Or so I thought.
We made it a little shy of 3 years before moving back to NYC in the early part of 2018. We're back on the Upper West Side again and I couldn't be happier. Unless it's to move internationally, I doubt we'll leave NYC again.
Don't get me wrong, Nashville is a great city. One of the better up-and-coming cities in America, I'd wager. The people are nice and the food is awesome.
But there were some things that just made it untenable for us long-term:
1. The cost of living isn't as low as you'd think, and it's constantly getting worse. We almost bought a house several times while we were living there, some of the smallest in our neighborhood, and they were still more space than we wanted or needed, and cost $500k to $700k. Two fell through randomly and we were outbid on the other. Our budget now is higher, but it's like 20% higher, not 100% higher.
2. You have to drive everywhere. The little walkable strips like 12 South in Nashville are a complete joke if you come from SF or NYC or Chicago. And they're completely slammed with people all the time now, despite the fact that there's only about 10-20 combined coffee shops, restaurants, and retail shops in a quarter-mile strip. And a very large portion of the city doesn't even have sidewalks if you wanted to walk, not to mention the huge cars whizzing by at 40mph a few feet from you. Very unpleasant.
3. Nashville is not ready for their growth. The traffic is horrible, everything is getting way too crowded, there's no public transportation (and they voted down even doing a rapid bus transit plan, so I don't see it happening anytime soon). Housing isn't being built fast enough and so prices are shooting up. Amazon is going to make it all much worse.
4. This might seem dumb, but the airport is a mixed bag, especially if you travel internationally. It was amazing to be able to leave our house and get to the gate in 25 minutes (seriously), but there are basically zero international flights and a lot fewer options to many parts of the country than I'd like. I love living next to three airports with tons of flights, even if the airports are some of the worst in the US and hard to get to. I hate connections. That's just me though.
5. Being land-locked annoyed me more than I realized it would. I love the ocean.
6. There's not a ton to do in Nashville actually. I don't like live music, craft beer, or anything "country" so that's 90% of the activities out the window for me.
7. There's basically nothing within a 2 hour radius of Nashville, so day trips or weekend trips are either a lot of car time to get to Louisville, Memphis, Knoxville, or Huntsville (none of which have that much to offer that Nashville doesn't, imo), or getting on a plane.
8. The people are nice...but there's something else there. It feels polite but not genuinely warm or something. I always felt like an outsider. Maybe because I wasn't from the south? Could have been my imagination, but what definitely isn't my imagination is that "southern charm" is generally reserved for straight white christians. Not always, but more than I'd like.
9. Speaking of which, it's uber-christian, in a way that's hard to understand unless you've been there. It just permeates the ground you walk on somehow. Not that everyone is christian, but a lot of people are, and people will ask you if / where you go to church, and my daughter's non-religious preschool taught her a bunch of christian songs, etc. And it's ironic because I was christian (my wife is even a minister), but I don't love living around it like that. Especially since my views on the intersection of faith and politics have radically evolved over the last few years.
10. This might be controversial: Nashville is fairly progressive for the south...but it's still very much the south. And the 2016 election really brought this home for me. Nashville is a little blueish purple dot in a deep, deep red state. If you drive 30 mins in any direction you'll see plenty of confederate flags, nasty bumper stickers, etc. And just like with christianity in nashville, not everyone is racist...but there's just a level of comfort and shrugging about the deep roots of racism in the south that I find disturbing.
Random example: there's a huge mansion there called Belle Meade...and it was formerly a plantation. They have weddings and other events there. At a plantation in the south where people were bought and sold and raped and murdered for decades. And no one thinks anything of it. It's just a nice building. There are also a bunch of streets and other things named after the big slave-holding families from Nashville's history.
To each their own, but ultimately, I don't think the south has ever really reckoned with its past, and there's just something a little off about the culture there that we ultimately decided wasn't the best place for us.
Hope I didn't offend anyone from Nashville or the south...just my own impressions from a few years living there.
EDIT: can't believe I forgot this: it's a hellscape during the summer. The heat and humidity in the south is not my idea of a good time. Although NYC's summers and winters aren't perfect either, but I actually like having 4 proper seasons.