Nashville has been experiencing rapid population growth. How do reconcile that with your claim that the governmental situation is dire?
Many are here because of the lack of income tax, the country music industry, and the extremely culturally conservative government. They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits.
A common refrain I hear when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke."
Nashville also, until recently, had a low COL compared to similarly sized non-Southern metros.
Personally I am here for work, and realistically many others would do the same. Nashville has more employment opportunities than the deep south and is a logical place for such people to end up.
> A common refrain I hear when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke."
What’s wrong with people sorting into places that are culturally compatible? After all plenty of people move to Paris for the culture.
> They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits.
Aside from schools, most people either don’t use those things or it doesn’t make a difference. Oftentimes it’s an upgrade from the utterly dysfunctional alternative where they came from. (The efficiency of my traditionally red county’s limited public services was a nice change of pace from DC.)
This was literally the gp's thesis, that it's easier to just leave than to try and improve things (for whatever your value of improve is).
I agree it's the logical thing to do, but when definitions of what services a government should provide vary greatly and people sort where they live based on them, it's going to lead to strange results.
The article is about government, which is a shit show here by almost any definition. The city has a massive council that is at war with the state, to the extent that the state just passed a law to cap the council size out of sheer spite. They're handing over billions to buy a stadium for a rich sports franchise. They handed out tax credits to Amazon for jobs in an office building that they're never going to fill.
There are reasons people would want to live here despite this, my list isn't exhaustive. But I can't see any world in which "good governance" appears anywhere on the list, unless you measure it only by how low your taxes are and how lax regulation is (I'm aware some do).
Maybe the extremely pro business, pro developer, pro tourism Nashville considers itself to be a success, but I can't get on board. There has to be a metric other than growth when making decisions, and I'll personally never willingly live in another city that is so blindly focused on it.