Destination 2017: NashvilleBy Richard Bradley

This dynamic also underlies President Trump’s manifest dislike of American cities, which, despite the fact that he’s never really lived anywhere else, he has described as hotbeds of carnage and chaos. Since last November’s presidential election, American cities nationwide have faced a wave of hostility from the White House to a degree unseen since the urban unrest of the 1960s and ’70s. Almost every domestic action Trump has taken—from his proposed federal budget, to drug policy, to cracking down on sanctuary cities, to proposed cuts in infrastructure funding, to healthcare efforts—takes aim at cities. This may be the definition of killing the goose that lays the golden egg, but it both plays to Trump’s political base and seems to satisfy some sort of primal need on the part of the president to exact revenge on those parts of the country that didn’t support him. Cities are an American success story. But some Americans seem to want to tear them down.

Back before the election, perhaps the closest watchers of what was going on in North Carolina were businesspeople and elected officials in cities kind of like Charlotte—politically and socially progressive, business-friendly cities with thriving economies that happened to be located in crimson-conservative states. And of all those islands of blue floating in seas of red—places like Austin, Texas; Minneapolis-St. Paul; Orlando, Fla.; Atlanta—perhaps the most concerned were the people of Nashville. That’s because Nashville had a lot to lose, and there were plenty of signs that Tennessee’s General Assembly was equally inclined to pass legislation that could derail Nashville’s remarkable growth. “We saw what can happen in North Carolina when the state doesn’t take those kinds of bills seriously in terms of their [economic] impact,” says Butch Spyridon, head of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation (CVC) and one of the most influential figures in the U.S. tourism community. In Nashville, “you have this momentum. How do you sustain it? Well, you sustain it by not hurting yourself,” he says.

How Nashville has gone about steering clear of divisive social issues and trying to promote unifying economic ones is a work in progress—but so far, it’s succeeding. The city has, by and large, managed to dodge the social bullets that have hampered Charlotte and other like-minded places. It’s also a story that could prove meaningful for the rest of the country, as policymakers, politicians, businesspeople and others try to bridge the divides that separate our country.

Of all the American cities that have enjoyed rebounds since the financial crisis a decade ago, perhaps none are surging like Nashville. Branded as Music City for its unparalleled music scene, it has become one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations, with 13.9 million visitors in 2016, an increase of 45 percent in 10 years. New restaurants and hotels are popping up almost every week. People from all over the country are moving to Nashville because of economic opportunity, an affordable cost of living and welcoming culture, as well as a new willingness on the part of young people to seek futures outside of traditional but prohibitively expensive cities like New York and San Francisco. (As of July, the unemployment rate in Tennessee was a state-record low of 3.6 percent compared with a national average of 4.4 percent; Nashville’s is even lower at 3.3 percent.) That’s also attracting people from all over the world: Nashville has one of the largest Kurdish populations in the U.S., and one of the fastest-growing Latino populations.

Nashville is asserting itself as a top-tier American city. And it’s also very blue: Nashville’s last seven mayors, dating back to 1962, have been Democrats, including the current mayor, Megan Barry. There are some complicating factors: Some of metro Nashville’s suburbs are deeply conservative. But in other ways, the pattern holds true. According to data compiled by the Nashville Chamber of Commerce—not known as a liberal organization—Nashville generates around 35 percent of the Tennessee GDP.

Tennessee, on the other hand, is remarkably red. “We’re not just red, we’re very red,” says Mark Cate, the former chief of staff to Republican governor Bill Haslam and the founder of the public affairs firm Stones River Group. Twenty-eight members of Tennessee’s 33-person Senate are Republican; 73 members of its 99-person House of Representatives are Republican.

In the early months of 2016, the Tennessee General Assembly debated bills that might have undermined Nashville’s reputation as an inclusive and welcoming city. One would have made the Bible the official state book. One would have defunded the University of Tennessee Office of Diversity and Inclusion and redirected some of that money to purchase “In God We Trust” bumper stickers for police cars (the office was eventually disbanded for the 2016–17 academic year). And, yes, another bill would have forced transgender people to use the bathrooms that corresponded to their gender at birth.

