Any FReepers have any advice for leaving the Bay Area and/or Tennessee as a new place to call home?
Anyone left California for another state?
Pros, clearly culture, cost and taxes, but anything you can advise would be helpful.
God Bless.
Left over 14 years ago. For a startup company in another blue state, with amazingly more permissive 2A laws.
Good luck in your new home. best wishes.
I was born in California 70 years ago. Family still farms here after 200 years., I’m still staying.
They screwed up the most wonderful stare in the union.
Have fun!!!
My advice is, if you’re leaving for financial reasons, that’s good. Franklin, Brentwood, etc, are high dollar. Maybe not as high dollar as Cali, but high dollar, nonetheless. And with all the folks moving there, home prices and taxes are going up with them.
As for Nashville, the Mayor put out a PSA a while back telling illegals how to avoid ICE. And the new mayor, whoever it may be, isn’t going to be any better. Nashville had a chance if they had went for Carol Swain, but she came in 3rd and was bumped out.
If you think Nashville is country music and all things Conservative, I politely tell you to think again. The city has been overrun with liberals and hipsters. As have Knoxville and Chattanooga. So, it’s probably more like California now, than what it used to be 5-10 years ago.
Like Texas, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, past Governors and mayors from all those states did their best to attract the tech industry, and others, thinking it would bring jobs to the folks of Tennessee. The companies moved and they brought their liberal employees with them. The Tennessee office of Facebook doesn’t want Good Ol’ Boys, driving F250s and heading to the woods looking for deer, so they imported their help.
And toss in the fact that the Legislature, without the help of the previous Governor or AG(both Republicans) tried to sue the Fed’s over refugee resettlement(mostly Muslims) and the associated costs and just got shot down in US Appeals court if I’m not mistaken. Toss in a healthy dose of illegal alien construction workers to build all those new houses around the area and all those new buildings downtown and, well, I’m sure you’re familiar with all of that.
Happening everywhere in the South. Doesn’t seem like any place is safe from it. Good luck.
Franklin/Spring Hill etc are booming but so is the traffic....just was in the area....
Practically all of Tennessee is very conservative...except for Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville. Those cities are getting filled more each day with liberals escaping the north. Well, in the case of Memphis, most of the conservatives have moved to the suburbs or north MS, leaving mostly Democrat voters in the actual city limits.
If you enjoy real people, if you enjoy people who still have manners, you will like Tennessee.
If during your visit you keep thinking...things are really slow here and behind the times, then pick another state.
I’ll Ping Wardaddy for you. He lives in Franklin.
Franklin and south is good, as is east toward Cookeville. The city of Nashville itself has many of the same problems of other large cities in the U.S., all is not rosy in downtown Nashville. It’ll be a far cry from the problems of California though.
While driving across the country, I stopped in Nashville, intending to stay one or two nights night. I liked the town so much that I extended my stay to a week.
As for advice, the California Franchise Tax Board does not believe in ex-Californians. They think you should continue to pay them, no matter where you live. So, best of luck.
Yes, we bought a home in Arizona in May, 2019 and are presently moving there, but not fast enough!!! So much has been accumulated over 50 yrs of marriage and 20 yrs in the same place....a lot to get rid of and a lot of pack. Can’t get there soon enough!! We are moving to the higher altitude: 6300 ft elevation, nice and cool in the summer in Show Low, AZ!!! When we take a load down and stay a few days....it’s very hard to leave there and come back to all the political garbage going on in CA!!! On the way home this last trip back just before Kingman, AZ we started
just counting Penske and big U-Haul moving trucks going East and by the time we reached Hwy 99, we counted 42 trucks and 1 Allied Van lines truck!!! Only 4 trucks were headed West!! LOL
My husband’s college roommate moved from Louisville where he grew up to Nashville. He loves it.
There are a lot of things I won't miss about California. The politics. Impolite and surprisingly bigoted people. Poor water quality and the state's mismanagement of the resource. Mediocre air quality, exasperated by the state's mismanagement of forested areas and subsequent wildfires that are difficult to contain.
Despite all of that, I would go back tomorrow if my wife and only child wanted to move back there. Not because I dislike central Texas (I don't). It is difficult to pin it down to specifics.
‘Exploding’ is the appropriate word.
You are at the tail-end of this movement though. If you’d signed up and left around 2000 (population then at 590,000), it would have made sense. Today at 690,000 and numerous urbanized counties around Nashville booming...I’m not sure if it makes great sense.
Add to it....the I-65 route (north and south) is extremely congested at the rush-hour periods.
To avoid the crazy house prices...you’d have to live 30 miles away (say in the Columbia or Chapel Hills area).
