A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis sheds light on an important question: how many people actually own their home?

That may seem like a benign, simple question. Most people are used to seeing the “homeownership rate” cited in the news. If an area’s homeownership rate is 70%, it is natural to assume that 70% of the population are homeowners. Yet that assumption is incorrect.

The reality is more complicated—and a bit wonky. The answer is also a practical example of how similar statistics, designed to measure the same phenomenon, can lead to different conclusions. And oftentimes, the difference hinges on small methodological choices most readers never see.

Understanding homeownership data

Official estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate the Knoxville metro area had a homeownership rate of ~71% in 2024. Most people understand that figure to mean that about 7 in 10 residents own their home. Yet that is not the case. This commonly cited metric actually reflects the owner-occupancy rate, which tell us what share of housing units are occupied by an owner. That is an important data point—particularly when measured over time—but it doesn’t answer the question the initial question: what share of the population owns their home?

Think about it this way. In 2024, the Knoxville metro area had a population of about 957,000. That population lives in roughly 395,000 housing units and consists of many different household types—including individuals, married couples, families with children, and so on. Not everyone in each housing unit is a homeowner. Some are renters. Some are roommates. Others are adult children living with their parents.

Here’s a thought experiment. Assume that (1) Knoxville’s homeownership rate is 100% and thus every housing unit is owner-occupied, and that (2) a given home can be “owned” by no more than two people. In that scenario, Knoxville could have no more than 790,000 homeowners (total housing units x2). Subtract that from the total population and that leaves roughly 167,000 people who aren’t classified as either homeowners or renters. As the homeownership rate is commonly understood, such individuals—whether they be adult children or roommates—are viewed as homeowners even though they do not actually own the home.

That’s the problem Minneapolis Fed research attempts to solve. To account for the disparity, the authors created what they refer to as the homeowners-to-population ratio, or HPOP, which measures ownership the population level.

To better understand the difference between the traditional owner-occupancy measure and the HPOP, consider a hypothetical cul-de-sac with five housing units, each of which is home to a separate group of residents:

• Housing unit 1. A couple owns their home. The woman’s parents live with them.

• Housing unit 2. A couple owns their home. Their son, a recent college graduate, lives with them.

• Housing unit 3. A man owns his home. A friend lives with him.

• Housing unit 4. A couple owns their home. Their two young children live with them.

• Housing unit 5. Three roommates rent their home. The owner lives elsewhere.

As illustrated in graphic below, these five housing units are home to 14 adults. Because 4 of the 5 housing units have their respective owners as residents, the owner-occupancy rate—the measure traditionally viewed as the homeownership rate—on the cul-de-sac is 80%. However, because only seven of the 14 adults are actually owners of the homes they live in, the homeowners-to-population ratio, or HPOP, is much lower, at 50%.

Source: New Homeownership Measure Puts People First (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2026).

Unlike the standard homeownership metric, the HPOP is based on individuals. It measures the total population of adult (18+) homeowners—including spouses and unmarried partners—by the total adult population, amounting to what can be considered the real homeownership rate. Unlike other metrics, the HPOP approach provides a more complete accounting of the adult population that does not own a home, including adults living in renter households or group quarters like military bases, nursing homes, or group homes. Crucially, it also includes adults who live in owner-occupied homes but are not owners themselves (e.g., adult children living with their parents; older parents living with their adult children; and other unrelated adults, such as friends or roommates).

Using the HPOP measure, the Minneapolis Fed found that homeownership is less prevalent than what is reflected in commonly-cited figures. In 2024, the U.S. homeownership rate was 65.3%—meaning 65.3% of housing units are occupied by their owner—yet the HPOP rate, or the share of the population that owns their home, was just 53.2%.

This 11.1 percentage point gap between the homeownership rate and HPOP is driven by the 13.9% of U.S. adults that live in owner-occupied homes but are not owners themselves—with adult children living with their parents being the largest group.

Applying the Homeowners-to-Population Ratio (HPOP) to Knoxville

For most of its history, Knoxville has been an owner-occupied town. Since 2005, the region’s homeownership rate has remained remarkably stable, rarely straying far from around 70%. It fell to a modern low of 67.1% in the wake of the Great Recession before recovering to a high of 71.9% in 2019; as of 2024, the latest year for which data are available, Knoxville’s traditional homeownership rate stood at exactly 71%.

Like in most other areas, Knoxville’s homeowners-to-population ratio (HPOP) suggests the traditional homeownership rate overstates homeownership at the population level. According to the Minneapolis Fed’s calculations, just 59.9% of adults in Knoxville MSA are homeowners—more than 11 percentage points lower than what the traditional rate reflects. In Knox County, the HPOP ratio is lower still, at 57% in 2024.

The HPOP methodology also allows for a more robust analysis of homeownership rates among young adults. Traditional homeownership rates for this age cohort are often inflated because young adults reside in non-typical households at a higher rate and are thus excluded from traditional calculations altogether.

According to Census data, the traditional homeownership rate for U.S. adults under age 35 was 37% in 2024. Using HPOP, which accounts for co-residents and dorm dwellers, that number falls to just only 22%. The same dynamic is at play locally. Census data from 2024 indicate that, in Knox County, the traditional homeownership rate among adults under age 35 was nearly 47%. When calculated using HPOP, however, that figure falls to just 25%—meaning only 1 in 4 young adults own their home.1

Peer Cities Comparison

Regardless of the measure used, homeownership is less common in Knoxville than in most other comparable metros. Knoxville ranks in the bottom third among peer cities for both the HPOP and the traditional owner-occupancy rate, although both measures remain roughly five percentage points above the national average.

More revealing than the 2024 figures, however, is how they have changed over the past decade. Across the peer city group, Knoxville and Huntsville stand out as clear outliers. On one hand, the two metros share several structural economic characteristics: both are anchored by federal research institutions and home to a major research university. Yet the two metros are on markedly different paths with respect to homeownership.

Each metro in the comparison saw its population-level homeownership rate increase between 2014 and 2024, with one exception: Huntsville, where the rate fell by more than four percentage points. That decline may seem surprising at first glance, especially given Huntsville’s exceptionally strong economy. Anchored by Redstone Arsenal, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and Cummings Research Park, Huntsville is one of the nation’s leading hubs for engineering, aerospace, and defense. Its STEM job market is strong and expanding, and, in part, why its early-career young professional base grew by 19% between 2019 and 2024—by far the strongest growth of any peer city.

But the key to understanding Huntsville’s declining homeownership rate is the interaction between its labor market and housing affordability. Home values in Huntsville increased by just 83% between 2014 and 2024—well below the peer average of 114%—and it has for years maintained the lowest rent burden, with an average rent-to-income ratio of just 18.5% in 2024 versus the peer average of 23.5%. Its relatively affordable rental market has helped attract young professionals seeking high-paying STEM jobs without the housing costs found in many other technology hubs. At the same time, comparatively affordable rents reduce the financial incentive to purchase a home immediately, with many newcomers choosing to rent while establishing their careers. In that sense, Huntsville’s declining homeownership rate is not necessarily a cause for concern and instead reflects, somewhat counterintuitively, the success of its economy in attracting a young, highly educated workforce.

Knoxville presents a markedly different story. Between 2014 and 2024, the typical home value increased by 140%—the second-largest increase among the peer metros, trailing only Nashville (143%) and well above the peer average of 114%. Moreover, Knoxville has lead the nation in price growth since 2020. Renters have also faced mounting affordability pressures in recent years. Knoxville experienced the largest increase in its rent-to-income ratio over the past decade, reaching 27.6% by the end of 2024—the highest among the comparison metros.2

Despite worsening affordability, however, Knoxville’s population-level homeownership rate increased by five percentage points from 2014 to 2024. That seems counterintuitive as conventional wisdom suggests rapidly rising home prices and rents should suppress homeownership. Much of the explanation lies in who moved to Knoxville during this period. In the wake of the pandemic, Knoxville experienced a surge in domestic migration. Many newcomers arrived with greater purchasing power, higher incomes, or accumulated home equity that enabled them to buy homes even as prices climbed.

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The divergent paths of Knoxville and Huntsville, and the gap between the HPOP and the traditional owner-occupancy rate, illustrate the same underlying lesson: statistics are best understood with context. Huntsville’s falling rate and Knoxville’s rising one look like opposite stories, but they’re actually the same story told through the same lens—a lens that can’t distinguish between a young professional choosing to rent in a strong economy and a resident being priced out by newcomers with more money. The traditional homeownership rate wasn’t built to make that distinction. HPOP was. It’s also a reminder that no number or statistic, however official, tells you what it means without the context behind it.

There’s a lot to be said about Knoxville’s growth. As I wrote in a column for the Knoxville News Sentinel last month, the Scruffy City is, by most conventional measures, thriving. Unemployment is low. Poverty is down. Homeownership is up. Crime is modest and falling. These are the metrics by which cities typically measure success. And by those standards, Knoxville has much to celebrate.

But high-level metrics can explain only so much and, at worst, can mask the structural weaknesses. That is where Knoxville finds itself. For all of its recent success, Knoxville’s demographic foundation—what determines whether a city’s growth is temporary or durable—is more fragile than it may seem.

Rising cost-of-living and housing prices dominate local headlines, and with good reason. Knoxville home prices grew faster than any other city in America, 86%, from 2020 to early 2026—and today, the typical household can comfortably afford just 13% of homes listed for sale. That is neither a sustainable nor desirable path for a mid-sized city aspiring to punch above its weight.

To some extent, deteriorating affordability is a byproduct of broader economic success—even if longtime residents do not view it as such. People do not move to places that are economically stagnant. They move to places that are dynamic, where job opportunities are rich and quality of life is high. That fact does not, however, make rising costs any less painful for those already here. Yet affordability, while the most pressing and visible challenge, is ultimately a solvable problem. Housing shortages and rising costs can be mitigated through deliberate policy, more housing, and a willingness to adapt to growth rather than resist it.

The more difficult challenges are easier to miss. They are structural and have no easy-to-implement solutions. They are the cracks in Knoxville’s demographic foundation—cracks that raise real questions about the durability of the city’s recent success.

Knoxville Isn’t Growing Its Own

Natural population growth is a critical indicator of demographic health. By excluding migration and looking only at the difference between births and deaths, it shows whether an area is reproducing from within (“growing its own”) or becoming increasingly reliant on newcomers to sustain itself.

The numbers for Knoxville are, well, not good. Among the other counties that anchor Tennessee’s largest cities, Knox County stands alone as the only one that experienced natural population loss from 2020 to 2025.

At the metro level—which includes surrounding counties—the numbers are just as bad. The Knoxville metro lost 11,934 residents to natural population decline, while Chattanooga lost 2,732. Meanwhile, Memphis added 10,183 residents through natural growth, and Nashville added 36,185.

Nationally, Knoxville’s internal growth is among the weakest in the country. Of 387 U.S. metro areas, Knoxville ranked 379th in natural population growth from 2020 to 2025—placing it in the 2nd percentile nationally. In other words, 98 percent of U.S. metros performed better, and only eight experienced larger natural population losses.

Most of the recent natural population loss is attributable to excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, and growth rates have begun to recover since 2023. Like many cities across the country, natural population growth is amid a multi-decade decline as fertility rates have fallen across the globe. Knoxville, however, has experienced an even steeper decline.

Since 2011, Knox County’s natural growth rate fell by 88%—a larger decline than Davidson (-19%), Hamilton (-52%), and Shelby (-55%). The county’s post-pandemic recovery has also been the most limited, and it is the only major county whose annual natural growth rate remains below 1%, at 0.3% in 2025.

What makes Knoxville’s natural growth trajectory so concerning is that it stems not from a singular issue but a convergence of four separate demographic headwinds: an older population, a higher age-adjusted death rate, a smaller share of young adults, and a lower fertility rate.

The problem isn’t just that Knox County has an older population and therefore naturally experiences more deaths. The county also has a comparatively high death rate even after controlling for age, meaning mortality is elevated for reasons beyond demographics alone. At the same time, Knoxville has a smaller share of residents in their prime family-forming years, and those who are of childbearing age are having fewer children. These dynamics are what distinguish Knoxville from the other major counties in Tennessee and many of its peers in the Southeast.

Across five key measures generally predictive of natural population growth, Knox County ranks in the bottom half among seven peer counties in four of the five categories. The county’s lone favorable metric is its comparatively high share of residents ages 15–44, the traditional demographic range used by major health organizations to define women of reproductive age. But even this apparent strength is somewhat illusory. Unlike its peer counties, Knoxville is home to a large land-grant university and has an unusually large concentration of college-aged residents, which inflates this metric and makes the county appear more demographically advantaged than it likely is.

Because simple rankings can obscure both the relative importance of each metric and the magnitude of differences between counties, I created a composite score that combines all five indicators into a single weighted score. Fertility and mortality are weighted more heavily because they directly determine natural population growth, while age-based measures receive less weight as more indirect proxies. On that measure, Knox County ranks last among its peer group and scores well below the median.

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Together, these metrics reinforce the fragility of Knoxville’s demographic foundation and the extent to which it has become exclusively reliant on migration to sustain its population. That matters because migration is inherently more volatile, shaped by external forces like housing costs, remote work trends, and broader economic cycles. Births, by contrast, are future workers, taxpayers, and consumers.

Such heavy reliance on migration raises a question about the durability of Knoxville’s growth—and what happens if the inflow of newcomers slows or disappears altogether.

Migration Is Already Below Pre-Pandemic Levels

Knox County led the state in net domestic migration from 2020 to 2025, adding 25,309 new residents. Its economy, galvanized by the influx of newcomers, grew at more than twice the nationwide average during the same period. But the latest data show migration is already slowing.

Migration to Knox County peaked in 2022, with a gain of 8,875 new residents, and has declined each year since. In 2025, net migration fell to 2,376—well below the 3,000 annual average from 2015 to 2019.1 The slowing of migration flows since 2022 has been consistent across Tennessee’s largest counties, with the exception of Shelby, which has experienced a net outflow of residents since at least 2010.

Fortunately, there are no signs that migration to Knox County will veer into negative territory soon; after all, the county has posted net migration gains every year since 2010. But even a modest slowdown could carry outsized consequences for a county with weak natural population growth.

Migration to Knox County is now below pre-pandemic levels.

One bright spot is international migration. From 2010 to 2019, Knox County added an average of 580 residents per year through international migration. Since the pandemic, that figure climbed to roughly 1,500 annually—due in no small part to institutions like the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Where Are All the Young Professionals?

