Housing Costs Driving Aspiring Musicians Out of Nashville

"[With] the currently popularity of country music, and the massive promotional boost ABC’s hour-long drama Nashville has given to the city, there’s parts of [Nashville] that feel like they are about to burst apart at the seams, and many such neighborhoods are the places that young, aspiring artists set up shop to incorporate themselves in the creative channels running through the city," according to Trigger, as written for the Save Country Music site. 

Nashville has not been immune to some of the same processes of housing affordability and displacement striking cities such as San Francisco and New York:

"If you look at many of American popular music’s big movements and eras, they started in areas where low rents fostered the creative process…The draw of traditionally-poor East Nashville as a haven for musicians looking to make it in music and collaborate with like-minded artists has been one of the ingredients not just to Nashville’s current output, but to its allure."

"But all that is in jeopardy now as development bulldozes much of the city’s affordable housing inventory, and rents and real-estate prices continue to spike…Nashville’s creative working poor are getting priced out of the city, and this could spell an ebbing of Nashville’s creative influx."

The article also cites an editorial by Jeannie Naujeck for the Nashville Ledger about the rising cost of housing in neighborhoods that have traditionally been home to Nashville's aspiring music industry creatives.