| I've spent the majority of the past decade in Nashville, first for university and the past four years working in tech here after a short stint in California. In that time, the tech community here has expanded dramatically. Even when I graduated from school, very few people from the CS program stayed in town. There weren't that many decent companies to work for then. Now you have many more options and you're starting to see larger, recognizable names in town (Eventbrite, Lyft). At one point the Nashville dev community slack was the second largest in the country, and there's a vibrant culture of meet-ups. One other great thing about Nashville is that there a large number of neighborhoods that each have their own character and have walkable sections. Depending on what's important to you and the sort of food/attractions/entertainment you enjoy, you can probably find somewhere to live and be reasonably close to things (at least in Nashville proper, I don't make it out to the suburbs much). As much as locals love to complain about traffic, it's still miles better than most large cities and I think anyone who's spent time in NYC, LA, SF, or even Atlanta will see that. Housing is definitely far more expensive than it used to be, and also still very affordable compared to many other places. I share a lot of the concern that other posters have mentioned about traffic moving forward, but hopefully if more people move here that are deeply invested in public transit and avoiding the fates of other cities the electorate will shift enough to see some real change. |
The complaints stem from a dramatic change, over the past 10 years it went from 15-20 minutes to get anywhere to at least 40. Comparing to cities at least 4-5 times the size of Nashville isn't valid.
Similar with housing, which the oddest thing, to me at least, is the valuation of certain areas over others.