For all of its recent economic momentum, Knoxville has too few young professionals and still struggles to attract and retain residents in the age cohorts most associated with labor force growth, household formation, and childbearing.

Among Tennessee’s major metros, Knoxville has the smallest share of residents between ages 25 and 44—the prime working and family-forming years. Roughly 26.8% of Knoxville’s population falls within that age range, compared with 27.3% in Chattanooga, 27.6% in Memphis, and 34.8% in Nashville. The gap looks small on paper. In practice, it can mean thousands fewer residents in the life stage most likely to buy homes, start businesses, and raise children.

Knoxville simply has too few young professionals.

There are also mixed signals as to whether the problem is getting better or worse. Census data indicate Knoxville has seen relatively strong growth among the age 25-34 demographic in recent years, but much of that growth has yet to translate into significant wage gains or a meaningful expansion of high-wage employment opportunities.

The more important question is whether that recent growth can be sustained. Young professionals are among the most mobile and housing-sensitive segments of the workforce. Over the past several years, local home prices have grown more than 3.5 times faster than earnings. Absorbing those costs is naturally more challenging for young professionals, most of whom have not yet reached their peak earning years and already face myriad relocation pressures.

Rental affordability compounds the problem. Census data indicate roughly half of young professionals are renters, and among recent arrivals, only about one in three own their homes. Lower homeownership among younger residents is expected—without generational wealth, saving for a down payment takes years.

The prevalence of renting, especially among newcomers, makes the health of the rental market central to whether young adults can build a future in Knoxville. Apartments and single-family rentals are a critical stepping stone for young professionals who cannot yet afford a home. For many young workers—from teachers and nurses to engineers and first responders—rental housing is the bridge between moving here and eventually putting down roots.

And that bridge is narrowing: Knoxville ranks among the 15 U.S. cities with the steepest decline in rental units priced below $999 per month. Such units accounted for 80% of the rental stock in 2014 but just 45% in 2024—a loss of more than 32,000 units at that price point over the decade.

Affordability is also reshaping where young professionals live even within Knox County. While younger, college-educated adults have traditionally gravitated toward urban areas, Knoxville is moving in the opposite direction.2 Young professionals are increasingly moving away from the urban core and into more suburban areas of the county. From 2023 to 2024 alone, the urban core’s college-educated population aged 25-34 fell by more than 20%.3 The exodus was even starker among those earning $75,000 or more, falling 27.3% over the same period.

A plausible explanation is price and availability: suburban areas offer larger homes, more space, and better access to ownership opportunities—though without the benefits and convenience of urban living. Importantly, the trend holds true across both housing tenure (renters vs. homeowners) and household size, although the reshuffling is more pronounced among families who own their homes. Income is the strongest predictor of all. As income rises—whether measured at the individual or household level—so too does the likelihood a young professional lives in the suburbs.

Urban areas in Knoxville are experiencing an outflow of college-educated young professionals, especially among those with a household income of $75,000 or higher.

The result is a clear geographic sorting of young talent. Census data from 2024 indicate that nearly 75% of college-educated young professionals in Knox County live in suburban areas. The epicenter—both in total population and share of residents—is northwest Knox County (north of I-40 and west of I-640), where young professionals make up 8.8% of the population.

But while economic data may highlight many of the challenges facing young professionals—helping to identify potential policy levers—they miss the qualitative factors that equally shape where young adults choose to build their lives: dating and social opportunities, nightlife, outdoor recreation, cultural amenities, career networks, etc. These things cannot be easily quantified, yet they matter enormously.

The Problem Is Clear. The Solution, Less So.

Knoxville is facing real demographic headwinds—but that doesn’t mean the Scruffy City is destined to stagnate or decline. By most measures, Knoxville remains one of the Southeast’s latest economic success stories: it’s growing, investment and business formation are strong, and people continue to move here from across the country.

But the rise and fall of American cities offers a useful warning. Cities rarely decline all at once. The challenges industrial cities in the Midwest faced did not emerge overnight. In many cases, their erosion began years before economic decline became fully visible.

Knoxville isn’t Detroit. The point, though, is that what distinguishes resilient cities from the rest is not whether and by how much they grow at any given moment; it is whether they can continuously replenish the workers, families, and institutions needed to sustain growth across generations.

Growth driven by migration alone isn’t a durable long-term strategy.

Growth driven by migration alone isn’t a durable strategy. Economic dynamism is almost always built on top of a strong demographic foundation, and Knoxville’s recent success has masked a less rosy reality: the region is no longer reliably growing its own population, and continued migration is far from a given.

These challenges do not have easy solutions, nor can they be solved through a single policy or intervention. They are structural problems that span both quantifiable issues—such as housing, affordability, and workforce development—and less tangible, though equally important, factors like quality of life and whether young adults can realistically envision building a family and career here.

Knoxville's growth over the past five years has been carried almost entirely by people moving in—not by babies being born, careers being launched, or families deciding to stay. That leaves little margin for error. If migration ever softens for reasons outside Knoxville's control, the demographic cushion that would normally absorb the shock simply isn't there.

That should worry anyone who cares about Knoxville and its future.

Conversations about a changing Cumberland Ave, affectionately known as “The Strip,” are common among many University of Tennessee graduates. Once a suburban, auto-centric thoroughfare, the approximately half-mile stretch of road from 17th Street to Volunteer Boulevard has unquestionably undergone a significant transformation over the past 15 years.

Gone are the surface parking lots, hole-in-the-wall bars, and aging one-story commercial buildings that made the strip, well, The Strip. In their place are apartment buildings home to well-over 10,000 students, widened sidewalks, new restaurants, and pedestrian infrastructure designed to accommodate the thousands of students that traverse to and from campus every day.

For many alumni, the Strip is replete with the nostalgia of their college years and its transformation feels like the loss of an old friend. For others, its redevelopment is a compelling example of the power of focused public investment and the economic boon it can create. Yet regardless of how one feels about the changes, one reality became impossible to ignore: the University of Tennessee desperately needed more student housing and, if not on Cumberland, where else would it go?

As recently as 2022, UTK’s student housing shortage was overwhelming.

Enrollment growth outpaced the supply of housing near campus for years, leaving students scrambling for places to live. With very few options, students looking for off-campus housing resorted to camping out in tents and on sidewalks to secure leases. The shortage extended to on-campus housing too, leaving UT with no option but to temporarily lease a Holiday Inn Express in West Knoxville—quickly dubbed the “Voliday Inn” by students—to serve as an “on-campus” residence hall for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Fortunately, the shortage is proving to be short lived.

Foreseeing the University’s growth, the City of Knoxville had set in motion an ambitious plan to overhaul Cumberland Avenue more than a decade before. The goal was to transform the sprawling, state-designated highway into a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly urban corridor that would serve as a gateway to the university and the surrounding community.

And the plan worked as intended. As streetscape and infrastructure improvements progressed, developers raced to meet rising demand. Over the next several years, a wave of purpose-built student housing projects broke ground, expanding the number of available beds by the thousands.

Still, though, the construction timelines for such large projects were long and many were plagued by pandemic-era delays and shortages. Developers simply couldn’t meet demand in real time. The dearth of existing supply meant rents continued to climb—that is, until now.

After years of virtually no vacancy and double-digit rent growth, the market finally appears to be catching up. According to Yardi Matrix, a national market intelligence and property data platform, Knoxville’s student housing preleasing rate was at 67.5% in February 2026.1 That’s down 9.9% from the prior year, the second largest decline in the country. It’s also a significant departure from just a few years ago when preleasing at this time of year routinely exceeded 95%, meaning most student housing complexes were virtually full.

A lower preleasing rate is, of course, a welcome sign for UT students. With nearly 13,000 beds already available, and more on the way, there are significantly more options—and, crucially, enough supply to create a more competitive marketplace where student complexes must compete with one another to fill beds. That dynamic has already placed downward pressure on rents. The latest data shows average leasing season rents are down 3.9% from last year, the steepest decline of any SEC school.

At roughly $1,081 per bed, however, Tennessee’s student housing rents are still the 10th highest among the top 32 Power 5 schools and higher than almost all of its SEC competitors—with rents at Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas A&M all below the $1,000 mark. The only SEC school with a higher average rent is Texas, at $1,291 per bed.

But there’s good news. With 1,627 more beds slated to come online in the next two years—and likely more to be announced between then—Tennessee ranks 3rd among SEC schools for the most beds under construction, trailing only Texas A&M and Arkansas.

The dramatic supply expansion in recent years, coupled with slower projected enrollment growth, suggests Knoxville’s student housing market is poised to further stabilize and, perhaps, even experience continued rent declines—or at the very least, an uptick in concessions to secure new leases. After years of fierce competition and quickly climbing rents, that is good news for UT students… and their parents.

Cumberland Avenue’s transformation has no by means been universally loved. But it solved a problem that no amount of nostalgia or good memories could. When demand rises, there’s a choice: allow more housing to be built, or accept higher prices and a reality in which students are forced to camp on sidewalks just to secure a place to live. Knoxville ultimately chose the former approach—and today, students are beginning to reap the benefits.

The impact extends beyond students, too. Every student who finds housing in a purpose-built student apartment is one less renter competing for a conventional apartment or single-family rental elsewhere in the city. That reduced demand from students, combined with a surge of new conventional multifamily construction across the city, has helped ease pressure on Knoxville’s rental market. It is in no small measure why apartment rents have been declining in recent months for the first time since at least 2017.

So while the Strip may never look or feel the way it once did, its transformation has provided thousands of students with a place to live within walking distance of campus while helping ease housing pressures elsewhere in the city. By any reasonable measure, that is a success.

Key Points

• Knox County home appraised values increased about 60% on average since the 2022 reassessment, while market home values increased only 20–30%.

• Reassessments estimate current market value, not cumulative appreciation since the last reassessment.

• Large appraisal increases often reflect both market appreciation and corrections to previously undervalued properties.

• The key question is not how much your appraisal increased, but whether it accurately reflects what your home could sell for today.

• Use my free Property Tax Change Calculator to estimate how reassessment will affect your annual tax bill based on projected tax rates for the city and county.

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Knox County’s 2026 countywide reassessment is underway. While the final numbers won’t be official until the process concludes, preliminary estimates show that assessed residential property values increased by roughly 60% on average since the last countywide reassessment in 2022.

For many homeowners, the dramatic increases reflected in their reassessment notices was difficult to reconcile with current housing market trends. And without additional context, that reaction is entirely understandable. Depending on the source, home prices in Knox County increased roughly 20% to 30% since 2022—substantial growth, but nowhere near 60%.

So what explains the gap? The short answer is that how much your property assessment changes is only loosely related to the home price growth figures cited in the news.

Unlike a home value index, a county property assessment is not a measurement of how much your home’s value changed since the last reappraisal. Rather, it is the county’s best estimate of what your property is worth today. That may sound like the same thing—but, in practice, it’s not.

Because reassessments are designed to estimate a property’s current market value, changes in appraisals often reflect more than just market appreciation. They can also reflect corrections to prior assessments that understated or overstated a property’s value. As a result, an appraisal can increase much faster than home prices in the broader market without necessarily indicating that the home appreciated by the same amount.

That is particularly relevant this time around because the last reassessment occurred during one of the most turbulent and unusual housing markets since the 1980s. Home prices accelerated rapidly during and after the pandemic, and in many cases assessments struggled to keep pace with a market that was changing fast. But to fully understand the discrepancies, it’s helpful to better understand the differences between assessments and the home price figures cited in the news.

The Difference Between Measuring a Market and Valuing a Home

Most figures cited in the news are sourced from various home price indices, which are designed to measure how home values are changing across an entire market, not the value of any specific property. To better understand the differences, it is helpful to know how some of the most common home price indices are constructed and what they’re measuring:

• Median Sale Price Index: The most basic way to measure changes in home prices is to compare how the median—or middle—sale price of homes changes over time. It’s easy to understand, and offers the most durable measure of home prices because it is based on actual sales. But using the median sale price alone has important limitations. It reflects only homes that actually sold during a given period, not the entire housing stock, so it is comparing different homes from one period to the next. As a result, changes in median sale prices can reflect shifts in the types of homes being sold, not just changes in market values.

• Repeat-Sale Price Index: This is the methodology used for many of the most widely cited home price indices, including the influential Case-Shiller Index. Rather than comparing different homes, a repeat-sale index tracks the same property over time. For example, if a home sold for $200,000 in 2018 and then sold again for $300,000 in 2025, the index would use that change to estimate appreciation. By comparing a property to itself, repeat-sale indices eliminate distortions caused by changes in the mix of homes being sold. When aggregated across thousands of transactions, it provides a credible—though still imperfect—measure of how home values have changed across an entire market. It is still, however, limited in that it only includes homes that have sold multiple times, meaning large portions of the housing stock are excluded.

• All-Transactions Price Index: This type of index builds on the repeat-sales framework by incorporating refinancing appraisals in addition to home sales. By adding these extra observations, it captures a larger share of the housing stock and generally provides a more comprehensive measure of market-wide appreciation, particularly in areas with relatively few home sales. However, it still excludes homes that have not been recently sold or appraised, leaving a significant portion of the housing stock unobserved.

In theory, an all-transactions price index is the most comparable to the change in appraised values. But again, a price index is designed to measure price appreciation at market-level. County appraisals, by contrast, attempt to estimate the value of every property—including homes that haven’t been bought or sold in a very long time—without the benefit of an on-site inspection and a full professional appraisal. That’s a much harder task.

The limits of automated valuation

Because county property assessors can’t conduct individualized appraisals for every parcel, they must rely on automated valuation models—or AVMs—to estimate property values at scale. AVMs estimate a property’s value primarily by analyzing recent sales of comparable homes nearby. They are, in essence, algorithms that include thousands of data points: what have similar homes sold for lately, and what does that imply about this one? When there are plenty of recent sales of genuinely comparable properties, AVMs can perform reasonably well.

But an algorithm or statistical model is only as good as the data fed into it. That’s the core problem. AVMs lean heavily on whatever recent sales data is available—and in neighborhoods or more rural areas with low turnover, that data can be thin, dated, or drawn from properties that aren’t truly comparable. In such areas, a home that hasn’t sold in 15 years leaves almost no direct footprint for an AVM to work from. The model then fills that gap by reaching for the nearest proxies it can find, which may be homes of different sizes, conditions, or locations. The further the algorithm has to reach, the less reliable the estimate.