Those bills didn’t become laws, but another one did. In April 2016 Governor Haslam signed Senate Bill 1556, informally known as the therapist law, which would allow mental health counselors to turn away patients if they objected to those patients because of “sincerely held principles.” The somewhat confusing language had originally been more specific; before it was amended, the law had said that counselors could turn away patients because of “sincerely held religious beliefs.” In Tennessee, folks knew what that meant. If you didn’t want to counsel a gay person, you didn’t have to.

The backlash wasn’t on a bathroom bill scale, but it hurt. The American Counseling Association canceled its 2017 conference in Nashville, which would have brought some 3,000 visitors and $4 million in revenue to the city. A Colorado-based group called the Centers for Spiritual Living canceled a meeting in Nashville, as did the Human Rights Campaign. Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and the state of California banned government travel to Tennessee.

The therapist law was a shot across the bow for Nashville, and it prompted several alarmed reactions. One was that the CVC’s Spyridon led a drive to create a statewide organization—with a special emphasis on Tennessee’s four biggest cities, Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga—called Tennessee Thrives. Inspired by a similar organization called Georgia Prospers, Tennessee Thrives is a coalition of nearly 400 businesses that want to gently but firmly remind state legislators of the lessons of North Carolina. The companies that have signed on to Tennessee Thrives—including Nashville-based Hospital Corporation of America, Jack Daniel’s and Bridgestone—promoted the message, “Tennessee is a great place to live, work and visit. Let’s keep it that way.” Ralph Schulz, the president of Nashville’s Chamber of Commerce, explains, “Businesses were happy to sign up for it because what Tennessee Thrives says was fundamentally already in their HR policies.” Adds Mark Cate of the Stones River Group, “We want to stand up for nondiscrimination. It wasn’t about starting a war here; it was just to make sure that we can clearly state just how important this is.” By all accounts, the message was received.

Another factor was the role of the Middle Tennessee Mayors Caucus, a group of 40 mayors, both Democrats and Republicans who meet regularly to discuss regional economic development. A moderating force, the caucus was deeply involved in the April 2017 passage of a bill called the Improve Act, which increased the state gasoline tax to raise money for much-needed infrastructure projects statewide. Crucial to Nashville was the inclusion of a “local option transit surcharge,” which basically said that some specific counties and cities could add a local tax for funding a local transit program, as long as the local voters approved it. Nashville is in dire need of improved transportation to handle its growth, and Barry is making a major political push for a new, comprehensive transit system that includes light rail, so the law and its local carve-out were a huge win for the city.

Barry herself is really the third leg of Nashville’s effort to maintain its momentum. She’s worked assiduously to build relationships with state legislators who might not generally look fondly on Nashville. “I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time [with the legislature] making friends,” Barry told me. “It’s just a lot harder to vote against something if you actually have a relationship with the people supporting it. What we’ve tried to do is find the stuff that we could work on together.”

“There are clearly legislators that have major philosophical differences with Mayor Barry and some of the other mayors,” Cate says. “But she and the other mayors are doing a nice job of reaching out. It’s not an us-versus-them posture. It’s finding middle ground on the subject of jobs and job creation.”

Of course, there are still difficult issues. Gun rights, for example, is an area where a growing city and a deep-rooted state culture of gun ownership are invariably going to clash. Spyridon and others played roles in blocking the passage of a law that would have allowed off-duty cops to bring their guns into any ticketed event—Nashville’s enormous New Year’s Eve celebration, for example, or Tennessee Titans games. The NFL banned off-duty carry in 2013, and fears of possibly having NFL games relocated out of state prompted the bill’s rejection. But in May, the governor signed a law legalizing the sale and possession of gun silencers. It was called the Tennessee Hearing Protection Act, but for many in Nashville it might have been called an incitement to handgun violence.

The silencer bill was a setback, but not a shock in a massively progun state and not something likely to have an enormous effect on tourism or economic development. But some of the calm may be temporary. Tennessee will elect a new governor in 2018, and it’s entirely possible that social issues involving guns or other hot-button topics will reenter the state conversation during the campaign.

And though Barry and other mayors have made progress in relationships with the state legislature, Trump is another looming threat, with the potential to be even more damaging to Nashville than a bad bill. Like mayors from both parties around the country, Barry admits to being concerned about White House positions on the federal budget, healthcare, drug policy, immigration, infrastructure spending (it’s clearly not the priority Trump said it would be during the campaign), climate change and more. “We realized with what happened in November,” Barry says, “that cities are really going to have to figure out the complex problems that we’re facing. Cities are going to have to lead.”