Nashville is dead

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For more than a decade, Nash­ville, Tenn., has been one of Amer­i­ca’s hippest and fastest-grow­ing cities. An­chored by the coun­try-mu­sic in­dus­try and boosted by a hos­pitable state tax cli­mate, the city and sur­round­ing re­gion at­tracted busi­nesses and res­i­dents. While its mu­sic scene made it a tourist mecca, Nash­ville also lured a gen­er­a­tion of col­lege-ed­u­cated trans­plants, earn­ing a po­si­tion as one of the coun­try’s new “brain­power cities.”

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These days Nash­ville is mak­ing its way onto other, less dis­tin­guished lists. The In­sti­tute for Truth in Ac­count­ing re­cently ranked it one of the coun­try’s five worst “sink­hole” cities, with $22,000 in debt per res­i­dent. Its bonded debt alone has in­creased by more than $1.25 bil­lion in 10 years. City lead­ers have used deficit fi­nanc­ing to bal­ance Nash­ville’s books and spent much of the city’s re­serve funds. The Ten­nessee comp­troller has threat­ened a state takeover, and even the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion’s lav­ish stim­u­lus isn’t enough to plug Nash­ville’s bud­get hole. Amid all this, an­gry lo­cal groups are try­ing to spur a spe­cial elec­tion to roll back a gi­gan­tic prop­erty tax in­crease. What was once called a mir­a­cle in Mu­sic City in­creas­ingly looks like a melt­down.

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Still, Nash­ville had trou­ble mak­ing do. Its lead­ers cul­ti­vated an am­bi­tion to make it a world-class city. Nash­ville built bright, shiny new things with debt. It spent more than $600 mil­lion to con­struct the Mu­sic City Cen­ter with bonds fi­nanced by ho­tel taxes and other fees. City lead­ers also built a mi­nor-league base­ball sta­dium for $91 mil­lion and a down­town am­phithe­ater that cost $52 mil­lion. Now they have pledged city debt to help con­struct a $275 mil­lion soc­cer sta­dium.

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