The result is that AVM-based appraisals are imprecise in ways that are not entirely random. They do not simply miss high and low in equal measure. Instead, they struggle most with the types of properties that are hardest to model: older homes, rural properties, custom-built homes, and neighborhoods with relatively few recent sales. Homes with unusual characteristics, significant renovations, or non-standard layouts are similarly difficult for an algorithm to value because there may be few truly comparable sales available to serve as benchmarks.

The same challenge exists at the top end of the market. Luxury homes tend to be more unique, sell less frequently, and exhibit greater variation in pricing than entry-level or mid-market homes. A difference in finishes, lot characteristics, architectural design, or buyer preferences can translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in value. As a result, high-end properties are often among the most likely to be overvalued or undervalued by automated models.

On the other hand, AVMs generally perform best in neighborhoods where homes are relatively similar and transactions occur frequently, producing estimates that are at or near market value. New subdivisions with consistent floor plans, lot sizes, and construction quality provide abundant comparable sales data, allowing the model to estimate values with relative precision. Popular, up-and-coming neighborhoods with high sales volumes similarly provide AVMs a steady stream of current market information to work from.

The risk of overvaluation for Zillow’s home flipping business was uniquely high. Its business model required determining both an acceptable initial purchase price and post-renovation resell value while leaving enough margin between the two to generate a profit. That’s not the case for AVM-based appraisals. Unlike Zillow, property assessors are not trying to generate a profit from individual properties. Their objective is simply to estimate market value as accurately as possible. In practice, assessment models often produce valuations that modestly trail actual sale prices, reflecting both the limitations of AVMs and the desire to avoid widespread overvaluation.

None of this means AVMs are ineffective. In fact, modern AVMs are remarkably accurate when viewed across thousands of properties. But aggregate accuracy does not translate to accuracy for every individual parcel. A model can do an excellent job estimating values across an entire county while still producing meaningful errors for specific homes.

Does the assessment reflect current market value?

The fact that appraisals increased faster than home prices is not, by itself, evidence that the property assessor got it wrong. A large increase often reflects both real market appreciation and the correction of a prior appraisal that was already below market value. Still, automated models are no infallible. They can mischaracterize a property’s condition, square footage, or comparable sales. Homeowners in lower-turnover neighborhoods, or with properties that don’t fit neatly into standard categories, have particularly good reason to scrutinize their assessments carefully.

If your appraisal feels wrong, the relevant question is not whether it increased more than the market, but whether the county’s estimate of your home’s current market value is reasonably accurate. You can assess this by reviewing recent sales of comparable properties or, better yet, asking a Realtor to conduct a market analysis. If similar homes are consistently selling for less than your appraised value, you may have grounds for an appeal.

The appeals process exists precisely for this reason. The key question is whether the county’s estimate reflects what your home would reasonably sell for today. If it doesn’t, there’s a process in place to rectify the error.

Property Tax Change Calculator

Because of Tennessee’s truth-in-taxation law, a higher assessment does not automatically translate into a proportional increase in property taxes. Preliminary estimates indicate that residential assessments increased by about 60% on average during the 2026 reassessment cycle. As a result, homeowners whose assessments increased by less than 60% will see their tax bill decline, while those whose assessments increased by more than 60% will see their tax bill increase.

To estimate how the reassessment may affect your property specifically, use the property tax change calculator linked below.

Other Thoughts On Reappraisal

You Probably Aren’t Paying Taxes On Unrealized Home Equity: According to a report the National Association of Realtors®, 12.8% of homeowners in Knoxville—or 34,723 households—have accrued home equity that exceeds the federal capital gains exclusion of $250,000 for individuals and $500,000 for couples, and thousands more have substantial equity but not enough to exceed the threshold. That raises an interesting question: are you being taxed on unrealized, illiquid home equity? For the vast majority of homeowners, the answer is probably not.

That’s because, in Tennessee, residential property is assessed at just 25% of its appraised value. In other words, homeowners are taxed on only a fraction of their property’s market value. For example, if you purchased a home for $250,000 in 2015 and it is now worth $500,000, your assessed value—the portion of the property subject to taxation—is only $125,000. Despite having accrued $250,000 in equity, you are still being taxed on only half of what you originally paid for the home.

There are, of course, some exceptions. A small share of residents those who have owned their home for a very long time—most of which own their home outright and do not have a mortgage—have assessed values that exceeds their original purchase price. In those cases, at least a portion of their property taxes is effectively based on unrealized equity. If Tennessee were to adopt a law that forbid assessed values from exceeding the original purchase—a change that would likely require a state constitutional amendment—these homeowners would pay next to nothing in property taxes despite utilizing the same publicly funded infrastructure and services as everyone else.

And this does not even begin to address the more fundamental question of whether taxing unrealized home equity is inherently unfair. A home’s value, and the equity it accrues, is not determined solely by the structure and land it sits on; its value also reflects, at least in part, the quality of the roads, schools, stormwater systems, parks, public safety services, and other public investments that surround it—most of which are funded primarily through property taxes. If a portion of one’s home equity, even if it is unrealized, is derived directly from public investment, is it necessarily unfair to tax it?

Ultimately, I do not find this question particularly interesting because most homeowners are not actually paying taxes on unrealized home equity in any meaningful sense.

Property Taxes Are Regressive. But the Alternatives Are Usually Worse.

One of the most common criticisms of property taxes is that they are regressive, meaning its a tax that burdens lower-income households more than higher-income ones. A retiree living on a fixed income and a high-income professional may own homes of similar value and therefore face similar tax bills despite having vastly different economic profiles and abilities to pay. That concern is legitimate and real.

The challenge, however, is that local governments still need revenue to fund the infrastructure and services that make communities desirable places to live, and that ultimately keep home prices stable. Roads must be maintained. Schools must be staffed. Parks must be maintained. Police officers must be paid. The question is not whether these services should be funded, but how. And when grapple with that question honestly, it becomes clear that there aren’t really any other more appealing alternatives.

Income taxes are more progressive, but Tennessee prohibits local governments from levying an income tax—and for good reason. Sales taxes are already a major source of local revenue, but they are even more regressive because lower-income households spend a larger share of their income on taxable goods and services. They are also capped by the state and, without imposing one of the highest sales tax rates in the nation, could never generate enough revenue to replace what is generated by property taxes. User fees can help pay for specific services, but they are modest and generate comparatively limited revenue. Local governments can also increase reliance on state and federal aid, but doing so reduces local control and leaves localities vulnerable to budget decisions made elsewhere.

Property taxes, for all their flaws, offer several advantages. They are relatively stable, difficult to avoid, and closely tied to the local assets that benefit from public investment. A new road, better schools, improved public safety, or well-maintained parks generally make a community more desirable, which in turn tends to increase nearby property values. In that sense, property taxes function, at least in part, as a mechanism for recapturing some of the value that public investment helps create.

Ultimately, the question is less about whether property taxes are flawed—they are—and more about whether there is a better way to generate the revenue necessary to sustain the public services and infrastructure that underpin both quality of life and property values. To advocate for curtailing or eliminating property taxes (which is a real discussion in places like Florida) also requires a realistic discussion of what would replace them. And the reality is that there is no clearly superior alternative.

There are many other engaging questions about property taxes and the best way to fund local government. But I’ll save those for another day and leave it here.

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Home prices across the Knoxville metro declined in the fourth quarter of 2025, falling 1.4%—or 3.6% in inflation-adjusted terms—from the prior year. It marks the first year-over-year drop since 2012, snapping a streak of uninterrupted appreciation that survived the pandemic, a doubling of mortgage rates, and one of the most aggressive Federal Reserve tightening cycles in recent history.

The decline, however, was short-lived. By the first quarter of 2026, Knoxville home prices rebounded, rising 4.5% year over year—or 1.9% after adjusting for inflation. Even so, the brief downturn was a notable inflection point for a market that has seen home prices more than double since 2019.

Home price growth in Knoxville is nonetheless expected to slow across 2026. A sustained decline or broad-based price correction still remains highly unlikely—the structural demand drivers that fueled the dramatic rise in prices remain intact, albeit much less pronounced.

Affordability constraints, driven in large part by elevated mortgage rates, continue to keep a significant share of would-be buyers on the sidelines. But underlying demand-side factors—continued in-migration, low unemployment, changes in household composition, and relatively low inventory levels—should provide enough of a floor to prevent outright price declines. Accordingly, I expect Knoxville home prices to increase modestly in 2026—roughly 1% to 3% annually—with real, inflation-adjusted price growth likely flat to slightly negative.

That forecast, however, is more uncertain than usual and depends on a multitude of extraneous factors. Mortgage rates remain the single most influential factor: rates rose to the highest level since the summer of 2025 in recent weeks, according to Freddie Mac. The impact of rates is hard to overstate: for example, a one percentage point decrease in rates would allow more than 14,000 additional households across Knoxville to afford the median-priced home—assuming they can cover the down payment.

Yet, most forecasters and housing market analysts—myself included—do not expect mortgage rates to meaningfully decline in 2026, as inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Fannie Mae’s latest forecast projects 30-year FRMs to average 6.3% across 2026 and 6.2% in 2027. Especially with the recent uptick in inflation—which rose to a three-year high in April—rates are unlikely to fall enough to bring prospective buyers off the sidelines. Conversely, if mortgage rates continue to climb and surpass 7.5%—which is also not likely at this point—home prices are almost certain to fall.

Geopolitical risks also introduce uncertainty. The ongoing war in Iran has pushed oil prices and inflation expectations higher, as evidenced by the recent run up in treasury yields. While recent reports of a potential agreement to end the conflict offered some encouragement, the U.S. this week launched additional strikes on Iranian military assets, further complicating already fragile negotiations over the fate of the Strait of Hormuz and the prospects for a lasting ceasefire. All things considered, there’s little indication the conflict will be resolved quickly—making a sustained decline in either inflation or mortgage rates this year less likely.

Ultimately, the range of plausible outcomes in 2026 is much wider than it has been in years. That is itself a trend worth paying attention to.

Affordability Constraints Holding Back Home Sales

Affordability remains the primary impediment for most homebuyers.

As of May 2026, a family earning $75,000 per year could afford just under 13% of homes listed for sale with a 5% down payment. That figure rises to 25% of homes with a 20% down payment. Importantly, these estimates do not include households that make more than $75,000 but who cannot afford the required down payment.

In a balanced market, where the price distribution of listings is generally aligned with the income distribution of households, annual income of $75,000 should be enough to afford roughly half of homes.

Rent Growth Slowing, But Typical Rents Are Still Over 50% Higher Than 2020

The rental market—which tends to respond more quickly to new supply and broader economic conditions than the for-sale housing market—continues to experience a pronounced slowdown in both rent growth and demand.

Single-family rents have been relatively stable since mid-2025, with annual rent growth generally hovering between 1% and 3%—below pre-pandemic norms and dramatically lower than the more than 20% growth recorded at the height of the pandemic-era housing boom in 2022. Since the beginning of 2024, the typical single-family renter has seen their rent increase by just under $150 per month.

By contrast, the multi-family market has experienced considerably more volatility—largely due to the historic numbers of new units that started construction in the early pandemic years and are now coming online. Annual multi-family rent growth has been mostly negative since November 2025 and since the beginning of 2024, the typical apartment renter has seen their rent increase by roughly $50 per month.

With a significant amount of new supply expected to become available over the next 12 months, multi-family rents will likely further soften in 2026—and could end the year in negative territory. But those declines, if they materialize, are unlikely to translate into rent cuts for existing tenants. More likely, many current renters will simply be offered lease renewals with little or no increase, while the bulk of concessions and pricing reductions will be concentrated in new leases.

Even though most leading indicators point to a softening rental market in 2026, there is still some some upside potential. Knoxville’s apartment vacancy rate currently sits at 6.6%—well below the 8.0% in Tennessee and 7.2% nationwide—according to Apartment List data. Generally, a vacancy rate of ~7-8% is considered a healthy or balanced market, where there is enough availability for renters to have options and more negotiating power, but not so much that units become hard to fill without sizable concessions.

In addition to “hard” data points like rent growth or vacancy rates, forward-looking private sector data also points to a softening market. Zillow’s Observed Renter Demand Index (ZORDI), which tracks the number of individuals actively searching for rental listings, helps to visualize the dramatic reversal Knoxville’s rental market has undergone since the pandemic-era housing boom.

The index peaked above 400 in 2021 and 2022, reflecting an extremely competitive rental market. Since then, renter demand has declined considerably. By 2024 and 2025, however, the index had fallen sharply into the “low demand” range, suggesting a much softer rental market with slower rent growth, more renter bargaining power, and increased supply availability.

The trend reflects a combination of easing migration demand, affordability constraints, and—most importantly—a substantial increase in multifamily housing supply across the Knoxville region. While demand remains healthy in absolute terms, supply growth has begun to ameliorate the severe supply-demand imbalance.

The single-family rental market, however, is in a comparatively stronger position. Unlike the apartment sector, where thousands of new units have recently hit the market, the supply of single-family rentals has expanded much more gradually, meaning there is a firmer floor under single-family rent growth even as overall rental demand cools.

Last Thoughts

At a broad level, Knoxville’s housing market remains fairly strong. As has been the case for several years now, the frenetic conditions that defined the pandemic-era boom are decidedly gone and aren’t likely to return in the near future. The market is gradually rebalancing, particularly on the rental side, where new supply has finally begun to ease some of the pressure that built up over the last several years.

That said, “normalizing” should not be confused with “affordable.” Even with slower home price and rent growth, affordability remains deeply strained for many households—largely because prices and rents rose so dramatically in such a short period of time.

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March 11, 2020, was a watershed moment that, for most Americans, marked the beginning of the pandemic era. That morning, the World Heath Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. By afternoon, the NBA had suspended its season after Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the virus. By evening, President Donald Trump was addressing the nation from the Oval Office, announcing sweeping restrictions on travel from Europe to the United States.

What no one could have known was that day also marked the beginning of a mass reshuffling of the American population that would, over the coming years, reshape the nation’s geography. As remote work severed the link between employment and geography, a steady stream of workers and families began leaving the country’s largest metros for smaller, more affordable ones—drawn by lower costs, more space, and a better quality of life. Knoxville was among the most popular destinations. And ever since, longtime residents and policymakers alike have wondered: Who, exactly, is moving here and from where?

New IRS and Census migration data help answer that question.

