Cornstalk5139

I live in Indianapolis & head south on I65 often. Do not underestimate how quickly the climate gets warmer as you head down I65. Columbus, Indiana gets 10 fewer inches of snow per year - on average - than Indianapolis. It's a 45 minute drive south. By the time you get to Nashville, you're talking about a pretty radical difference in overall climate. Nashville isn't Miami, but it's certainly not the Midwest. The State of Tennessee my refuge for when perpetual grey skies or polar vortexes become too much for me. Sometimes Nashville, sometimes Knoxville, and sometimes Chattanooga. It just depends on whether roads are open in the Smoky Mountains and what my friends in various parts of Tennessee are up to. But they're all considerably milder in the winter than Indy.

I think that both Columbus & Indianapolis have started to see a lot of migration from Nashville. Out of state migration numbers are up for both cities. There stand to be a decent chunk of long time middle-class renters & recent college grads who can't afford to live in their hometown anymore & who look to nearby cities. I have noticed a lot of Tennessee plates outside BMVs in Indy. The same is probably true in Columbus, and probably in Cincinnati too. That said, I'm not sure that the state governments of Ohio or Indiana care about wealth inequality either. Local officials in cities & college towns probably do, but all that they can do about it is upzone. Which is great, but it also won't prevent low-density sprawl elsewhere. It's a huge balancing act.

Nashville did an excellent job of leveraging its mild climate & music/arts scene into a booming economy. While it the city's infrastructure is terrible, its narrow streets & even the inner loop's highway barrier have - thus far - been working in favor of Nashville. Narrow streets slow traffic, making things feel pleasant for pedestrians & adding to the quality of the urban environment. The inner loop works with those narrow streets to create a development boundary. Property values are very high in Downtown Nashville for at least three reasons that I see: The arts scene & all of the economic activity that brings. The narrow streets inadvertently provide a decent experience for pedestrians, which turns out to be an inadvertent value add for residents. The infrastructure makes getting between Downtown & the rest of Nashville so difficult that a lot of high income folks with business to conduct Downtown will just live Downtown (or adjacent to Downtown) I don't think that Nashville's poor infrastructure will slow down migration from wealthy coastal city folks. Property values in Nashville's urban core & in Williamson county will continue to climb for the foreseeable future. But that's not to say that Nashville won't have problems. By not acting on infrastructure issues, I think Nashville has been setting itself up to have massive wealth inequality issues, similar to that of the Bay Area. Home prices in nice places will keep climbing while non-desirable places to live will collect all of the people who can't afford $1M homes: from service workers to folks who struggle with mental illness or addiction. Many will be priced out of Nashville altogether, which has already started happening. Before long, I think Nashville's only middle class will be people who work(ed) normal jobs & were lucky enough to buy property in a nice area early on. Even if Nashville's existing infrastructure were good, it wouldn't be able to build out forever. The City is in a pretty geologically significant river valley, where developable land is surrounded by steep hills and peppered with floodplains. Then there's the huge chunk of this river valley that would be a great candidate for development, but it's full of Williamson County's estate & ranch style homes. Good luck making room for the middle class there. Nashville and Tennessee should've invested in infrastructure early in the way that Salt Lake City did, but that obviously didn't happen. I don't know if there's a way to prevent the aforementioned wealth disparity issues without re-dedicating a significant amount of ROW in the metro area to transit. The residents of Nashville consistently vote against any infrastructure that isn't for cars, whether it's transit or "just" infrastructure to prevent homes from flooding. I think the upcoming transit referendum has a good chance of passing, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. ____ Now let's contrast Nashville to the two cities in the Midwest that have been growing very quickly in recent years: C-bus & Indy. These cities have much better infrastructure than Nashville AND they don't have significant physical barriers preventing sprawl. The effect is that property values in C-bus & Indy don't reach the same extremes as in Nashville. Simple supply & demand. The upside is that there is no real threat to the middle class in C-bus or Nashville, and there probably never will be. The other side of the coin is that C-bus & Indy are destined to be insanely sprawling cities; it will be a while before it makes more sense to build 30 towers in Downtown Indy or Cbus than it does to just build another ring of suburbs. It's... not great.