Ask ten Nashville residents and you’ll get ten different answers, but they cluster around a few consistent themes: the combination of genuine cultural identity, a strong job market, and a social environment that is warmer than most American cities its size. The honeymoon answer changes. The one that survives years of traffic and rising housing prices is the music.
The Music, Specifically
Not the tourist version of the music, though that’s there too. The fact that live music is available every single night of the year, at multiple quality levels, for free or for very low cover charges, in venues ranging from 50-person listening rooms to 20,000-seat arenas. The Bluebird Cafe runs songwriter rounds where the writers who penned songs you’ve heard on the radio for twenty years play them acoustically three feet from your face. The Station Inn has hosted bluegrass every Sunday for decades. Robert’s Western World on Broadway is free, goes late, and books bands that can actually play.
For anyone who cares about music, not just country music, but music as a daily presence in a city’s life, Nashville delivers in a way that very few other American cities can. A musician can walk into a session in East Nashville and find themselves playing alongside people who have toured the world. That density of craft is unusual and real.
The People
Southern hospitality is a phrase so overused it has lost meaning, but Nashville’s social culture is genuinely different from cities of comparable size in the Northeast or on the West Coast. Strangers speak to each other. People hold doors. Conversations happen in checkout lines. This isn’t performed; it’s a baseline social norm that newcomers from less warm cities consistently cite as one of the things that made them stay.
Nashville also has a “six degrees becomes two” effect in its professional and creative communities. The healthcare world is surprisingly small. The music industry is even smaller. The tech startup community knows itself. Networks are tight, which means that for people who are professionally social, Nashville accelerates relationship-building in ways that anonymous big cities don’t.
The Nature Access
Nashville is 56% tree canopy, the highest of any major American city. Radnor Lake is a 1,300-acre state natural area that ends inside the city limits. Percy Warner and Edwin Warner Parks together cover 3,100 acres of forested ridges and trails within 20 minutes of downtown. The Shelby Bottoms Greenway runs along the Cumberland River through East Nashville.
For a city of Nashville’s size, the access to genuine natural space within the city is exceptional. Radnor Lake has herons, deer, and beavers. You can walk a legitimate forest trail and be downtown in 20 minutes.
No State Income Tax
The financial benefit is real for working professionals. Tennessee’s no-income-tax policy means a higher take-home paycheck than equivalent jobs in most other states. For someone earning $80,000, the difference compared to California’s income tax can exceed $5,000 annually. That’s a vacation, a year of car payments, or accelerated mortgage payoff.
What Doesn’t Make the List
Traffic doesn’t get better. The public schools are complicated, depending on your ZIP code and your resources, they range from excellent (specialized magnet schools, Hume-Fogg, MLK Academic Magnet) to genuinely problematic. The summer humidity is real. The housing prices that made this question easy to answer in 2012 are no longer what they were.
The best thing about living in Nashville is that it has a specific identity, music, food, community warmth, outdoor access, and enough economic health to support that identity without hollowing it out entirely. That combination is rarer than it sounds.
Sources
- Resident surveys: The Honest Local blog, Nashville pros and cons research (2024)
- Metro Nashville Parks Department, park acreage data
- American Forests, urban tree canopy study
- Tennessee Department of Revenue, income tax policy
- Bluebird Cafe, Station Inn, Robert’s Western World venue histories
- Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, quality of life data 2024