In Gallatin, Tennessee, home prices have jumped by two-thirds since the pandemic, and one local commissioner outraged by nearby housing construction said it was “living like hell.” As so many Californians move to the fast-growing state, locals worry they’re taking their left-wing politics with them, and signs targeting “greedy developers” who are allegedly gobbling up farmland have gone up in their yards.
Tennessee and neighboring southern states are facing an anti-growth backlash as their population boom adds 2.7 million people — the same as Chicago’s population — and the sentiment goes beyond the usual NIMBY-ism as once-sleepy downtowns clog up with traffic, pastures give way to apartment complexes and municipal water systems get strained by new demands.
Sumner County, where the Cumberland River meanders through lush hills northeast of Nashville, saw its economy grow 8.5% annually from 2020 to 2022, putting it in the top 7% of growing counties in the U.S. The number of apartments available in Gallatin, the county seat, nearly doubled in the four years through 2022, according to real estate marketplace RentCafe.
The boom, driven by migration from Democratic states like New York and California, has helped right-wing groups that combine conservative religious beliefs with anti-growth policies to seize control of the local legislature. At a May Planning Commission meeting, an urgent agenda item was whether to raise the minimum lot size in rural areas to at least 2.3 acres, enough to ward off developers seeking higher density.
“If we don’t do that, we’ll end up with a big Nashville,” Sumner County Commissioner Mary Genang, who is supported by the Sumner County Constitution Republicans, told the planning commission. For two years, Genang and her neighbors have opposed plans by Arlington-based homebuilding giant DR Horton to build 675 homes on vacant land in Gallatin, a city of 50,000 people.
“Where I live, it’s hell,” Genung said. The Planning Commission supported the lot size measure and referred it to the County Commission for a vote. Dr. Horton did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Don’t build it in my backyard’ activists have long opposed new development, but local officials and business groups across the South say anger has grown since pandemic-era growth. Arcane rules governing issues such as zoning exceptions, city annexations and impact fees, a levy on new construction projects aimed at covering the costs of added infrastructure, have pitted cities against counties and counties against the state.
In some cases, the backlash comes from people lamenting the loss of their small-town way of life, and in other cases, public infrastructure can’t keep up: In Texas, city water and sewer systems are overburdened, and farm bureaus in Tennessee and South Carolina have warned that farmland is being plowed up to make way for subdivisions.
According to the University of Tennessee Agricultural Institute, Sumner County is set to lose 16,000 acres of farmland between 2011 and 2022, nearly three times the Tennessee county average.
“There’s been a huge migration from the Midwest and Northeast to the South, which has caused home prices to skyrocket,” said Leslie Deutch, managing principal at real estate consultancy John Burns Research & Consulting. “Now we’re seeing a backlash from people who were living on one-acre lots.”
The Southeast, which includes Texas, accounted for more than two-thirds of all U.S. job growth from early 2020 to mid-2023, nearly double its pre-pandemic share. Tennessee’s economy was the second-fastest growing in the U.S. from 2020 to 2023, tied with Nevada and behind Florida, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Low real estate prices and no income tax have lured so many Californians to Tennessee that one estimate puts the number at more than 22,000 in 2022. Locals say they’ve seen T-shirts and bumper stickers around town saying “Don’t turn Tennessee into California.” Jimmy Kisner, whose family has owned a hardware store in Gallatin for 47 years, says it’s a satire of Californians’ “left-wing politics.” “Don’t mess with what we have, don’t raise our taxes.”
Despite population shifts, Tennessee remains a Republican-dominated state, with Republicans holding the governor’s mansion, two U.S. Senate seats, and eight of the nine U.S. House seats.
(Louis DeLuca)
Construction boom
Sumner County, once home to Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash and, in her high school years, Taylor Swift, saw its population grow rapidly in the decade leading up to 2020, adding about 35,000 people, or about 18% of its population of 200,000. Then, single-family home prices soared during the pandemic, locking many of the county’s workers out of the housing market.