Knoxville Is Leading the State in Net Domestic Migration

Knox County recorded the largest net migration gain of any county in Tennessee from 2020 to 2025, according to Census data. The county has sustained above-average population growth for several consecutive years, expanding at more than twice the national rate, with an average annual growth rate of 1.1% compared to 0.5% nationwide. That growth was driven entirely by net migration, not natural population increase, as Knox County for several years has recorded more deaths than births.

The composition of that migration is as notable as its volume. Recent growth was driven by younger residents: Gen Z and Millennials together accounted for approximately two-thirds of Knox County’s net migration gains from 2020 to 2025, with Gen Z alone accounting for more than one-third of all new arrivals. While a large share of that increase is attributable to enrollment growth at the University of Tennessee, data suggest Knox County is also attracting young professionals and early-career workers at a rate that seemed unlikely a decade ago.

But the headline numbers are only illustrative to a degree. What matters as much as how many people arrived is who they are—and what they brought with them.

Knoxville Is Attracting Higher-Earning Migrants

Since 2020, Knox County experienced a significant net gain in adjusted gross income (AGI), or taxable income, through domestic migration—evidence that, on average, those moving to Knoxville are bringing more income with them than those leaving.

The typical newcomer reported an annual AGI of $72,324 in 2023, slightly above the county’s median household income of $70,265 in 2023. Those leaving, by contrast, reported an average income of $66,655.

Knox County is gaining higher earners while losing comparatively lower-income households, predominantly to surrounding counties.

Aggregated across thousands of households, the economic impact is substantial. Driven by both a net increase in households and the wage differential between inbound and outbound movers, Knox County saw a total outflow of $878 million in taxable income from 2022 to 2023 compared to an inflow of $1.06 billion—a net gain of more than $180 million attributable to migration alone.

The picture looks different when narrowed to in-state migration. Within Tennessee, Knox County experienced a net outflow of $52 million in AGI, along with declines in both households and individuals, driven by an exodus of lower- and middle-income households.

The population growth driving Knoxville’s economy is, at the same time, pricing out the people who built it.

That is the central tension of rapid growth. When higher-earning newcomers compete for a housing stock that hasn’t kept pace with demand, prices rise. And when prices rise, the households with the least equipped to absorb those costs—longtime renters, working families, fixed-income residents—are the first to go.

Growth of this kind is rarely unambiguous. At a basic level, more income flowing into Knoxville means more income earned and spent locally—on homes, services, and small businesses. That spending then recirculates through the economy, creating what economist refer to as a multiplier effect: a new resident hires a contractor, who pays employees, who spend their wages at local restaurants and shops, which hire more workers to meet growing demand. Each round of spending generates another, amplifying the original impact and, over time, raising the ceiling for local wages and investment.

But benefits also come with tradeoffs. The same inflow of higher-income households also contributes to affordability pressures—most notably in the housing market, where increased demand and competition from higher-earning newcomers has pushed home prices and rents beyond what many existing residents can afford.

Over the long term, these pressures tend to moderate. Higher demand encourages new construction, expanding supply and easing upward pressure on prices. In practice, however, that process is slow. Housing takes time to build, and in the interim, the burden of higher costs falls disproportionately on renters and first-time buyers—those least equipped to absorb rising costs.

The benefits of growth accrue gradually over a period of years; the pressures arrive immediately.

That’s the disparate reality of growth in a place like Knoxville. In the short run, growth feels pernicious and destabilizing. Over the long term, however, it produces a larger, more dynamic economy with higher wages and more job opportunities.

Where Knoxville’s Newcomers Are Coming From—and Where Others Are Headed

Knox County’s population growth has consistently outpaced the national rate for more than a decade, driven entirely by net migration. In recent years, nearly half of all new residents arrived from a different state—a notable shift from the 2000s and 2010s, when in-state movers made up an overwhelming share of the county’s growth.

Top Origins of Inbound Movers

Florida and California are the top origin states. Together, they account for nearly 10 percent of all newcomers, representing 4.9% and 4.4% of inbound movers, respectively. While newcomers from both states have higher incomes than the overall average, the differences in income levels and household size illustrate how Knox County—and Tennessee more broadly—is attracting starkly different demographics.

Newcomers from California report average incomes roughly 34% above the overall inbound average and tend to have larger household sizes, suggesting a disproportionate share of newcomers are families relocating for work or seeking relief the Golden State’s notoriously high cost-of-living. Florida’s newcomers, by contrast, tend to be smaller households earning closer to—or even below—the average, indicating that a disproportionate share of newcomers are retirees or near-retirees living on fixed incomes.

These patterns extend beyond California and Florida, too. Fulton County, Georgia—the core of the Atlanta metro area—offers another example. It is younger, more highly educated, and significantly higher-income than most origin counties and sends newcomers whose average incomes are roughly 59 percent above the typical inbound mover, despite having a smaller average household size. It mirrors a broader migration pattern: higher-earning, working-age households leaving expensive metros—some relocating, some returning home—to more affordable cities like Knoxville.

Top Destinations of Outbound Movers

Equally important is where residents go when they decide leave. Unlike inbound movers, a majority of outbound residents—roughly 54%—remain within Tennessee, taking with them $458 million in adjusted gross income. These moves reflect a sober economic calculus: households seeking marginally lower costs of living.

The income profile of those leaving reinforces that point. The typical outbound mover reported an annual income of $66,655 in 2023, compared to $72,324 for those moving in. Among those relocating elsewhere in Tennessee, incomes are lower still—averaging $64,607, or about 3 percent below the overall outbound average.

And yet, even this pattern masks important variation. Households leaving for Blount County reported average incomes of $63,089—consistent with families seeking affordable, workforce-oriented housing in areas like Maryville and Alcoa. Those heading to Loudon County, by contrast, reported $108,768—a gap that reflects an entirely different kind of mover, one drawn to the higher-end, amenity-rich communities around Tellico Village and the surrounding lakefront

Taken together, these patterns suggest outbound migration from Knox County is driven by a multitude of factors. And increasingly, that sorting reflects an unfortunate reality: for many residents, staying in Knox County is becoming less a matter of choice than of means.

Left unchecked, the pattern carries consequences that extend well beyond any one household’s decision to move. As lower- and middle-income residents are priced out, the region risks hollowing out crucial parts of its workforce—teachers, police officers, firefighters, and others—that no city can function without.

There are fiscal implications, too. From 2022 to 2023, Knox County experienced a net loss of roughly $52.8 million in adjusted gross income due to out-migration to surrounding counties in the Knoxville metro area alone. That figure overstates the short-run impact as many of those households will continue to work in Knox County, bringing their labor and spending back across county lines each day. But the longer arc is concerning.

In a similar vein, the out-of-state destinations of those moving away from Knox County offer a revealing lens on the region’s ability to retain talent—particularly graduates of University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Moves to places like Fulton County, Georgia (Atlanta) and Harris County, Texas (Houston)—where average wages are appreciably higher—suggest that many of Knoxville’s well-educated young professionals are leaving for larger, more dynamic labor markets in search of opportunity Knoxville can’t yet provide.

But the story is not uniformly one of upward flight. Moves to Chicago, Los Angeles, and Charlotte—where average incomes fall to $48,333, $61,781, and $59,302—suggest Knoxville is not simply losing labor talent to higher wages, but to the broader appeal of larger cities with dense industry concentration that draw younger, more mobile young professionals, even when the financial tradeoffs may be less favorable.

In that sense, the challenge is not just economic. Retaining talent requires more than competitive pay and career opportunity—it also requires building a city where educated workers actually want to live.

Conclusion

The data is clear about what is happening. Knoxville isn’t just growing—it’s attracting a particular kind of growth, one that is economically additive but doesn’t always reach everyone. On one hand, the inflow of higher-earning migrants is a genuine sign of strength. But it is also, in the absence of sufficient housing supply and wage growth, a source of pressure that falls hardest the types of workers the county and its economy can’t function without.

Growth and the extent of its benefits are path dependent, shaped by past choices that laid the groundwork for what Knoxville is already experiencing—and, most importantly, by the decisions we make today. There is a reality in which Knoxville gets things right: where the growth that is reshaping the county allows residents to benefit from the city they helped build.

Such decisions are not easy. Their benefits are diffuse and long-term, their costs visible and immediate. That asymmetry is the challenge: it why so many of our nation’s greatest challenges—from the national debt to aging infrastructure to the affordable housing crisis—remain nagging and unresolved. The political incentive structure almost never points in the right direction.

That’s is why, in this environment, the most consequential policy decisions require elected leaders to act against the path of least resistance—to make decisions whose benefits will be felt years from now by people who may never know who made them. That is a hard thing to ask. But it is also, at this moment in Knoxville’s history, exactly what is required.

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When Knoxville’s housing market exploded in the wake of the pandemic, institutional investors and corporate hedge funds became a popular scapegoat for the dramatic rise in local home prices. The argument is straight forward: Corporate investors, armed with algorithms and institutional capital, are buying up single-family homes at scale, outbidding ordinary families and driving prices out of reach.

It's a compelling narrative. But at least in Knoxville, it’s mostly wrong.

Data from Parcl Labs, a real estate analytics firm that tracks property ownership at the parcel level, shows that institutional investors own a negligible share of single-family housing in the Knoxville market. As of March 2026, investors of any kind—from small mom-and-pop landlords to larger, publicly-traded real estate investment trusts—owned roughly 8.0% of single-family homes in Knox County and 7.3% across the broader Knoxville metro area. Both figures have risen modestly over the past seven years, up from 6.5% and 5.7% respectively in January 2019.

To be sure, almost 1 in 10 homes owned by investors is not nothing. But the topline number doesn’t exactly tell the full story. Investor ownership, when broken down by portfolio size, provides much more insight into investors’ impact on the local housing market and, particularly, the rise in home prices.

For this analysis, investors are segmented into four tiers: small (2–9 properties), mid-size (10–99), large (100–999), and institutional (1,000 or more homes nationwide). Given hedge funds often operate through networks of obscure, rotating LLCs to obscure their ownership footprint, Parcl Labs data uses an algorithm that processes millions of data points across naming conventions, transaction patterns, corporate structures, and geospatial records to map LLCs back to their true corporate owners.

In Knox County, small-scale investors, often referred to as “mom-and-pop” landlords, account for roughly 75% all investor-owned properties. These owners are typically individuals or families who own a handful of rental homes—often as a supplemental source of income, retirement investment, or inherited property.

By contrast, large institutional investors own only 1.9% of all investor-owned properties. That equates to only 0.28% of Knox County’s single-family housing stock, or roughly 443 homes in a county with more than 214,000 total housing units, underscoring how limited the role of institutional investors actually is in the local market.

For every home in Knox County owned by Wall Street, small “mom-and-pop” landlords own roughly 38.

That begs an obvious question: are corporate investors who collectively own fewer than 450 homes—just 0.28% of the housing stock—really to blame for the broad-based rise in Knoxville home prices over the past five years? The honest answer is no.

Data on purchase-activity reinforces the point. A recent Realtor.com analysis, which utilizes a more expansive definition of institutional investors (i.e., any entity that purchased 350 or more homes from 2015 to 2025), found that institutional investors accounted for just 0.6% of all home purchases, or 1,428 total purchases, across the Knoxville metro area from 2015 to 2025. That figure is lower than most other competitor cities, such as Nashville (2.2%), Chattanooga (0.7%), and Greenville (1.2%).

In fact, among select U.S. metros in the Sun Belt, Knoxville had the lowest investor market share and the highest home price growth from 2015 to 2025—a direct contradiction of the prevailing narrative that institutional investors are driving the surge in prices.

In fact, the data points in the opposite direction: metros with the highest levels of investor activity, on average, experienced more modest price growth, while markets with relatively little institutional presence—like Knoxville—experienced some of the most rapid price appreciation.

That doesn’t mean investors have no impact. But it does suggest they are not the primary force behind broad-based price increases. Data at the national level reinforces that point: Rental units as a percent of single-family homes—an (imperfect) proxy for investor market share—peaked in 2014 at 19%. But it has declined every year since, falling to a decade low of just under 16% in 2024. At the same time, house price growth surged even as the investor market share experienced a sustained decline, underscoring yet again that investor activity is only loosely connected to the broader trajectory of housing prices.

Taken together, the data points toward a much simpler explanation rooted in basic economics: strong population and household growth, driven by strong net migration, colliding with a housing market that has failed to build enough homes for well-over two decades. And the deleterious effects of that slowdown are visible over the long-run. From 1970 to 1980, Knox County’s housing supply expanded by 35%—prompting home prices to fall an inflation-adjusted 11% in the following decade. Since the 1970s, however, supply growth has slowed steadily, and real home price appreciation has climbed as a result.

Investors can, of course, intensify affordability pressures in certain neighborhoods, especially when purchase activity is highly concentrated. But that is a localized phenomenon, not the engine driving the broader housing market. The sustained upward pressure on prices is primarily the result of too many people competing for too few homes—a problem that no amount of investor regulation resolves without also addressing supply side constraints.

Investor Activity Concentrated in Handful of Large Metros

Institutional investors make up only a tiny fraction of single-family home purchases nationally, and their buying activity has been trending downward since peaking in 2021. Moreover, investor activity is highly concentrated geographically. According to Realtor.com, the top 10 metros by total activity account for over 50% of institutional investor purchases and the top 25 metros account for 75%—and Knoxville doesn’t make either list.

Even in metros with comparatively high levels of investor activity, institutional buyers still make up only a small share of overall single-family purchases. In Memphis—the leading metro by investor purchase share—they accounted for just 4.4% of total single-family home purchases from 2015 to 2025.

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There is also substantial variation in within metros. Across Knoxville, only a handful of zip codes have an above average share of its housing stock owned by investors. Not surprisingly, neighborhoods near the University of Tennessee and the downtown core have the highest concentrations. The Fort Sanders area, which almost exclusively caters to UT students, stands out with investors of any size owning just over 22% of the total housing stock.

The downtown core, where around 13% to 16% of housing units are owned by investors, is also a magnet, largely driven by local short-term rental operators and other small-scale investors. By contrast, more suburban areas across Knox County tend to have a smaller share of their housing stock owned by investors, and an even smaller share owned by large corporate types.

Profile of Investor Purchases: Fixer-Uppers & Build-To-Rent

The are other reasons to question the “institutional investors are the problem” narrative, too.

