'I live in hell': Anti-growth fervour grips U.S. South after pandemic boom

In Gallatin, Tennessee, house prices have jumped by two-thirds since the pandemic, and one local commissioner incensed at nearby homebuilding said she “lives in hell.”

Tennessee and several of its neighbors in the U.S. South are facing an anti-growth backlash, after turbocharged migration helped boost the region’s population by 2.7 million people — the size of Chicago. As traffic snarls in once-sleepy downtowns, apartment complexes replace meadows and municipal water systems strain under new demand, passions are running high in a way that goes beyond regular nimbyism.

In Sumner County, where the Cumberland River snakes through the verdant hills northeast of Nashville, the economy grew by 8.5 per cent a year from 2020 to 2022, putting it in the top seven per cent of all U.S. counties for growth. The number of apartments in the county seat of Gallatin almost doubled in the four years through 2022, according to property marketplace RentCafe.  

The boom — driven by transplants from blue states like New York and California — has spurred a right-wing group that marries conservative religious beliefs with restrictive policies on growth into control of the local legislative body. At a planning board meeting in May, the pressing agenda item was whether to boost minimum lot sizes in rural areas to at least 2.3 acres; big enough to ward off housing developers who need more density.