The median price of a single-family home in Gallatin is currently $472,000, according to data from Redfin, and employers aren’t paying high enough wages to attract workers from Nashville, said Kathleen Hawkins, president of the Hendersonville Chamber of Commerce.With businesses desperate for a local workforce, developers built more than 1,300 apartment units between 2020 and 2022 alone, mostly in Gallatin, according to data from RentCafe.
Sumner County Constitution Republicans, outraged by overdevelopment and recent tax hikes, recruited and supported 14 candidates for the 24-member county commission, which they won in 2022 in an August election in which only 15% of voters cast ballots.
Since then, the group has pushed for larger lot sizes and slammed Gallatin City Council members for allowing higher-density residential development on county land. This year, the group tried unsuccessfully to get state lawmakers to support a bill that would have prohibited cities from annexing land without the county’s permission.
David Klein, a key member of the group known for his distinctive moustache, said he isn’t against growth, he just wants development to generate profits for himself.
“In Gallatin, consolidation is happening like there’s no tomorrow,” Klein said as he drove around town in his dark blue Ford F-150. “Apartments are being built in droves, and schools have to be funded.”
Some business leaders in nearby cities and regions are worried.
“We’re a little concerned about that group,” said Brian Rose, Gallatin’s city planner. Rose said the city needs to keep growing to attract industry, expand its tax base and pay for things like parks.
Randall Carter, Tennessee region president for First National Bank, who does business with many farmers in the Gallatin area and attended the May Planning Commission meeting to speak out against the expansion of zoning, said he finds it ironic that a staunchly conservative group that has traditionally avoided regulation is writing the rules on how land can be used.
“If you go too far to the right, you can end up going left,” Carter said.
Georgia, North Carolina
More than 250 miles away in Forsyth County, Georgia, a bustling commuter region north of Atlanta, a campaign flyer recently posted on the social media site Nextdoor attacking approval for a 2,600-unit apartment building has generated more than 300 comments in the thread.
“Apartments are a huge political issue,” said Forsyth County Commissioner Cindy Jones Mills, who is not seeking reelection. Her colleague Laura Semanson calls herself “a big developer’s worst nightmare” on her campaign website, while Commissioner Alfred John boasts that “zero apartments have been approved” in his district during his term.
Patrick Foster, director of the watchdog group Smart Growth Forsyth County, said Forsyth County’s wastewater capacity has struggled for years to keep up with people moving in, and developers haven’t always been held accountable.
In coastal North Carolina’s Brunswick County, whose population has grown by 20,000 in just four years, county commissioners have issued a blitz of demands, including a call for traffic studies for new projects that could delay development by up to nine months.
The Wilmington Chamber of Commerce and the builder-backed Business Alliance for a Healthy Economy wrote Brunswick County leaders warning that it risks driving up home prices even more and scaring off employers.But it’s necessary because most of Brunswick’s roads are two-lane and at or near capacity, said Jim Bradshaw, a former Brunswick County economic development leader who now lobbyes to slow the growth of housing development.
In fast-growing suburbs of major Texas cities, water shortages have caused some communities to halt new construction. Magnolia, a town of about 5,000 people northwest of Houston, has suspended new residential and commercial development through the second half of 2022. The city extended the policy because it doesn’t have enough wells to keep up with development.
“We were building too many homes too quickly,” said Magnolia City Administrator Don Doering, who said the city plans to build two wells a year in the near future at a cost of $3 million each.
About an hour south of Sumner County, in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing suburb of Nashville, Rutherford County Mayor Joe Carr is battling the Tennessee Legislature to impose thousands of dollars in impact fees on new development. The local school system is struggling to keep up with the 1,200 new students who move in each year, and traffic is so bad that Carr said, half-jokingly, locals have learned not to make left turns.
For now, a bill in the state Legislature that would allow Rutherford County to impose the fee has stalled, something Carr attributes to the influence of real estate developers.
“I’m not looking for a fight, but I’m not shying away from one either,” Carr said.
– Bloomberg’s Michael Sasso and Shelley Hagan
