In Gallatin, Tennessee, home prices have risen by two-thirds since the pandemic, and a local commissioner was outraged by nearby housing development, saying she’s “living in hell.” So many Californians have moved to the boom state that locals fear their left-wing politics have migrated with them, and lawn signs take aim at the “greedy developers” they say are gobbling up farmland.
Tennessee and some of its neighbors to the South are facing an anti-growth backlash after turbo-migration boosted the region’s population by 2.7 million people — the size of Chicago. As traffic in the once-sleepy downtown dwindles, apartment complexes replace pastures, and municipal water systems become strained by new demand, passions run high in ways that go beyond regular Nimbyism.
In Sumner County, where the Cumberland River meanders through the green hills northeast of Nashville, the economy grew 8.5% annually from 2020 to 2022, putting it in the top 7% of all U.S. counties for growth. The number of apartments in the county seat of Gallatin has nearly doubled in the four years through 2022, according to real estate marketplace RentCafe.
The boom — driven by transplants from blue states like New York and California — has propelled a right-wing group that blends conservative religious beliefs with restrictive growth policies into control of the local legislature. At a May planning board meeting, the pressing agenda item was whether the minimum lot size in rural areas should be increased to at least 2.3 hectares; large enough to fend off housing developers who need more density.
“If you don’t do that, you’re going to be one big Nashville,” Mary Genung, a Sumner County commissioner backed by the group — the Constitutional Republicans of Sumner County — told the planning board. Genung and her neighbors have been fighting for two years against a project by housing giant DR Horton Inc., which is planning 675 homes on vacant land in Gallatin, population 50,000.
“Where I live, I live in hell,” Genung said. The planning board supported the lot size measure and put it before the County Commission for a vote. DR Horton did not respond to a request for comment.
While not-in-my-backyard activists have long fought against new developments, local officials and business groups in the South say they have seen increased levels of anger since the pandemic-era boom. Arcane rules governing things like zoning exceptions, city annexation and impact fees, which apply fees to new construction projects intended to cover any additional infrastructure costs, pit cities against counties and provinces against states.
In some cases, the response comes from people mourning the loss of the small-town way of life. In other countries, public infrastructure simply cannot keep up. In Texas, city water and wastewater systems are overloaded, while agricultural agencies in Tennessee and South Carolina warn their farmland is being plowed for subdivisions.
Sumner County lost 16,000
“We had a big migration of people from the Midwest and Northeast to the South, and housing prices skyrocketed,” said Lesley Deutch, managing director at real estate consulting firm John Burns Research & Consulting. “Now you’re getting pushback from the people who lived on an acre of land.”
From early 2020 to mid-2023, the Southeast, including Texas, was responsible for the growth
That’s how many Californians have moved to Tennessee alone – more than 22,000 by 2022.
Despite the migration, Tennessee is comfortably Republican, with the Republican Party in the Governor’s House, two seats in the U.S. Senate, and eight of the nine seats in the House of Representatives.
Construction fairy tale
Once the home of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash — and, for a period in high school, of Taylor Swift — Sumner County had quickly filled up in the decade through 2020, adding about 35,000 people, or about 18% of the 200,000 inhabitants. strong population. Then a huge increase in single-family home prices during the pandemic pushed many county workers out of the market.
The average price of a single-family home in Gallatin is now $472,000, Redfin Corp. data shows, and employers have not been able to pay enough to lure workers from Nashville, says Kathleen Hawkins, head of the Hendersonville Chamber of Commerce. With companies desperate to hire local workers, developers built more than 1,300 apartments between 2020 and 2022 alone, mostly in Gallatin, RentCafe data shows.
Angered by what they saw as over-development – plus a pair of recent tax increases – Sumner County Constitutional Republicans recruited and endorsed a slate of 14 candidates for the 24-member County Commission. They won in 2022, in the August elections, with only 15% of voters turning out.
Since then, in addition to pushing for larger lot sizes, the group has railed against city council members in Gallatin, accusing them of allowing high-density housing projects on county land. It tried unsuccessfully this year to get state lawmakers to support a bill that would ban the city from annexing land without county approval.
David Klein, a prominent member of the group known for his signature handlebar moustache, said he is not against growth but believes development pays for itself.
“In Gallatin, they’re annexing like there’s no tomorrow,” Klein said during a drive through town in his navy blue Ford F-150. “Lots of apartments, and we have to fund the schools.”
Some business leaders in neighboring towns and communities are alarmed.
“I’m a little concerned about that group,” said Brian Rose, Gallatin’s city planner. Gallatin must continue to grow to attract industry, expand its tax base and pay for things like parks, Rose said.
Randall Carter, Tennessee regional president for First National Bank, does business with many farmers in the Gallatin area and appeared at the planning commission meeting in May to oppose the larger lot sizes. He finds it ironic that a group of staunch conservatives, who traditionally eschew regulations, are setting rules about what people can do with their land.
“You can go so far to the right that you end up on the left,” Carter said.
Georgia, North Carolina
More than 250 miles away, in Forsyth County, Georgia, a booming commuter area north of Atlanta, a recent post on the social media site Nextdoor showed a campaign flyer attacking the approval of 2,600 apartments. The thread attracted more than 300 comments.
“Apartments are the big issue politically,” said Cindy Jones Mills, a Forsyth County commissioner who is not running for re-election. Her colleague Laura Semanson calls herself “big corporate developers’ worst nightmare” about her
Forsyth County’s sewage treatment capacity has struggled to keep up with all the people for years, said Patrick Foster, director of the watchdog group Smart Growth Forsyth County, and developers haven’t always been held accountable.
In coastal Brunswick County, North Carolina, where the population has grown by 20,000 in just four years, county commissioners have issued a series of demands at once. One required a traffic study of new projects that could delay developments by up to nine months.
The Wilmington Chamber of Commerce and the builder-backed Business Alliance for a Sound Economy sent Brunswick County leaders a letter warning them they risk further driving up home prices and scaring off employers. But it’s necessary because most roads in Brunswick are two-lane and at or near capacity, said Jim Bradshaw, a former economic development leader in Brunswick County who is now trying to slow housing growth.
In the fast-growing suburbs of Texas’ major cities, some communities are halting new construction due to a lack of water. Magnolia, a city of about 5,000 people northwest of Houston, has imposed a moratorium on new residential and commercial development at the end of 2022. The city has expanded the policy because there are not enough resources to keep up with development.
“We built too many houses too fast,” said Don Doering, Magnolia city manager. Doering said the city plans to build two wells per year for the foreseeable future, at a cost of $3 million each.
About an hour south of Sumner County, in the booming Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro, Rutherford County Mayor Joe Carr is battling the Tennessee General Assembly to impose impact fees — which could amount to thousands of dollars — on new developments. The local school system is struggling to keep up with the 1,200 new students joining each year, and traffic is so bad that locals have learned not to turn left, Carr said, only half-joking.
For now, bills in the General Assembly to have Rutherford County levy the fees have stalled. Carr attributes this to the influence of real estate developers.
“I’m not looking for a fight, but I’m not going to shy away from it either,” Carr said.