Investors writ large tend to acquire lower value homes, oftentimes in need of significant repairs. According to Parcl Labs data, the median purchase price of investor acquisitions (existing-homes only) was just under $210,000 from 2019 to 2022—significantly below the overall median sale price. An analysis by East Tennessee Realtors from 2022, which uses a different methodology, similarly found that 46% of investor purchases in Knox County were for properties valued at $200,000 or less, with a quarter of all investor purchases priced below $117,250.

For the most part, these are not the move-in-ready homes that first-time buyers compete for at list price. They are, disproportionately, distressed properties: homes that need significant repair and are often not accessible for cash-strapped buyers. Without investor capital, many of these properties would sit vacant or deteriorate further. In this case, investors absorb the rehabilitation risk that neither individual buyers nor public programs are well-positioned to take on—and in doing so, return blighted or functionally obsolete units to the active housing stock. The result is an expansion of critical single-family rental supply that caters to households that cannot yet access ownership, such as working families and young professionals who need time and stability before they can save for a down payment.

Beyond existing-home purchases, nearly 1 in 4 investor purchases from 2019 to 2022 were for new construction, colloquially known as build-to-rent, at a median price of $521,000. These homes were never competing with ordinary buyers to begin with. They represent net additions to the housing stock, purpose-built for renters who either cannot or have not yet chosen to own.

To be clear, neither scenario is meant to suggest that all investor activity is a net benefit. Poorly managed rentals, speculative flipping without rehabilitation, and concentrated ownership in vulnerable neighborhoods can all cause real harm. The argument here is narrower: that the category of ‘investor’ is too broad to be analytically useful, and that policy responses calibrated to the Wall Street landlord problem will largely miss the actual market dynamics at work in Knoxville—while potentially discouraging the kind of small-scale investment that is doing some of the market’s most unglamorous but important work.

Why the “Investor Myth” Matters

Numerous studies have concluded that institutional investors are not to blame for the broad-based decline in housing affordability. That conclusion holds especially in mid-sized markets like Knoxville where their footprint is negligible. Yet the narrative persists—animating residents, commanding headlines, and shaping local policy conversations that should be focused elsewhere.

That misdirection has a cost. When the political energy around housing affordability concentrates on Wall Street landlords and institutional buyers, it crowds out more important conversations about zoning reform, permitting, and the mismatch between the homes the market needs and the homes the regulatory environment allows builders to produce profitably.

Knoxville is not a market where policy restricting institutional investor purchases will meaningfully change affordability. Institutional investors own fewer than 500 homes and, even if every one of those homes were returned to the for-sale market tomorrow, it would represent a rounding error against the county’s housing deficit.

The Knoxville housing crisis is real. Its causes are structural: too little available housing supply, too much demand, and a construction sector limited by scarce labor and zoning policy that starkly limits how much housing can be built and where. Fixing it requires confronting those causes directly. That work is harder and less satisfying than blaming a hedge fund—but it is the only thing that will move the needle on housing affordability.

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As the local election season heats up, property taxes are once again a key issue among the candidates running to be the next Knox County Mayor. The candidates have differing opinions on the issue—but to fully grasp each candidates’ position, it’s important to understand how Tennessee’s property tax system actually works.

How Your Property Tax Bill is Calculated

Property taxes in Tennessee are calculated using a simple formula—but it’s one most people never see laid out clearly. Here’s how it works, step by step.

Now, you need to understand how the tax rate is set.

How Tennessee’s Certified Tax Rate System Works

The Knox County Property Assessor’s office conducts a countywide reappraisal every two years, updating the value of every property. Home values almost always rise, and if the tax rate stayed the same, most homeowners would see their tax bill increase by roughly the same percentage as their home’s value.

For example, if a home’s value rises from $300,000 to $400,000 (a 33% increase), and the tax rate remains $1.55 per $100 of assessed value, the annual tax bill would rise from about $1,162 to $1,550—an increase of roughly $388, or 33%.

But that’s not usually what happens in practice. That’s because Tennessee uses a Certified Tax Rate system, often referred to as a “truth-in-taxation” law. After a reappraisal, the state requires local governments to lower the tax rate so that total property tax revenue stays about the same as before (excluding new construction).

Think about it this way: If a county was generating $1 billion in property tax revenue before reappraisal at a rate of $1.55, and total property values rise by 25%, the tax rate must be reduced to a level that still produces about $1 billion—not $1.25 billion. That lower, adjusted rate is the certified tax rate. As a result, most homeowners see only modest changes in their tax bill after a reappraisal. Some pay more, some pay less, depending on how their property value changed relative to the countywide average—but the system as a whole is designed to avoid a sudden, across-the-board tax increase.

So Now the Politics…

There will be a countywide reappraisal in 2026. According to a source familiar with internal deliberations, the county property assessor’s office expects property values to increase by roughly 50 percent.1 Under Tennessee’s certified tax rate system, the tax rate must be adjusted downward after a reappraisal so that total property tax revenue remains approximately neutral (excluding new construction). Based on current estimates, that would reduce the county’s rate from about $1.55 per $100 of assessed value to roughly $1.03 per $100 of assessed value.

What to do after the tax rate falls is where the mayoral candidates disagree.

Some candidates have suggested maintaining the current $1.55 rate rather than adopting the lower certified rate, which would increase the county’s property tax revenue by over $160 million. Supporters of this approach generally view it as a way to better fund services—such as schools, infrastructure, and public safety—without raising the tax rate. Their argument is driven by new data which shows that, due to strong inflation and sluggish revenue growth, Knox County today spends 20% less per person (excluding education) than it did in 2000.

Others strongly oppose that approach and argue that it amounts to a de facto tax increase. They support adopting the certified rate (~$1.03). Under this option, most homeowners would see relatively modest changes in their tax bills, aside from differences based on how their individual property value changed relative to the county average.

It’s worth noting that the County Commission—not the Mayor—sets the property tax rate. The mayor proposes the budget, and commissioners have historically deferred to those priorities, but the final decision rests with the Commission. Raising the rate requires only a simple majority, and while the Mayor can veto the measure, the Commission can override with a simple majority plus one—rendering the Mayor’s veto power far less consequential than it might seem.

To better illustrate how changes in the tax rate affect property tax bills, the table below shows the annual difference across a range of home values. For example, a homeowner with a current appraised value of $300,000 would see their annual bill increase by an average of $581, or an additional $48 per month, if the county were to maintain the current rate instead of adopting the lower certified rate.

As home values rise, that difference grows proportionally. A $500,000 home would see an increase closer to $900–$1,000 per year, while a $1 million home would see an increase of roughly $1,900–$2,000 annually. In other words, the impact of holding the higher rate is not uniform—it scales with property value. For some households, the difference may feel modest. For others, particularly those on fixed incomes or in rapidly appreciating neighborhoods, it can be much more significant.

This is where the political obfuscation comes in. Candidates who favor maintaining the current rate can accurately say they are not raising the tax rate, which is often how tax increases are traditionally defined. But because property values—and therefore assessed values—have risen, keeping the same rate is a de facto tax increase because it would result in higher tax bills for most all homeowners. On the other side, candidates who support adopting the certified rate frame it as preventing a tax increase, which is mostly true, even though some individual tax bills may still rise depending on how one’s property value changes relative to the countywide average.

Both arguments have basis in how the system works, but they emphasize different parts of it—one focusing on the rate, the other on the final bill. For voters, understanding that distinction is essential to cutting through the political rhetoric and evaluating what each position actually means in practice.

Even Maintaining the Rate Wasn’t an Option Last Time

A useful recent example comes from Mayor Indya Kincannon during the City of Knoxville’s last reappraisal.

In April 2022, Mayor Kincannon proposed a 50-cent increase to the City’s property tax rate to generate additional revenue for core services and public safety. But that proposal came with an important caveat: a countywide reappraisal was approaching, which would trigger a lower certified tax rate.

As expected, property values rose significantly, and the certified rate was recalculated downward. When the City ultimately adopted its new rate, it dropped from $2.9638 to $2.1556 per $100 of assessed value—the lowest rate Knoxville has seen since 1974. In effect, the originally proposed increase was partially offset, with the net impact landing closer to 36.5 cent tax increase, not the full 50.

But the sequencing matters. Because the City raised the rate before the reappraisal, it effectively increased the baseline from which the certified rate was calculated. Had the City not enacted that initial increase, the certified rate would have reset from a lower starting point—resulting in an even lower final tax rate. In that sense, the final rate is both lower than the pre-reappraisal rate and higher than it otherwise would have been without the prior 50 cent increase.

The key point is this: simply keeping the prior rate was never treated as a neutral option. Doing so would have effectively doubled most resident’s property tax bills—a dramatic, across-the-board tax increase that not even the City was willing to accept. The result, then, is a bit counterintuitive: Knoxville residents are paying a lower tax rate than they have in decades, while still paying higher tax bills.

Some Final Thoughts

Property taxes are one of the most visible—and most misunderstood—parts of local government. Much of the confusion comes down to a simple disconnect: people hear about tax rates, but what they ultimately feel is their tax bill. In a system like Tennessee’s, those are not the same thing.

The mechanics matter. Rising property values usually increase the tax base, but Tennessee’s certified rate process is designed to reset that base and prevent automatic revenue growth. And the decision of whether to adopt that lower rate—or maintain a higher one—is not a technical adjustment. It’s a policy choice with real tradeoffs.

Those tradeoffs are worth stating plainly. Maintaining a higher rate can provide local governments with needed revenue to keep up with growth, invest in infrastructure, and maintain service levels in a rapidly growing county. At the same time, adopting the certified rate prioritizes predictability for taxpayers and guards against increases that are driven solely by rising home values rather than deliberate policy decisions.

Neither approach is inherently right or wrong. But they are fundamentally different. And that’s why clarity matters. When candidates say they are “not raising taxes,” they may be referring to the rate. When homeowners say their taxes are going up, they are referring to their bill. Both can be true at the same time.

Understanding that distinction is the key to cutting through the rhetoric and having a more honest conversation about how we fund the services community relies on.

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I’m often asked: Are you a Democrat or a Republican?

I hate that question. It isn’t an offensive, or even unreasonable, question. But it assumes a binary that, increasingly, I find both intellectually unsatisfying and oftentimes meaningless. My honest answer is neither. Not because I’m indifferent to politics. Quite the opposite actually. It’s because I’ve followed politics closely enough to know that party labels, especially at the local level, tell you very little about whether someone is actually right or whether they’re qualified for the job.

That’s why I’m not just politically independent. I am anti-partisan. But let me be precise about what that means, because it is often misunderstood.

Being anti-partisan isn’t the same as being apolitical. I have many views—strong ones—on housing policy, fiscal responsibility, the role of local government, and many other issues. It isn’t the same as being a centrist, as if the truth must always live in the middle, either. And it isn’t an “I’m above-it-all” detachment that lets you feel superior without actually engaging or debating the issues at hand. There’s also a version of anti-partisanship that is little more than a personality type—the person who cannot help but be contrarian, who takes pleasure in disagreeing with whoever is in the room, who mistakes heterodoxy for wisdom. That is not what I am describing.

To be anti-partisan, as I mean it, is a commitment to evaluating ideas on their merits rather than on the basis of who is advancing them or which party they belong to.

That distinction matters more than ever because modern partisanship has become less about policy and more about identity. The question isn’t what do you believe? but who do you stand with? Across multiple levels of government, Republicans who once championed free markets now embrace protectionism because their party switched positions. Likewise, many Democrats who spent years decrying executive overreach cheer it on when it serves their desired ends. That inconsistency isn’t accidental; it’s structural. It is what hyper-partisanship demands.

The deeper problem, however, is that partisanship doesn’t just distort how we govern; it distorts how we think. When your political identity is rooted in party loyalty, every new piece of information is processed through the lens of whether it helps or hurts your side. Evidence stops being something you reason from and becomes something to reason around—something to be selectively deployed in defense of a conclusion you were never really open to reconsidering.

This is how otherwise intelligent people end up defending positions they would have found indefensible five years ago, simply because the party moved and they moved with it. Anti-partisanship is, at its core, a demand that we take ideas seriously on their own terms. It requires asking not who said this but is this true, and does it work.

Partisanship isn’t just a bad habit that individuals could correct if they tried harder. It is a set of incentives—social, professional, and political—that actively punish independent thinking and reward conformity. Politicians who break with their party on a single issue face primary challenges, loss of funding, and ostracism from their own side. Voters who express ambivalence get lectured that this is too important a moment to be sitting on the fence. Commentators who refuse to pick a side find themselves without an audience, because audiences have largely sorted themselves into camps that want to be confirmed, not challenged. The system selects for loyalty. Anti-partisanship is, in that sense, a kind of resistance—not to any particular party, but to the machinery of the two-party system itself.

The most common objection I hear is that anti-partisanship is just false equivalence in disguise—that saying “both sides have flaws” is a way of avoiding the harder judgment that one side is, in fact, worse. It’s a fair critique, but it misses the point. Anti-partisanship does not require you to conclude that both parties are equally wrong on every issue, or that every disagreement has a sensible position on each side. That would be its own form of intellectual dishonesty, a reflexive symmetry that is just as lazy as reflexive loyalty. What anti-partisanship actually requires is simpler and more demanding: that you evaluate each question on its own terms, without your conclusion being predetermined by which team benefits.

An anti-partisan can—and sometimes must—conclude that one party is badly wrong, or that one side’s position is genuinely worse. The difference is in how you arrive at that conclusion. A partisan arrives there because it confirms what they already believed. An anti-partisan arrives there in spite of the fact that it might complicate their preferred narrative. The commitment isn’t to symmetry. It’s to honesty. And honesty, applied consistently, is sometimes asymmetric.

Nowhere is hyper-partisanship more corrosive than in local politics, which today feels like the last arena where pragmatism can still win. Local government is, at its core, a practical enterprise. The job of a county commissioner, city council member, or mayor is not to advance an ideological vision. It is to run the business that is local government—to ensure that public schools are adequately funded, roads are well maintained, neighborhoods are safe, and taxpayer dollars are managed responsibly. These are not Republican problems or Democratic problems. They are problems that require competent, pragmatic people who answer to their constituents rather than to a party apparatus. When partisanship colonizes that space, it doesn’t make local government more principled; it just makes it less functional.

