Transit to the Hinterlands

The East Nashville Farmers’ Market jolts the intersection of 5th and Woodland to life on summer Tuesday afternoons. Like any such event in a midsize city, it has its fair share of urbanites conspicuously taking their $40 canvas tote bags out of the trunk of Civics, still bearing weathered Bernie bumper stickers. 

But, like its sister event in Richland Park, it’s also a wildly inventive hub of entrepreneurial spirit that differentiates itself from Nashville’s official (and increasingly tourist-oriented) farmers’ market. Deep-cut plants like stridolo and sunchokes peek out from soil balls, ready for easy planting. A produce booth offers fresh strawberry lemonade next to a vendor selling locally made pottery. It’s the kind of artsy enclave the city’s more politically active urbanites see as a sign of the salvation possible if they can just approve a transit plan, a place the community market’s patrons can walk to from their newly renovated duplexes. The only issue is that most of the people who make the whole thing possible live far beyond the city limits. 

As Nashville readies itself for yet another transit referendum, Mayor O’Connell befuddled many of his most vocal detractors with the “Choose How You Move Plan,” a proposal that, superficially, is as pragmatic as it is multifaceted. While Megan Barry’s resoundingly rejected 2018 plan would have led Nashville to tie Chicago as the city with the highest sales tax in the U.S., O’Connell suggests a more modest .50 percent sales tax increase that would put Davidson County on par with the 9.75 percent rates long established in neighboring counties like Rutherford, Williamson, and Wilson. 

Although a tax increase is a tax increase, O’Connell’s team has sought to alleviate concerns over the inevitable financial burden on the city’s residents at a time when inflation has ravaged personal finances. According to the plan, 60% of sales tax revenue comes from “visitors,” so those who see their discretionary income further eroding can at least take heart that users of pedal taverns are doing most of the heavy lifting. 

However, as he proved on the campaign trail with his “billionaires and bachelorettes” rhetoric, O’Connell’s political effectiveness stems from binary thinking. There are locals and visitors, walkable communities and commuters, Real Nashvillians and everyone else. 

O’Connell’s stickiest blindspot (and the one his political legacy will hinge upon) is that the “visitors” he spends so much energy differentiating from the urban core residents who led to his decisive victory are not a monolith. In fact, they are the key members of the creative class whom O’Connell favorite Richard Florida deemed vital to the urban center of the future. And they increasingly do not live in Nashville proper.

The numerous think pieces touting Nashville’s growth and “It City” status often elide the fact that the metro boom is largely a result of the growth of the fourteen counties that make up the Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area. In 2023, its population grew to 2,102,573 with 715,884 residents living in Davidson County. Though Nashville claims 34% of the area’s residents, it has been mired in a post-COVID population exodus that has only served to enrich the surrounding counties boasting lower crime rates, better schools, more space, and a cheaper cost of living. 

As bustling and dynamic as Nashville is, its most famous and influential presences (Carrie Underwood, Alan Jackson, Reba, etc.) have long lived in areas like Franklin, Leiper’s Fork, and Gallatin. Likewise, the “local” produce Nashville’s chefs use to garner all those James Beard awards comes from farms in far-off locales like Maury and Smith County. Now, the area's middle earners are also catching on to the fact that the difference in their commute downtown from Midtown or Lebanon is often negligible. With property tax increases driving business outside the city, commutes to the suburbs are all the more common. 

In the parlance of “Choose How You Move,” these local outlanders largely responsible for Nashville’s cultural renaissance are indistinguishable from Broadway-bound convention goers. But while a tourist is a captive audience forced to assume the tax burden for the duration of their stay, the rest of us have the option to take O’Connell’s slogan at face value. 

As great as life can be in those surrounding thirteen counties, country dwellers can’t just drive down to the local Whole Foods or Nordstrom–much less Kroger or Target. We make our weekend pilgrimages. For those who live equidistant from Nashville and the area’s ever-growing suburban cities, a .50 percent tax increase could easily result in a shift in buying habits and, for Nashville, millions in lost revenue. Gordonsville residents have no reason to go through the struggle of getting to the Green Hills Trader Joe’s when the Franklin location has ample parking and–pending approval of O’Connell’s plan–is no longer more expensive. Folks from Bowling Green could still drive into Davidson County or opt for Hendersonville and Gallatin, which have many of the same amenities at a lower tax rate.

For all of Nashville’s pretense and “It” cachet, the city is merely, in geographical terms, a catchment area for one of the most economically fertile regions in the United States. However, Nashville’s singular culture derives from the rural areas that receive so much neglect and outright scorn from the more urbane members of O’Connell’s base. 

In The Country and the City, cultural critic Raymond Williams dissects the relationship between London and the rest of England as such: “English attitudes toward the country, and to ideas of rural life, persisted with extraordinary power, so that even after the society was predominantly urban its literature, for a generation, was still predominantly rural; and even in the twentieth century, in an urban and industrial land, forms of the older ideas and experiences still remarkably exist.” From Music Row and Broadway to the Southern boutiques in Hillsboro Village and 12 South, such ideas dominate the identity that Nashville sells to the world, a form of cultural imperialism that Metro’s most heralded bureaucrats hope to parlay into more bus routes as they mask their contempt for the area’s real economic engine.

When talking to any transit fetishist, one quickly realizes that their version of the world ends at anything beyond a half-hour drive from the urban center unless it’s another destination city they can access via a bus ride to BNA. They happily exploit the fruits of Middle Tennessee’s culture while never deigning to engage or understand it. They live in a bubble rooted in classism that sees those outside the city limits as inferior and useful only for the economic windfall they provide. 

Like District 19 Councilmember Jacob Kupin, they tout the positive fiscal benefits of Mayor O’Connell’s sales tax increase for the city and dismiss the concerns of working families with the promise that the plan will be so successful they can save $12,000 a year by giving up their cars. That working-class rubes would ever want to make a Costco run to Sumner County or daytrip to a Tennessee state park is of no concern. Those of Kupin’s ilk want the help nearby to serve their craft cocktails and clean up the refuse from their farm-to-table dinners as they carve out lucrative niches as men and women of the people. It’s all as smooth as the Tennessee Whiskey distilled in the outskirts.