoned with its past, and there's just something a little off about the culture there that we ultimately decided wasn't the best place for us.
Hope I didn't offend anyone from Nashville or the south...just my own impressions from a few years living there.
EDIT: can't believe I forgot this: it's a hellscape during the summer. The heat and humidity in the south is not my idea of a good time. Although NYC's summers and winters aren't perfect either, but I actually like having 4 proper seasons.
A lot of that is actually why I would recommend Knoxville over Nashvillle. It's smaller, but it has lower home prices, more access to nature (I went hiking in the Smokies or Cumberland plateau many weekends), less of the country kitsch, better weather since it's higher up (although still somewhat miserable in parts of the summer), but you still get an airport and the tax/income stuff if you care. Plus, Oak Ridge National Lab (why I was there), Y-12 and the University of Tennessee mean it can be a bit denser in terms of some tech stuff and the general mood (I very much feel you on the fake-friendly-christian-tied-weirdness, found it to be less so in Knox) if you know where and how to look. More of an old-hand career-oriented crowd than the younger Nashville scene, but still interesting people.
Although, ultimately, I reached the same conclusion. I'm from Chicago and now I live in Arlington right outside of DC. I got out as soon as my contract ended. Can't really imagine going back.
I moved from Knoxville to SF about half a year ago. Knoxville is definitely quirky in ways that I haven’t found in other cities, and I like the physical terrain (little rolling hills) better than Nashville. For some reason, I’m not a fan of flat cities.
Knoxville’s downtown area is very different (culturally and politically) than Knoxville’s suburban areas. I would never want to live somewhere like Farragut, but some of the older, more historic neighborhoods near downtown are becoming quite interesting. Still no tech, unfortunately, which is why I moved, but in terms of just generally nice places to live in the south, Knoxville and Asheville are probably my two favorite cities.
We have tech, but it isn't an overwhelming driving force, and it's heavy on the enterprisey side. If you know C#/Java/Javascript you won't have any trouble staying employed.
Thank you for the pretty detailed summary of your experiences.
Every once in a while I think about moving somewhere Nashville-esque, and it's nice to be reminded that all my problems associated with living in a large, developed city won't go away just by moving.
I grew up in a very Southern-esque area, and every time I go back to visit, I get reminded of the culture you describe, and it generally makes me uncomfortable. Everything is Christian, just about every car has some egregiously political bumper sticker. There's nothing to do unless you drive 30 minutes to the nearest strip mall.
I agree on a lot of your points. However, I would say Memphis does have a lot to do if you know where to look.
Nashville might be solid blue, but the politics of the state is ran by it's suburbs. The worst republicans imaginable live in Franklin and Murfreesboro. And you can not avoid them if you live and work in Nashville. To make matters worst, the corporate democrats in Nashville just rubber stamp everything the republican's do as long as it benefits Nashville. I managed to last two years in Nashville. The culture is sick.
I live in Nashville as well. All of this is true. Another point - If you have kids, most of the schools suck. Private school is very popular here for "traditionally southern" reasons.
The religion comment is very accurate, and very annoying. Even if you are religious, you may find the culture here a bit cloying.
I've been planning my escape for over a year now. :)
> There's basically nothing within a 2 hour radius of Nashville
That should maybe be rephrased as: "There's basically no large metropolitan areas withing a 2 hour radius of Nashville". There's a number of forests and state parks to explore around Nashville.
Please tell all your friends in NYC this story. Everywhere that isn't already a major urban area is terrible, full of backwards hicks and not worth moving to, especially the ones in states with low taxes and few laws curtailing individual freedom. Those are the worst.
Edit: If it wasn't obvious, everything but the first sentence is sarcasm. I want nothing to do with living in or near a city and it follows that I don't want where I live becoming less rural.
You're preaching to the choir, my friend. Why do you think I moved there?
Ultimately it wasn't the right balance of priorities for me. No need to take offense though. I'm sure you're one of those people who either hates NYC or says "great place to visit, but I'd never want to live there". Doesn't bother me :)
And yeah, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but rural Tennessee is full of "backwards hicks". Doesn't make them bad people but our views do not align and I don't want to live in that culture any more than they (you?) want to move the Upper West Side.
I don't think multigenerational poverty gives these "hicks" you speak of the choice to move the the Upper West Side even if they wanted. They don't choose their life anymore than the urban poor does
Not the point. And I didn't call them "hicks", I was just responding to the comment using their term (hence the quotes).
