An influx of new residents from blue states including California and New York has upset locals in Tennessee who say that the mass migration to low-tax states in the South has driven up the cost of living, eroded quality of life and put a strain on precious resources.
Longtime residents of Sumner County, Tenn. told Bloomberg News that they “live in hell” as they watch local traffic get worse, “greedy developers” take up more land to build homes and people with “lefty politics” move in and threaten to “mess up what we’ve got” by “making our taxes go up.”
“Don’t California My Tennessee” is a slogan seen on bumper stickers and T-shirts in towns such as Gallatin, Tenn., the seat of Sumner County which lies about 30 miles northwest of Nashville.
Sumner County has seen its economy grow 8.5% annually between 2020 and 2022 — putting it in the top 7% of all US counties when measuring growth, according to Bloomberg News.
But the growth has also spurred backlash among locals who say their way of life is in danger.
According to real estate listing site Zillow, properties in Gallatin that sold for around $100,000 in 2018 are now listed for as much as $380,000.
The surging real estate prices have made homes unaffordable for many of the county’s workers. The media price of a single-family home in Sumner County is $472,000, according to Redfin Corp.
In 2022 alone, more than 20,000 people from California moved in to Sumner County — an influx that has required the annexation of more land in order to build housing to accommodate the new residents.
“Don’t mess up what we’ve got, and don’t make our taxes go up,” Jimmy Kisner, a longtime resident of the county, told Bloomberg News when asked for his views on the newcomers.
Kisner said he feared that people with “lefty politics” were changing the character of the region.
Between 2011 and 2022, Sumner County lost 16,000 acres of farmland, according to the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture.
The number of lost acreage represents triple the rate of the average county in Tennessee.
“Where I live, I live in hell,” Mary Genung, a county commissioner, told Bloomberg News.
Genung and her neighbors have fought plans by a developer to build hundreds of homes on a vacant lot.
She wants to deter developers by increasing minimum lot sizes in rural areas — making it more likely that they will give up on building high-density residences.
“We had a big migration of people from the Midwest and Northeast to the South, and home prices skyrocketed,” Lesley Deutch, managing principal at real estate consultancy John Burns Research & Consulting, told Bloomberg News.
“Now you’re getting pushback from the people that have lived on an acre lot.”
David Klein, a member of the Sumner County Constitutional Republicans, a group that backs candidates opposed to more development and higher taxes, told Bloomberg News that “they are annexing like there’s no tomorrow” in Gallatin.
“Lots and lots of apartments, and we have to fund the schools,” he said.
