Tennessee has seen an influx of new residents from Democratic states such as California and New York, and locals resent the migration to lower-tax Southern states, which they say is raising the cost of living, lowering the quality of life and straining precious resources.
A longtime resident of Sumner County, Tennessee. He told Bloomberg News They’re “living like hell” as they watch local traffic get worse, “greedy developers” grab more land to build housing, and people with “political leftist” tendencies move in and threaten to “ruin what we have by raising taxes.”
“Don’t Let California Be Tennessee” is a slogan found on bumper stickers and T-shirts in towns such as Gallatin, Tennessee, the county seat of Sumner County, about 30 miles northwest of Nashville.
Sumner County’s economy is expected to grow 8.5% annually from 2020 to 2022, putting it in the top 7% of U.S. counties when measuring growth rate, according to Bloomberg News.
But the growth has also sparked a backlash from local residents who say their way of life is at risk.
According to real estate website Zillow, a property in Gallatin that sold for about $100,000 in 2018 is now on the market for $380,000.
Rising real estate prices have put housing out of reach for many of the county’s workers: The median price of a single-family home in Sumner County is $472,000, according to Redfin.
More than 20,000 people are expected to move to Sumner County from California in 2022 alone, and this influx is necessitating the annexation of more land to build housing to accommodate the new residents.
“Don’t mess with what we have and don’t raise our taxes,” Jimmy Kisner, a longtime resident of the county, told Bloomberg News when asked his thoughts on the newcomers.
Kisner said he worries that people on the “political left” are changing the character of the area.
Between 2011 and 2022, Sumner County lost 16,000 acres of farmland, according to the University of Tennessee Agricultural Institute.
The amount of farmland lost is equivalent to three times the size of an average Tennessee county.
“Where I live is hell,” County Commissioner Mary Gennang told Bloomberg News.
Jenun and her neighbors have opposed developers’ plans to build hundreds of homes on the vacant land.
She wants to increase minimum lot sizes in rural areas to deter developers, making them more likely to forgo building higher density housing.
“There’s been a massive migration of people from the Midwest and Northeast to the South, which has caused home prices to skyrocket,” Leslie Deutch, managing principal at real estate consultancy John Burns Research & Consulting, told Bloomberg News.
“Now we’re getting backlash from people who lived on the one-acre property.”
David Klein, president of Sumner County Constitutional Republicans, a group that supports candidates opposed to more development and tax increases, told Bloomberg News that in Gallatin, “annexation is happening like there’s no tomorrow.”
“We need to build a ton of apartments and fund schools,” he said.