I would note this as well....the 13 counties that make up the ‘greater’ Nashville area back in 2010....had a population of 1.6 million people. Right now, it’s at 2.09 million and I would expect it to bump against 2.4 million by 2025.
In simple terms, you are too late to really benefit from this.
I'm a native Californian who relocated business and family to North Texas in 2005. The short answer is, it was one of the best decisions of my life.
You're probably already up to speed on the positives of this area. I'll just say that it's everything you've heard, but even better. It took me a full five years of living here to fully wrap my wits around what an incredibly smart move we'd made. It was a rising scale of appreciation, as time went by.
Today I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Texas to any conservative looking to relocate from a blue state.
Don’t ever vote Democrat.
That’s my advice for you, if you want to keep the pleasantries of the Red state red.
I moved to California in 1973 after graduating from college. It was truly an era of “California Dreaming.” I married a California native, we raised three kids there, and we’ve been in our house on the San Francisco peninsula since 1983. Real estate was astronomically high from the day I moved there — my dad thought I was incredibly stupid for buying a 900 sq ft house (including a one car garage) in Palo Alto for $100,000 in 1973
Lots of things have completely ruined the area, the two being the huge siuccess of Apple, Facebook, and Google with many smaller firms close behind. Living with that much wealth around you has a real dispiriting affect. It also breeds the most staggering rudeness imaginable. I’m dismayed that we now live in Little Beijing and Little Bangalore. All the houses in our neighborhood are snatched up by Chinese, 100% of the new kids enrolled in our K-12 school district are Chinese, and you don’t hear a lot of English spoken on our town streets anymore. The traffic is unbelievable and you typically need an hour to go 15 miles. Being a pedestrian has become a real scary nightmare. I won’t even start about the politics and the resulting thoroughly disgusting cities and the rampant graffiti.
We bought a house in The Idaho Panhandle (now commonly called “North Idaho”) a year and a half ago and are splitting our time between the two homes. The ten counties in the Panhandle have 350,000 people in 21,000 square miles. The biggest problems are the rough winters and people are just too polite. Everybody wants to stop and chat. At four-way stop intersections, sometimes things clog up because two drivers sit waiting for the other to go first and both keep waving the other guy to go.
We’ve got really good skiing less than an hour away. We can actually leave our California house and be skiing in Idaho in less time than it takes to drive to Tahoe these days.
Here’s a small anecdote about city governance. Coeur d’Alene really prides itself on its natural beauty and wonderful downtown area. We were hiking Tubbs Hill in August and I spotted graffiti on a utility box at the trailhead. That evening I wrote to the city council members about it. I got an immediate reply from two thanking me for alerting them and saying they would take care of it. The next morning at 7:30 am (less than 12 hours later!) I got an email from a councilman saying it was fixed. He included a photo of the freshly repainted utility box! When did a city ever do something so quickly?
I do miss the magnificent Central and Northern California scenery, the ocean, the redwood mountains, the weather and the friendliness from four decades ago. I have to keep reminding myself that the California I loved is all gone and not coming back. I find myself frequently resenting all the change that ruined paradise.
Right now we are in a position to keep both houses so we have some time to figure out what to do. I retired a couple years ago but my wife is working another year.
Good luck. Left Wa state 5 years ago for northern Michigan and have had no regrets. Just wanted to add that it’s fun to vote now and know it actually matters.
I fled SoCal in 2015 for Knoxville, Tennessee. Smartest thing I have ever done.
I have grave concerns about Nashville; it’s going sideways fast. Too many celebutards and other libtards are descending like the locusts that they are. When it was just the CW people, no problem. But, this is dreadful.
There is also a huge mosque in Murfreesboro, so stay away from there.
Please do come and join us. Help keep our state red. It was a very exciting Election Night, 2016–I saw my vote count for the first time in my entire life.
How can we speed this up?!
Maybe a fundraiser to give free high capacity magazines to any legal gun owner from California looking to move?
I have lived in Jackson, TN all my life. Having said that, if my husband and I could get a job in Middle or East TN, we’d move. West TN is flat. Middle TN is gorgeous and hilly, East TN is Smoky Mountains. Don’t go to Nashville, Memphis, or Knoxville. Liberals rule there. Fall Creek Falls State Park is the best kept secret in TN. Lots of waterfall systems. Near Sparta, TN. Woodbury TN is nice too...outer suburb of Murfreesboro. But don’t live in Murfreesboro proper...that’s where that huge mosque is, and it’s a “Mecca” for new arrivals to the US.
“pondering a move from the Golden State to the Nashville area.”
Go east, young man; go east. Nashville is going bright blue quickly.