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There is, however, a cost to being anti-partisan. People want to know where you stand, and “it depends on the issue” is an unsatisfying answer in a world that rewards talking points and punishes nuance. And partisan identity offers something genuinely valuable: a community, a shared narrative, a sense that your political engagement means something because it connects you to a larger movement. To opt out of that is to accept a certain kind of loneliness in your political life. But when people organize their political lives around party loyalty rather than principled reasoning, they stop updating their beliefs. They stop listening. They mistake consistency for integrity, when in fact they’ve just stopped thinking. The cost is real. But I think it is worth it.

What you get in return is something more durable: intellectual freedom. One of the tragedies of partisan life is that it forecloses genuine intellectual movement. If your conclusions are shaped by the party platform, then new evidence can only be processed in one of two ways—either it confirms what you already believed, or it gets explained away. There is no third option, no honest reckoning with the possibility that you were wrong. Anti-partisanship holds that third option open. It allows you to follow an argument wherever it goes, even when it goes somewhere uncomfortable, even when it means admitting that the other side got something right. The capacity to say I was wrong or they have a point is not weakness. It is a basic precondition of serious thought. And it is becoming rarer.

Being anti-partisan doesn’t mean having no convictions. It means your convictions answer to the evidence, not to the party. That’s a simple standard. And it shouldn’t be as rare as it is.

It’s a cliché, but it’s true: the secret is out. Knox County is one of the fastest-growing counties in America. It is also, by some measures, one of the most fiscally unprepared for that growth.

Since the Great Recession, the county’s economy has consistently outpaced the nation, averaging 3.0% annual real GDP growth since 2010 compared with 2.4% nationally. That trend only intensified after the pandemic: since 2021, local real GDP has grown at an average annual rate of 5.3%, compared with 3.6% nationally—meaning the local economy has, on average, grown almost 50% faster than the country overall in recent years.

The current wave of growth did not appear overnight. Momentum began building around 2015 and has only accelerated since.

That growth has delivered real dividends. Expanded air service, including Southwest Airlines, and the arrival of national brands like Nordstrom Rack, Whataburger, Topgolf, and In-N-Out Burger are direct byproducts of a larger, more dynamic regional economy. Without it, many of the amenities residents now enjoy simply wouldn’t exist.

But rapid growth has also exposed—and deepened—serious challenges.

Home prices and rents have vastly outpaced income growth, pushing homeownership out of reach and making it harder for longtime residents to climb the economic ladder. As a result, the median sale price has exceeded the affordable home price—or the maximum price a typical family could afford without spending more than 30% of their income on housing—for 40 consecutive months, as of January 2025.

In addition to the rising cost-of-living, other quality of life measures have slowly deteriorated. Traffic congestion, one of the most widely cited concerns among voters, has reached historic levels. Meanwhile, the county has identified roughly $1.7 billion in local road-improvement projects yet today, under current budget constraints, can afford to repave less than 50 miles of roads per year, at a budgeted cost of roughly $15 million per year.

Even more, despite Knoxville being a fraction of Nashville’s size, TDOT officials have said the 17-mile stretch from the I-40/75 split to the I-640 interchange in Knoxville is the busiest stretch of interstate in Tennessee—with no easy solutions on the horizon, especially in a state like Tennessee that utilizes a “pay-as-you-go” model for road improvements.

While many roadways are controlled by the state, data from the Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization show regional arterials have experienced the greatest increases in traffic volumes in recent years. That increase in traffic and underinvestment in road infrastructure is, in part, why there was a life-altering traffic crash every 15 hours in the region from 2016 to 2021—a number that has likely increased over the past 4 years.

Yet these pressures are not simply the inevitable side effects of growth. They also reflect deeper budgetary changes: Knox County’s public infrastructure and fiscal capacity have not kept pace with the speed of its own growth. Much like the local housing market, rapid economic expansion and population growth has overwhelmed the region’s infrastructure, which was already lacking even before the pandemic made Knoxville a premier relocation destination.

And the core problem is fiscal. Rising debt service payments and sluggish revenue growth have steadily eroded the county’s ability to fund basic services—things like road paving, stormwater upgrades, and deferred maintenance—even as demand for them has surged.

The numbers tell a stark story. From 2000 to 2024, the county’s operating budget increased by an inflation-adjusted 23%, while the population grew 33% over the same period.

But even that modest budget growth is misleading. Strip out state-driven education funding—which reveals a clearer picture of dollars available for infrastructure and county services—and the operating budget has grown by just 7% since 2000. The result: Knox County today spends roughly 20% less per resident (excluding education) than it did in 2000—$799 per resident compared with $1,009, in current dollars. In other words, the county is trying to serve a third more people on roughly a fifth less money.

After adjusting for inflation, the non-education portion of Knox County’s operating budget is actually down 6.9% from 2010—underscoring how population growth and rising costs have steadily eroded the county’s fiscal capacity.

The scale of the county’s debt obligations are serious, too. As of 2025, Knox County carried roughly $761.23 million in outstanding principal and interest—about $1,500 for every resident. Annual debt service payments are projected to rise from $84.4 million in fiscal year 2025-2026 to $110 million by 2030, consuming nearly 10 percent of the county’s total budget and an even larger share of non-education spending.

Looking at spending relative to the broader economy tells a similar story. The total operating budget (excluding education) as a share of GDP fell from 1.5% in 2001 to just 0.89% in 2024, meaning county government spending has steadily declined relative to the size of the economy it serves. This metric, which ideally would remain relatively stable over time, decreased in 16 of the last 23 years.

A similar story emerges when spending is measured against total personal income, or the combined earnings of county residents. Because this metric reflects the income base that ultimately supports public services, it provides a useful snapshot of how large government spending is relative to taxpayers’ ability to pay, making it a much clearer indicator of fiscal burden than raw spending totals. By that measure, too, county government today represents a smaller share of the community’s overall earnings than it did 25 years ago, with county spending (excluding education) falling from 1.8% of total personal income in 2000 to just 1.1% in 2024.1

And the problem isn’t likely to get better. According to a source familiar with internal deliberations, the county property assessor’s office expects property values to increase an additional 50% after the 2026 reappraisal. Under Tennessee’s certified tax rate system, that would push the county’s nominal property tax rate down to roughly $0.80 per $100 of assessed value from the current rate of $1.55—the lowest rate on record.

And Knox County already has one of the lowest effective property tax rates in the entire country, according to a study by nationwide real estate data firm Attom Data.

None of this is to say that low taxes are bad. In fact, maintaining a relatively low tax burden is unequivocally a good thing. It has long been a part of Knox County’s success, encouraging business investment and leaving more money in the pockets of residents. That matters. But low taxes are not cost-free—the costs simply accumulate elsewhere, in deferred roads, aging infrastructure, and services that don’t keep pace with a growing population.

For more than two decades, Knox County has done more with less, going 25 years without raising the property tax rate. That discipline is admirable in many ways. But the county that approach was designed for—smaller, slower-growing, with less debt and lower costs—no longer exists.

The Knox County of today has one-third more residents, a rapidly expanding economy, and infrastructure obligations that can no longer be deferred without consequence. At some point, the amenities and infrastructure that make a place attractive to business and residents—good roads, reliable stormwater systems, and public services—become more valuable to economic growth than an incrementally lower tax bill, what economists refer to as diminishing marginal returns.

Knox County may be approaching that threshold. The county’s tax rate is already among the lowest in the nation; the marginal benefit of letting it fall lower and lower is almost certainly smaller than it has ever been, while the cost of the infrastructure gaps that low rate produces is growing larger every year. The county is, in effect, trying to run a bigger government on a budget calibrated for one half its size.

The question is not whether growth will continue—by most indications, it will. And that growth will help to grow the overall tax base, but likely not fast enough to outpace the growth in labor and material costs like paving asphalt, concrete, steel, pipes, fuel, and other industrial equipment.

The real question, then, is whether a fiscal model designed for a much smaller community can meet the demands of the city Knoxville has actually become. That is a question Knox County leadership will have to face—and soon.

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Local political and business leaders have long talked about Knoxville’s “brain drain” problem. Our region’s best and brightest attend the University of Tennessee, then pack their bags upon graduation and head to cities like Atlanta, Nashville, or Washington D.C. in search of higher paying jobs and more fun. For a long time, Knoxville simply couldn’t provide the sort of amenities—or salaries—needed to compete with bigger, flashier cities.

That “brain drain” carries real economic consequences. When UT graduates leave, the region loses more than their degrees. It loses future entrepreneurs, homeowners, civic leaders, and taxpayers. Young professionals are disproportionately likely to start businesses, form families, buy homes, and anchor neighborhoods. Their presence creates the density of talent that attracts employers in the first place.

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In mid-sized metros like Knoxville, even modest outflows of educated workers ripple outward: employers struggle to scale and emerging industries look to more talent-rich cities, culminating in slower growth and economic stagnation. Over time, that erosion compounds. Cities that cannot retain their workforce talent slip into decline—and once that cycle sets in, it is notoriously hard to reverse.

For decades, a consistent outflow of high-skill, educated workers kept Knoxville’s economy from reaching its full potential. But data from recent years suggest that is changing. From 2019 to 2024, Knoxville saw its population aged 25-34 grow by 14%—the strongest growth in the state and far exceeding the 5% growth from 2015 to 2019. It has also outpaced most peer cities, including economic rivals Nashville (8%) and Greenville, SC (8%).

That double digit growth didn’t happen by accident. Over the past decade, Knoxville leaders placed renewed focus on attracting and retaining young people. While relative affordability was always a competitive advantage, the city lacked many of conventional “big city” amenities—Knoxville, after all, earned its nickname as the “Scruffy City” and long lacked the flash and scale of larger metros. Even today, the city’s nightlife is modest, the urban core can be quiet after business hours, and the job market is thin at the higher end.

But over the last decade, a renewed focus on downtown reinvestment, public-private partnerships on civic infrastructure projects like Covenant Health Park and the Urban Wilderness, the steady expansion of companies looking for early-career professionals (e.g., Axle Logistics, CGI Group, Tombras, and others), and the gravitational pull of institutions like Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the adjacent “Nuclear Valley,” where scores of nuclear-focused startups have clustered into something resembling a mini Silicon Valley, have reshaped the region’s trajectory.

All of these developments have played a role in helping transform East Tennessee into a place where high-skill young people can realistically envision building a career, launching a company, and climbing the economic ladder without feeling as though they must leave for a bigger city. That is a remarkable shift from where we were a decade ago.

Yet for all the benefits strong civic infrastructure and lifestyle appeal might bring, economic considerations like affordability tend to be the stronger driver of migration trends. And on that front, Knoxville is facing some real challenges.

Knoxville’s relative affordability has long been a strong competitive advantage. For more than a decade—from 2008 through 2019—earnings and home prices in Knoxville moved in tandem, with both rising about 22% in just over a decade.

Then the pandemic happened.

Earnings didn’t stagnate. They continued to grow at a relatively strong pace—up 21% between 2020 and 2024, meaning incomes rose nearly as much in just four years as they had in the entire preceding decade. But home prices broke away entirely, underscoring the consequences of years of underbuilding.

From 2020 to 2024, home prices surged 76%—more than 3.5x faster than earnings. What had long been a stable relationship between incomes and home values completely diverged, pushing prices far beyond what many long-time residents can reasonably afford and, equally as important, what young professionals can afford.

Take Nashville—one of Knoxville’s foremost competitors in terms of talent attraction—as an example. Prior to 2021, Nashville rents were always at least 30% higher than Knoxville’s. But that gap narrowed considerably over the past several years, with Nashville rents just 2% higher than Knoxville as of the beginning of 2026.

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Yet despite the convergence in housing costs, household incomes in Nashville remain more than 20% higher than in Knoxville. The disparity is even greater for nonfamily households—which includes people living alone or with a roommate—with an income-gap of more than 26%. In other words, the housing cost discount that once compensated for lower wages and smaller city amenities has all but disappeared.

And the trend isn’t confined to Nashville. Since the onset of the pandemic, Knoxville has seen rents far outpace most of its peer cities with rents climbing 61% since the beginning of 2020—well above the 39% average among peer cities. Notably, median rents in Knoxville are 5% higher than in Raleigh, NC, where the median household income is $27,960—or 38%—higher than in Knoxville.

For a recent graduate comparing job offers, a slightly smaller paycheck can be justified if rent is dramatically cheaper. It is far harder, however, to justify when housing costs are nearly the same but wages are not. And if Knoxville loses its relative affordability without achieving wage parity with larger metros, as current trends suggest, the brain drain problem could quickly return. Thus, the very demographic we have worked so hard to attract—early-career and high-skill talent—will once again have reason to look elsewhere.

For years, local leaders focused on boosting Knoxville’s “fun factor,” investing in downtown vitality, outdoor amenities, and civic infrastructure to make the city more livable and competitive. That work mattered. It helped change the narrative.

But today the challenge is different. Demand is no longer the problem. People want to live here. The question now is whether they can afford to stay.

The best, and likely the only, way to restore some semblance of balance is to create and sustain an economic and regulatory environment that allows both private and public actors to flood the market with new supply of all kinds—subsidized, market-rate, single-family, multifamily—at a scale sufficient to slow price growth long enough for earnings to catch up.

There is no shortcut around the math. We can debate secondary factors or pursue politically satisfying distractions, but until we confront the structural shortage itself, affordability will remain elusive. And if we don’t act soon, the brain drain that has long plagued the Scruffy City may very well return.

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This is Part II in a series of autobiographical essays tracing the different parts of my life. If you haven’t read Part I, I’d encourage you to start there.

It is hard to say what turns ordinary worry into panic, or what unseen line the mind crosses before fear takes residence in the body and becomes something larger and more consuming. But once it does, it moves in quietly—the way darkness overtakes a room at dusk—claiming its place as though it had always belonged, until panic begins to speak for the body.

For those who have never felt the swell of panic, it can be hard to understand. Panic does not announce itself with consistency or reason. It can manifest differently for different people. For me, it is pernicious and physical. It can arrive anywhere—at a movie theater, in an Uber, during a meeting, upon waking in the morning. There is no reliable trigger, no clear warning, only the sudden, unmistakable sense that something inside me has gone awry.

For most of childhood, or at least the part I remember, my parents were separated and I lived full-time with Mom. During those years, I yearned to spend time with Dad—to feel the unmistakable bond between father and child. Yet even then, my body knew something my mind did not. Each time Dad was to pick me up, my body grew tense; and when I knew he was on his way, it would revolt. My heart began to beat so hard I could feel it in my ears. A lightheaded sensation would rise in my chest, as if the air itself was thinning.