I'm surprised that it comes as news to some people that the political views and lifestyle preferences of people living in rural Tennessee are starkly different from those of people living in Manhattan. Or that while we can and should be civil with people elsewhere geographically and politically, people with diametrically opposed views and value systems are rarely all that eager to spend their lives together.
Yeah. I prefer trees to people. I'd take long distances between things and the occasional preachy christian or hick over city problems any day. I don't think I'm missing anything by drinking $1 gas station coffee and buying my bread at Walmart instead of Whole Paycheck.
City people should stay in the cities and country people should stay in the country and as long as neither group tells the other how to live we should be fine.
of course overwhelmingly we are beset by the tyranny of the increasingly small minority of "country people" telling us how to live due to how the senate and house are setup.
The rural Tennessee isn't really the part you should worry about. It's suburban Tennessee. The suburb culture throughout the state is basically white supremacist.
as someone who escaped the south 16 years ago a lot of these statements ring true although I would not put them so kindly. I think these are general problems with many southern urban centers.
> 8. The people are nice...but there's something else there. It feels polite but not genuinely warm or something. I always felt like an outsider. Maybe because I wasn't from the south? Could have been my imagination, but what definitely isn't my imagination is that "southern charm" is generally reserved for straight white christians. Not always, but more than I'd like.
Coming from the Midwest, this statement is almost exactly my impression. Everyone is wearing a mask made of their own skin. Seems like everyone is afraid of being judged and excommunicated for saying or doing the wrong thing. The famed "Southern charm" comes across as bad acting, after knowing people who are genuinely nice and unguarded in their behavior. It might work on other Southerners, but it's very unctuous and unpleasant to me, especially when there's contrived familiarity in it. The only people that seem actually friendly are the other transplants.
> 9. Speaking of which, it's uber-christian, in a way that's hard to understand unless you've been there. It just permeates the ground you walk on somehow. Not that everyone is christian, but a lot of people are, and people will ask you if / where you go to church, and my daughter's non-religious preschool taught her a bunch of christian songs, etc. And it's ironic because I was christian (my wife is even a minister), but I don't love living around it like that. Especially since my views on the intersection of faith and politics have radically evolved over the last few years.
As a non-religious person, this is the sand in my knickers. The spouse is "cafeteria" Catholic, so we don't really go to church that much. And I wouldn't call the atmosphere uber-Christian, either. It feels more like a ubiquitous cult that has appropriated and subverted Christian symbology to control people's relationships and behavior. Churches around here, or at least the white-people churches and black-people churches, are the social clubs and public meeting spaces. People don't just do the obligatory once-a-week church, but go back at additional times during the week, for extra credit, I guess. At first look, it seems like segregation is alive and well, by pushing civic life into private spaces that can legally exclude the xenos. In this sense, the Catholic churches are actually on the progressive side of the spectrum, because you can actually see people of different colors in the same room. But then they bore you to tears, and ask for money all the time.
The other annoying cultural browbeater is asking what football team you support. If I were to say that I'm boycotting the NFL because of concussions and Kaepernick, but also that I didn't watch before because football is a boring game to watch, anyway, I would become an untouchable pariah overnight.
The "Jesus is my quarterback" vibe around here is pervasive, and a constant irritant. It's like other religions and sports don't even exist, and it creates a kind of bland groupthink that makes everyone you meet seem like cloned pod people. I didn't even realize it explicitly until seeing a guy with piercings and tattoos, and feeling an invisible cloud of tension dissipate. I thought, "Finally! Someone who's different!" And it all fell into place. The society creates forced conformity, and the price for individuality is to be excluded from the dense core of society, banished to the periphery.
And I wouldn't call the atmosphere uber-Christian, either. It feels more like a ubiquitous cult that has appropriated and subverted Christian symbology to control people's relationships and behavior.
That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me these days.
I think there are genuine Christians around. You may have even met one. I also think there are people who call themselves Christians, because they attend a church that declares itself to be Christian, and publicly declare themselves for Jesus, and who may or may not even realize that what they do and what they say that they believe do not always align.
Not being Christian myself, and having no stake in what it really means to be Christian, it nevertheless seems to me that the various points made in the Sermon on the Mount should be relevant. And yet there are so many around here that stand and pray in the churches and the schools and the stadiums and the courthouses and in the town squares and on the street corners, that they may be seen by others, and heap up empty phrases, to be heard for their many words. It couldn't be clearer in the narrative that Jesus--the main protagonist of the whole religion and the illustrative model for righteous behavior and wisdom--said, "don't do this". And then people do it anyway.
