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Comment by atwebb | Hacker News Reader

In general, Nashville seems poised to be a sleeper tech city. Cheapish (especially surrounding areas), lots of money (personal and business), liberalish, well located. Though crime rates leave something to be desired and it can be a bit backwards/old South sometimes.

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> liberalish

As a native, I do not know Nashville as a liberal city, but I guess perspectives are all relative.

I more mean that it deviates from the normal southern views. It votes blue more often than not, is quite "metropolitan" and getting more so. Sure Williamson and Rutherford are about as crazy right wing as it gets with that many people around but Davidson is much different. Most of the inane things coming out of the state gov't aren't introduced by Nashville/Davidson reps, heck silly most legislation seems to be because of Stacey Campfield.

Ditto. (Though I mostly grew up a lot farther out in the sticks.) I think what they mean is "the area around Vandy and the recently-gentrified portions of East Nashville are liberalish".

That having been said, the general feel of Nashville has really changed over the past decade.

I used to see it as a "dirty, smelly big city", but it certainly feels more alive now than it used to.

Then again, perhaps a lot of that is the fact that I live somewhere else, and now I go there to visit friends and family.

At any rate, glad to see a pyTN conference springing up!

I only go across the river to visit friends or go to the tomato fest and Vandy area for McDougals chicken.

I live and have lived in the areas people consider solidly red, you'd be surprised how people vote. They just don't wave a moderate or liberal flag like the conservatives do.

Good point.

Additionally, a lot of the liberal/conservative divide is actually urban vs. rural. Davidson Co. is certainly mostly urban.

I think I just have a skewed perspective of things, as I interact almost entirely with people in the rural parts of TN (which obviously isn't Nashville itself).

> liberalish

Compared to what? Maynardville?

Quite insightful but no, compared to many other conservative cities and it's seems to be leaning away from it's conservative past. For example, there's still tons of churches but some of the biggest and most popular are the newer,relaxed ones.

Do you live in Nashville? Nashville is progressing faster than Knoxville, but far slower than Chattanooga. It's a complex situation, and I don't think you can boil it down to comparing the churches. As far as being a "sleeper tech city", I've yet to see any indication that Nashville is on the verge of a high tech or startup renaissance. If you want to see a traditionally conservative, "sleeper tech city" look no further than Greenville, SC. Greenville has recently (in the last 7 years) entered a rapid development phase with numerous tech startups, co-work facilities, etc. Have you ever considered moving to Greenville? I'd move to Greenville over Nashville any day. OR I could start a company in Maynardville - farming as a service or some such thing.

I live in Nashville and I have lived in Chattanooga and I definitely don't share your sentiment. Maybe it's not obvious to you, but there are some phenomenal happenings here.

"If you want to see a traditionally conservative, "sleeper tech city" look no further than Greenville, SC. Greenville has recently (in the last 7 years) entered a rapid development phase with numerous tech startups, co-work facilities, etc"

Nashville has checked all of those boxes.

Did I mentioned we have an incredibly active developer community here? Its not all big healthcare companies running Java & .Net, for instance, there is Emma (http://myemma.com/), Stratasan (http://www.stratasan.com/), The Skillery (http://www.theskillery.com/), Wannadao (https://www.wannadolocal.com/), inquicker (https://inquicker.com/), Moontoast (http://www.moontoast.com/), etc

We have events like coderfaire, hacknashville, hack-a-day, nashville code brigade, nashville user group leadership (group), etc

We also have very active user groups for functional programming, dynamic languages, ruby, php, python, javascript, flash, etc

We have tons of co-working locations, not going to name them all.

Not to mention that a ton of large SV types have remote workers here (I'm looking at you Github, SurveyMonkey, etc).

We have an incubator (http://jumpstartfoundry.com/).

What makes a city a "sleeper tech giant"?

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