It is a very particular feeling—panic, that is. The chest grows heavy and exhausted. The stomach twists into knots and the insides churning to the rhythm of tachycardia. The nose and mouth feel constricted, as if covered by a semi-permeable plastic wrap, making each breath deliberate and labored.

One particular instance stands out—not because it was unusual but because it was so ordinary.

I was at Mom’s office after school, pretending the empty office next door was mine as I so loved to do. Dad called to say he was on the way to pick me up for the weekend. The mere anticipation of time together—time I desperately longed for—sent me barreling to the bathroom, doubled over, my body suddenly at war with itself. I couldn’t leave the bathroom. Dad waited for me in the parking lot. Knowing he was there—not just on his way but there—only led my body to revolt even more, as if some hidden alarm clock was going off, warning me of a danger I didn’t yet know existed. Was I sick? Was it food poisoning or the stomach flu? Or was it something more sinister—a truth my body knew before my adolescent mind could comprehend?

There is a certain cruelty in the body’s wisdom—how it speaks in tremors long before the mind can understand why. I loved Dad; I longed to spend time with him. And yet somewhere deep within the hidden chambers of my mind, I understood that to be with him was to step onto uncertain ground. One could never be sure which version of Dad would arrive—sometimes tender, sometimes volatile, and often not quite the version of him I hoped for.

No one teaches a child how to reconcile such disparate realities—indeed, the small and striving mind of a child, still growing and malleable, is not equipped to understand that sort of complexity. Yet still, children know a great deal about the world around them long before their brains mature in full. They know in their body, in their breath, in the tightening of their gut, in the trembling of their hands. They know in the silence between words and in the glaring eyes of a parent. And I knew—without knowing exactly—that while I loved Dad, my body feared him. Both were true.

That is the cruel inheritance of love when it is uncertain: it drives you toward fire for its warmth, even as it sears your skin, because the child’s heart would rather be burned by a parent’s love than to live without it. Love, tangled and unadorned, can wound as faithfully as it warms.

Only years later I would come to know the sensations I felt as panic attacks—back then they were simply my body’s way of speaking. But what my body learned as a child never fully left me: the quickening pulse, the tremble in the hands, the breath caught somewhere between the chest and throat, the opaque white color my skin turned when nausea climbed from depths of my stomach to the back of the throat.

When panic grows inside, the experts, in the kindest way possible, tell you to steady yourself—to master the body’s rebellion with the quiet science of breath. In the sterile language of medicine, it is called “cyclic sighing,” a fancy term for a way of breathing. You draw in air through the nose until your lungs are stretched, then take another small sip of air—just enough to expand the diaphragm to its full capacity—and release it slowly through the mouth until nothing remains but the hollowness of your lungs.

Medical experts say it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the body’s built-in recovery mechanism that slows the heart and steadies the breath when fight-or-flight takes hold. They tell you it is science, a way to trick the body back toward stasis. But what they do not tell you—what cannot be measured or explained in sterile medical terms—is that sometimes, even for those who don’t believe, it feels like a kind of prayer. It is not a request for deliverance but a desperate hope that the moment, that the feeling will pass, that the body still remembers how to be quiet again—that relief, however brief, is still possible.

At first, my panic attacks seemed connected to particular circumstances like spending time with Dad. But they soon began to occupy more and more space in my life. In the latter half of elementary school, I spent countless mornings in the front office of Blue Grass Elementary, begging Mom to pick me up from school. My stomach twisted; nausea rose like a tide I could not hold back. I pleaded to go home—to return to Mom, the only place that felt like refuge.

For a period those pleas were a near-daily occurrence. I was a deeply happy child but also one that seemed to be falling apart—yet there was no fever, no injury or ailment anyone could name. No one quite knew what to make of me, and so in a final attempt to pin my suffering to something concrete, Mom took me to the Children’s Hospital for blood tests. They came back perfectly normal. What plagued me was something lab results could not detect. So I carried on sick without being sick, a child whose body was speaking a language that evaded recognition.

As I grew older, anxiety seeped into almost every corner of my life. Like any kid, I traversed the neighborhood with friends, got invited to sleepovers, and tried to move through the world as if I were like everyone else. But there were signs that something was off. It became a small mystery among my friend’s parents why I was the one kid who never stayed the night even when all the others did. I invented excuse after excuse, but the truth was something I couldn’t fully explain. Each time I agreed to stay over, I would arrive and enjoy the evening just fine—that is, until bedtime crept close and panic began to consume me.

While my friends played video games or drifted asleep, I hid in the bathroom to call my mother, begging her to come pick me up. One night, I distinctly remember slipping out of my close friend’s house at the edge of midnight. I was not yet brave enough to walk the dark alone, so once I summoned whatever courage I had, I eased the door shut behind me and sprinted off into the darkness—my heart pounding, my mind convinced that I was fleeing danger even if no one was there to see it.

My anxiety also manifested in other, less physical ways. For a brief period, I was terrified of being home alone. It was an odd, illogical sort of fear because I felt perfectly safe outside; and so on summer days, I would sit in the driveway hitting tennis balls against the garage door or throwing baseballs against the side of the house, waiting for someone to come home. It was the irrationality of this fear that is most curious. By any reasonable measure—whether inside or outside—I was never actually in danger. If anything, being outside was more dangerous, a fact explained to me more than once in that patient, serious tone reserved for children who refuse to see reason.

Yet the thought of being alone inside our house—of being enclosed by its walls—somehow felt more threatening than anything that could meet me in the open air. Why is something I still don’t fully understand. But fear and anxiety do not obey the laws of probability or common sense; they follow the hidden contours of the mind, answering to truths yet to be articulated.

I was scared almost constantly during this time. On numerous mornings, I would slip through the shared bathroom into my brother’s room to lay on the carpet floor between his bed and the window. We were the only ones home, and the only way I felt safe—to find some sort of stasis—was to hide between him and the door. My brother was a menace to me growing up, an endless source of small, petty miseries. He took delight in getting on my nerves any and every way possible. Yet his adoration for me was always evident and unwavering, and in moments like these—and in moments when my fear was justified—he was someone I hid behind instinctively.

That fear followed me in other spaces, too. One weekend I was home alone for the day and did not expected anyone home until the evening. I spent the morning on the living room couch watching The Office, though “watching” is not quite the word. My eyes were on the screen but my mind was wandering—uneasy, alert, listening for every sigh and creak of the house. For hours, I startled at shadows and mistook gusts of wind for an intruder. Then came the sound I feared most: the giggle of the front door. A metallic tremor. Someone trying to get in. I stood behind the wall of the adjacent room, watching the door handle jerk and twist as though someone was picking the lock. I had been wrong so many times before, had talked myself down from so many false alarms, that even in the moment I wondered if what I was seeing was real or imagined. But then the door popped open, daylight breaking around the door frame, and my worst fear became real. Someone was inside—someone who did not belong there.

What happened next felt less like bravery than instinct. I leapt from behind the wall and threw my body into the door, slamming it shut with every ounce of force my 100-pound body could gather. I heard a scream—a sharp, startled pain. Once the door was locked, I pressed my face to a narrow window and saw a dark-haired man with his back to the door. Then I began to recognize a voice. When the man finally turned around, clutching his wrist, there stood my oldest brother staring back at me with eyes filled with a mixture of shock and fury.

Fear does strange things to the body. It does not ask for permission. And when terror rises high enough, when it floods every aspect of your mind, the body lets go. Non-essential functions fall away and control of the body dissolves. So it wasn’t until I unlocked the door and let my brother inside that I realized my shorts were wet and I was stilling in a pool of urine.

The world teaches us to call this shame, to treat it as a failure of will. But it is not a weakness; it is part of our evolutionary history and the human body’s oldest instinct speaking in the only language it knows: to survive. Long before any of us learned the names for fear, the body learned to make itself lighter, to flee faster, to startle a predator long enough to escape. Many who have faced fear, both real and perceived, have spoken of this—of how the body lets go in those moments when one’s courage demands more of them than their body can bear. The body makes decisions before the mind can form a thought. We all carry that same ancient reflex. At first, my brother was furious—understandably so, since I had slammed his wrist in a door—but he ultimately saw the wreckage of my fear for what it was. He later told me that what I did was, in its own way, brave.

What I did not yet understand—what I would not understand for many years—is that panic is rarely born from nothing. It is not the mind inventing danger for sport. More often, it is memory without language, fear without chronology. The body, faithful and sophisticated, keeps watch long after the threat itself has learned how to hide. And so the panic that followed me through classrooms and bedrooms, through sleepovers and empty houses, was not wandering aimlessly. It was orbiting something. It was waiting for me to be old enough to look back and see what it had been guarding me against all along.

My anxiety manifested in psychological ways, too. One of the cruelest features of Dad’s addiction was his ability to vanish for days at a time. I would call again and again. Each time my call went unanswered tightened a knot inside me. After a couple of days with no communication, I asked Mom to drive me to his house—a child’s version of a welfare check, born of worry and a hope I could never quite shake.

When we pulled up, his truck was parked in its usual spot. I stepped out into the winter cold and knocked on the front door. Still, nothing. So I did what I had done many times before when he’d locked himself out or when I needed something from the house when he wasn’t home: I crawled through the dog door into the finished garage upstairs. The cold hit me first—his house was only a shade warmer than the air outside—and then the familiar musk of stale cigarette smoke, a scent that clung to him and seemed to seep into the walls themselves. I opened the door from the garage into the main house and almost immediately Auggie greeted me with a gentleness that only made the silence feel more ominous. I walked down the dark hallway to the master bedroom: it was empty, save for the usual heap of clothes on the bed. The living room was the same—empty but for the flicker of King of the Hill playing on mute, like the house were trying to impersonate life in Dad’s absence.

I finally reached the guest room—the place where I slept when I stayed over, where I had so often dozed off waiting for him to emerge from the hallway bathroom—and I cracked open the door. In the darkness I could make out the faint outline of a body on the bed. So I stepped inside and tapped his shoulder, then shook him lightly when he didn’t move. When he didn’t wake, my first thought—cold and immediate—was that he was dead. And then without warning, he erupted. He shot up and screamed—something to the effect of “Get the fuck out!”—in a voice so raw and feral it seemed almost inhuman. It was a scream unlike anything I had ever heard before. The closest comparison is the chainsaw-wielding man in a haunted corn maze, except this was worse—far worse—because here there were no actors or boundaries. Dad never hurt me, and I never honestly feared that he would. But his display of pure, unadulterated anger was unforgettable.

One of the hardest realities to accept is that the body is often right long before the mind is ready, or even capable, of believing it. As a child, I mistook its warnings for weakness and its resistance for betrayal. I wanted my fear—my anxiety—to be an error, something that could be corrected or disciplined out of me. But fear, I have since learned, is not always a malfunction of the spirit or the nerves; sometimes it is the most honest form of knowledge we possess.

What my body learned in those early years—about uncertainty, about absence, about love that could vanish without explanation—never truly left me. It did not fade with time or yield to reason. It settled instead into muscle and breath, into reflex and instinct, embedding itself in the quiet places where memory outlives language. Even now when panic rises without invitation, it carries with it the residue of those lessons: that love can be unpredictable, that safety is never guaranteed, that silence can speak with many voices at once.

And yet the body remembers something else as well. It remembers how to endure. How to steady itself, if briefly, when the world feels unmoored. How to find small islands of quiet when certainty is nowhere to be found. This, too, is an inheritance—less visible or discussed but no less real—and it is the one that makes living possible.

That is what it means to live with fear without surrendering to it: not to erase what the body has learned or to deny how darkness can shape us, but to listen more carefully to what that darkness is trying to teach. To bear one’s light without pretending it was found easily or without cost. To recognize that panic, for all its cruelty, can be—and often is—one of love’s most distorted expressions: a vigilance born not of apathy or weakness, but of the simple, enduring truth that what gives us life can also shape our wounds.

This is Part II in a series of autobiographical essays tracing the different parts of my life. If you haven’t read Part I, I’d encourage you to start there.

It is hard to say what turns ordinary worry into panic, or what unseen line the mind crosses before fear takes residence in the body and becomes something larger and more consuming. But once it does, it moves in quietly—the way darkness overtakes a room at dusk—claiming its place as though it had always belonged, until panic begins to speak for the body.

For those who have never felt the swell of panic, it can be hard to understand. Panic does not announce itself with consistency or reason. It can manifest differently for different people. For me, it is pernicious and physical. It can arrive anywhere—at a movie theater, in an Uber, during a meeting, upon waking in the morning. There is no reliable trigger, no clear warning, only the sudden, unmistakable sense that something inside me has gone awry.

For most of childhood, or at least the part I remember, my parents were separated and I lived full-time with Mom. During those years, I yearned to spend time with Dad—to feel the unmistakable bond between father and child. Yet even then, my body knew something my mind did not. Each time Dad was to pick me up, my body grew tense; and when I knew he was on his way, it would revolt. My heart began to beat so hard I could feel it in my ears. A lightheaded sensation would rise in my chest, as if the air itself was thinning.

It is a very particular feeling—panic, that is. The chest grows heavy and exhausted. The stomach twists into knots and the insides churning to the rhythm of tachycardia. The nose and mouth feel constricted, as if covered by a semi-permeable plastic wrap, making each breath deliberate and labored.

One particular instance stands out—not because it was unusual but because it was so ordinary.

I was at Mom’s office after school, pretending the empty office next door was mine as I so loved to do. Dad called to say he was on the way to pick me up for the weekend. The mere anticipation of time together—time I desperately longed for—sent me barreling to the bathroom, doubled over, my body suddenly at war with itself. I couldn’t leave the bathroom. Dad waited for me in the parking lot. Knowing he was there—not just on his way but there—only led my body to revolt even more, as if some hidden alarm clock was going off, warning me of a danger I didn’t yet know existed. Was I sick? Was it food poisoning or the stomach flu? Or was it something more sinister—a truth my body knew before my adolescent mind could comprehend?

There is a certain cruelty in the body’s wisdom—how it speaks in tremors long before the mind can understand why. I loved Dad; I longed to spend time with him. And yet somewhere deep within the hidden chambers of my mind, I understood that to be with him was to step onto uncertain ground. One could never be sure which version of Dad would arrive—sometimes tender, sometimes volatile, and often not quite the version of him I hoped for.

No one teaches a child how to reconcile such disparate realities—indeed, the small and striving mind of a child, still growing and malleable, is not equipped to understand that sort of complexity. Yet still, children know a great deal about the world around them long before their brains mature in full. They know in their body, in their breath, in the tightening of their gut, in the trembling of their hands. They know in the silence between words and in the glaring eyes of a parent. And I knew—without knowing exactly—that while I loved Dad, my body feared him. Both were true.