A genuinely uber-Christian atmosphere would (in my non-Christian opinion) not have so many public declarations of piety blasted around everywhere. Nor would it constantly be trying to oppress minorities, and strip health care away from the poor. Nor would it be building weapons of war, or turning away the oppressed without a shred of comfort. Maybe you get a different experience when a priest reads to you from the Bible and then tells you it means something other than what it says, but when you go direct to the source material, and take the myth at face value, the hypocrisies are obvious.
Or so I thought.
We made it a little shy of 3 years before moving back to NYC in the early part of 2018. We're back on the Upper West Side again and I couldn't be happier. Unless it's to move internationally, I doubt we'll leave NYC again.
Don't get me wrong, Nashville is a great city. One of the better up-and-coming cities in America, I'd wager. The people are nice and the food is awesome.
But there were some things that just made it untenable for us long-term:
1. The cost of living isn't as low as you'd think, and it's constantly getting worse. We almost bought a house several times while we were living there, some of the smallest in our neighborhood, and they were still more space than we wanted or needed, and cost $500k to $700k. Two fell through randomly and we were outbid on the other. Our budget now is higher, but it's like 20% higher, not 100% higher.
2. You have to drive everywhere. The little walkable strips like 12 South in Nashville are a complete joke if you come from SF or NYC or Chicago. And they're completely slammed with people all the time now, despite the fact that there's only about 10-20 combined coffee shops, restaurants, and retail shops in a quarter-mile strip. And a very large portion of the city doesn't even have sidewalks if you wanted to walk, not to mention the huge cars whizzing by at 40mph a few feet from you. Very unpleasant.
3. Nashville is not ready for their growth. The traffic is horrible, everything is getting way too crowded, there's no public transportation (and they voted down even doing a rapid bus transit plan, so I don't see it happening anytime soon). Housing isn't being built fast enough and so prices are shooting up. Amazon is going to make it all much worse.
4. This might seem dumb, but the airport is a mixed bag, especially if you travel internationally. It was amazing to be able to leave our house and get to the gate in 25 minutes (seriously), but there are basically zero international flights and a lot fewer options to many parts of the country than I'd like. I love living next to three airports with tons of flights, even if the airports are some of the worst in the US and hard to get to. I hate connections. That's just me though.
5. Being land-locked annoyed me more than I realized it would. I love the ocean.
6. There's not a ton to do in Nashville actually. I don't like live music, craft beer, or anything "country" so that's 90% of the activities out the window for me.
7. There's basically nothing within a 2 hour radius of Nashville, so day trips or weekend trips are either a lot of car time to get to Louisville, Memphis, Knoxville, or Huntsville (none of which have that much to offer that Nashville doesn't, imo), or getting on a plane.
8. The people are nice...but there's something else there. It feels polite but not genuinely warm or something. I always felt like an outsider. Maybe because I wasn't from the south? Could have been my imagination, but what definitely isn't my imagination is that "southern charm" is generally reserved for straight white christians. Not always, but more than I'd like.
9. Speaking of which, it's uber-christian, in a way that's hard to understand unless you've been there. It just permeates the ground you walk on somehow. Not that everyone is christian, but a lot of people are, and people will ask you if / where you go to church, and my daughter's non-religious preschool taught her a bunch of christian songs, etc. And it's ironic because I was christian (my wife is even a minister), but I don't love living around it like that. Especially since my views on the intersection of faith and politics have radically evolved over the last few years.
10. This might be controversial: Nashville is fairly progressive for the south...but it's still very much the south. And the 2016 election really brought this home for me. Nashville is a little blueish purple dot in a deep, deep red state. If you drive 30 mins in any direction you'll see plenty of confederate flags, nasty bumper stickers, etc. And just like with christianity in nashville, not everyone is racist...but there's just a level of comfort and shrugging about the deep roots of racism in the south that I find disturbing.
Random example: there's a huge mansion there called Belle Meade...and it was formerly a plantation. They have weddings and other events there. At a plantation in the south where people were bought and sold and raped and murdered for decades. And no one thinks anything of it. It's just a nice building. There are also a bunch of streets and other things named after the big slave-holding families from Nashville's history.
To each their own, but ultimately, I don't think the south has ever really reckoned with its past, and there's just something a little off about the culture there that we ultimately decided wasn't the best place for us.
Hope I didn't offend anyone from Nashville or the south...just my own impressions from a few years living there.
EDIT: can't believe I forgot this: it's a hellscape during the summer. The heat and humidity in the south is not my idea of a good time. Although NYC's summers and winters aren't perfect either, but I actually like having 4 proper seasons.