That is the cruel inheritance of love when it is uncertain: it drives you toward fire for its warmth, even as it sears your skin, because the child’s heart would rather be burned by a parent’s love than to live without it. Love, tangled and unadorned, can wound as faithfully as it warms.

Only years later I would come to know the sensations I felt as panic attacks—back then they were simply my body’s way of speaking. But what my body learned as a child never fully left me: the quickening pulse, the tremble in the hands, the breath caught somewhere between the chest and throat, the opaque white color my skin turned when nausea climbed from depths of my stomach to the back of the throat.

When panic grows inside, the experts, in the kindest way possible, tell you to steady yourself—to master the body’s rebellion with the quiet science of breath. In the sterile language of medicine, it is called “cyclic sighing,” a fancy term for a way of breathing. You draw in air through the nose until your lungs are stretched, then take another small sip of air—just enough to expand the diaphragm to its full capacity—and release it slowly through the mouth until nothing remains but the hollowness of your lungs.

Medical experts say it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the body’s built-in recovery mechanism that slows the heart and steadies the breath when fight-or-flight takes hold. They tell you it is science, a way to trick the body back toward stasis. But what they do not tell you—what cannot be measured or explained in sterile medical terms—is that sometimes, even for those who don’t believe, it feels like a kind of prayer. It is not a request for deliverance but a desperate hope that the moment, that the feeling will pass, that the body still remembers how to be quiet again—that relief, however brief, is still possible.

At first, my panic attacks seemed connected to particular circumstances like spending time with Dad. But they soon began to occupy more and more space in my life. In the latter half of elementary school, I spent countless mornings in the front office of Blue Grass Elementary, begging Mom to pick me up from school. My stomach twisted; nausea rose like a tide I could not hold back. I pleaded to go home—to return to Mom, the only place that felt like refuge.

For a period those pleas were a near-daily occurrence. I was a deeply happy child but also one that seemed to be falling apart—yet there was no fever, no injury or ailment anyone could name. No one quite knew what to make of me, and so in a final attempt to pin my suffering to something concrete, Mom took me to the Children’s Hospital for blood tests. They came back perfectly normal. What plagued me was something lab results could not detect. So I carried on sick without being sick, a child whose body was speaking a language that evaded recognition.

As I grew older, anxiety seeped into almost every corner of my life. Like any kid, I traversed the neighborhood with friends, got invited to sleepovers, and tried to move through the world as if I were like everyone else. But there were signs that something was off. It became a small mystery among my friend’s parents why I was the one kid who never stayed the night even when all the others did. I invented excuse after excuse, but the truth was something I couldn’t fully explain. Each time I agreed to stay over, I would arrive and enjoy the evening just fine—that is, until bedtime crept close and panic began to consume me.

While my friends played video games or drifted asleep, I hid in the bathroom to call my mother, begging her to come pick me up. One night, I distinctly remember slipping out of my close friend’s house at the edge of midnight. I was not yet brave enough to walk the dark alone, so once I summoned whatever courage I had, I eased the door shut behind me and sprinted off into the darkness—my heart pounding, my mind convinced that I was fleeing danger even if no one was there to see it.

My anxiety also manifested in other, less physical ways. For a brief period, I was terrified of being home alone. It was an odd, illogical sort of fear because I felt perfectly safe outside; and so on summer days, I would sit in the driveway hitting tennis balls against the garage door or throwing baseballs against the side of the house, waiting for someone to come home. It was the irrationality of this fear that is most curious. By any reasonable measure—whether inside or outside—I was never actually in danger. If anything, being outside was more dangerous, a fact explained to me more than once in that patient, serious tone reserved for children who refuse to see reason.

Yet the thought of being alone inside our house—of being enclosed by its walls—somehow felt more threatening than anything that could meet me in the open air. Why is something I still don’t fully understand. But fear and anxiety do not obey the laws of probability or common sense; they follow the hidden contours of the mind, answering to truths yet to be articulated.

I was scared almost constantly during this time. On numerous mornings, I would slip through the shared bathroom into my brother’s room to lay on the carpet floor between his bed and the window. We were the only ones home, and the only way I felt safe—to find some sort of stasis—was to hide between him and the door. My brother was a menace to me growing up, an endless source of small, petty miseries. He took delight in getting on my nerves any and every way possible. Yet his adoration for me was always evident and unwavering, and in moments like these—and in moments when my fear was justified—he was someone I hid behind instinctively.

That fear followed me in other spaces, too. One weekend I was home alone for the day and did not expected anyone home until the evening. I spent the morning on the living room couch watching The Office, though “watching” is not quite the word. My eyes were on the screen but my mind was wandering—uneasy, alert, listening for every sigh and creak of the house. For hours, I startled at shadows and mistook gusts of wind for an intruder. Then came the sound I feared most: the giggle of the front door. A metallic tremor. Someone trying to get in. I stood behind the wall of the adjacent room, watching the door handle jerk and twist as though someone was picking the lock. I had been wrong so many times before, had talked myself down from so many false alarms, that even in the moment I wondered if what I was seeing was real or imagined. But then the door popped open, daylight breaking around the door frame, and my worst fear became real. Someone was inside—someone who did not belong there.

What happened next felt less like bravery than instinct. I leapt from behind the wall and threw my body into the door, slamming it shut with every ounce of force my 100-pound body could gather. I heard a scream—a sharp, startled pain. Once the door was locked, I pressed my face to a narrow window and saw a dark-haired man with his back to the door. Then I began to recognize a voice. When the man finally turned around, clutching his wrist, there stood my oldest brother staring back at me with eyes filled with a mixture of shock and fury.

Fear does strange things to the body. It does not ask for permission. And when terror rises high enough, when it floods every aspect of your mind, the body lets go. Non-essential functions fall away and control of the body dissolves. So it wasn’t until I unlocked the door and let my brother inside that I realized my shorts were wet and I was stilling in a pool of urine.

The world teaches us to call this shame, to treat it as a failure of will. But it is not a weakness; it is part of our evolutionary history and the human body’s oldest instinct speaking in the only language it knows: to survive. Long before any of us learned the names for fear, the body learned to make itself lighter, to flee faster, to startle a predator long enough to escape. Many who have faced fear, both real and perceived, have spoken of this—of how the body lets go in those moments when one’s courage demands more of them than their body can bear. The body makes decisions before the mind can form a thought. We all carry that same ancient reflex. At first, my brother was furious—understandably so, since I had slammed his wrist in a door—but he ultimately saw the wreckage of my fear for what it was. He later told me that what I did was, in its own way, brave.

What I did not yet understand—what I would not understand for many years—is that panic is rarely born from nothing. It is not the mind inventing danger for sport. More often, it is memory without language, fear without chronology. The body, faithful and sophisticated, keeps watch long after the threat itself has learned how to hide. And so the panic that followed me through classrooms and bedrooms, through sleepovers and empty houses, was not wandering aimlessly. It was orbiting something. It was waiting for me to be old enough to look back and see what it had been guarding me against all along.

My anxiety manifested in psychological ways, too. One of the cruelest features of Dad’s addiction was his ability to vanish for days at a time. I would call again and again. Each time my call went unanswered tightened a knot inside me. After a couple of days with no communication, I asked Mom to drive me to his house—a child’s version of a welfare check, born of worry and a hope I could never quite shake.

When we pulled up, his truck was parked in its usual spot. I stepped out into the winter cold and knocked on the front door. Still, nothing. So I did what I had done many times before when he’d locked himself out or when I needed something from the house when he wasn’t home: I crawled through the dog door into the finished garage upstairs. The cold hit me first—his house was only a shade warmer than the air outside—and then the familiar musk of stale cigarette smoke, a scent that clung to him and seemed to seep into the walls themselves. I opened the door from the garage into the main house and almost immediately Auggie greeted me with a gentleness that only made the silence feel more ominous. I walked down the dark hallway to the master bedroom: it was empty, save for the usual heap of clothes on the bed. The living room was the same—empty but for the flicker of King of the Hill playing on mute, like the house were trying to impersonate life in Dad’s absence.

I finally reached the guest room—the place where I slept when I stayed over, where I had so often dozed off waiting for him to emerge from the hallway bathroom—and I cracked open the door. In the darkness I could make out the faint outline of a body on the bed. So I stepped inside and tapped his shoulder, then shook him lightly when he didn’t move. When he didn’t wake, my first thought—cold and immediate—was that he was dead. And then without warning, he erupted. He shot up and screamed—something to the effect of “Get the fuck out!”—in a voice so raw and feral it seemed almost inhuman. It was a scream unlike anything I had ever heard before. The closest comparison is the chainsaw-wielding man in a haunted corn maze, except this was worse—far worse—because here there were no actors or boundaries. Dad never hurt me, and I never honestly feared that he would. But his display of pure, unadulterated anger was unforgettable.

One of the hardest realities to accept is that the body is often right long before the mind is ready, or even capable, of believing it. As a child, I mistook its warnings for weakness and its resistance for betrayal. I wanted my fear—my anxiety—to be an error, something that could be corrected or disciplined out of me. But fear, I have since learned, is not always a malfunction of the spirit or the nerves; sometimes it is the most honest form of knowledge we possess.

What my body learned in those early years—about uncertainty, about absence, about love that could vanish without explanation—never truly left me. It did not fade with time or yield to reason. It settled instead into muscle and breath, into reflex and instinct, embedding itself in the quiet places where memory outlives language. Even now when panic rises without invitation, it carries with it the residue of those lessons: that love can be unpredictable, that safety is never guaranteed, that silence can speak with many voices at once.

And yet the body remembers something else as well. It remembers how to endure. How to steady itself, if briefly, when the world feels unmoored. How to find small islands of quiet when certainty is nowhere to be found. This, too, is an inheritance—less visible or discussed but no less real—and it is the one that makes living possible.

That is what it means to live with fear without surrendering to it: not to erase what the body has learned or to deny how darkness can shape us, but to listen more carefully to what that darkness is trying to teach. To bear one’s light without pretending it was found easily or without cost. To recognize that panic, for all its cruelty, can be—and often is—one of love’s most distorted expressions: a vigilance born not of apathy or weakness, but of the simple, enduring truth that what gives us life can also shape our wounds.

“Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on.

Then, finally, you make it to four minutes.

Hit stop. Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.

That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight. For two to four minutes, Boyd will remain conscious while the State of Alabama kills him in this way. When the gas starts flowing, he will immediately convulse. He will gasp for air. And he will thrash violently against the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological torment until he finally loses consciousness. Just short of twenty minutes later, Boyd will be declared dead.”

—Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, Boyd v. Hamm, October 23, 2025

Last October, the United States Supreme Court turned down a request from an Alabama inmate, Anthony Boyd, to delay his execution for the justices to consider whether killing him by nitrogen hypoxia would violate the Eighth Amendment’s constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Nitrogen hypoxia—an execution method developed in the late 2010s and first authorized by Oklahoma in 2015—kills by forcing a person to inhale pure nitrogen, thereby depriving the body of oxygen. It is, in plainer terms, suffocation.

The case concerned a narrow procedural question—the method by which the state may carry out an execution—not the legality of capital punishment itself. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, in its unflinching account of how a human being would be put to death, elucidates what the law often abstracts away: the death penalty is more than a policy choice or punishment—it is unadulterated violence, meticulously administered by the state. And it brings a broader reality into focus: government-sanctioned execution is not a relic of another era. It remains firmly embedded in the American justice system, still legally authorized in 27 U.S. states.

An Enduring Punishment—and an Unsettled Conscience

To be judged by a tribunal and condemned to death for one’s transgressions has been a fixture of human societies since antiquity and endures today—not just in America but in more than 55 countries across the world. One of humanity’s oldest forms of punishment, the death penalty has long been viewed as a necessary feature of a civilized society, justified by its supporters as a morally proportionate response to the most heinous, morally reprehensible crimes—an affirmation of society’s condemnation of the irreparable harm such crimes impose.

It has not, however, persisted without criticism. One of the earliest and most influential critics, Enlightenment-era philosopher Cesare Beccaria, argued in his 1764 treatise On Crimes and Punishments that executions were neither an effective deterrent nor morally defensible. And since then, prominent historical figures from Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela have advocated for the abolition of capital punishment.

Yet the practice endures, sustained by the slow pace of legal reform and by its appeal to the deeply human impulse for retribution—the desire to balance the scales and to impose finality where lesser punishments seem insufficient. That appeal to deep moral intuitions helps explain why so many Americans still support capital punishment today. Though support has fallen from roughly 80% in the mid-1990s, amid heightened fear of violent crime and a bipartisan “tough on crime” consensus, roughly 50–60% of U.S. adults still favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, as documented in decades of public opinion research by Gallup and the Pew Research Center.

Even still, it is not a position most Americans are especially proud of. Pew’s research also found that capital punishment draws significantly more support online than in telephone surveys—a phenomenon known as social desirability bias, or the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in ways they believe are more socially acceptable as opposed to what they truly believe.

But the question lingers. Why do so many Americans endorse the death penalty in the abstract, yet hesitate to defend it aloud, face to face? Perhaps the beginning of the answer lies in the fact that capital punishment is not simply a matter of policy design and effectiveness. It is an intensely moral question, too—one that uniquely resists compartmentalization. Questions of morality do not hover at the margins of the policy debate; they are embedded within it.

The Cost Consideration

First, there is the simple and dispassionate question of cost. Many proponents of capital punishment emphasize the exorbitant cost of long-term imprisonment, arguing that execution is a fiscally responsible alternative. But scores of studies (see here, here, or here) have affirmed that, for a variety of structural reasons, the death penalty is much costlier than life imprisonment.

Capital cases are, by design, inefficient. Lengthy trials, extended appeals, and special procedures built into death penalty cases make them exceedingly costly. Such procedural safeguards are not bureaucratic excess; they exist because the punishment is irrevocable. The legal system slows itself down precisely because the risk of error is so high. That caution, while necessary, carries an enormous price tag. One widely cited analysis found that each death row inmate costs roughly $1.12 million more (in 2015 dollars) than an inmate serving a comparable life sentence in the general prison population.

The result is a system that pays a premium without reliably delivering what it promises: many individuals sentenced to death are never executed. Instead, after years or decades of litigation, they die of natural causes or have their sentences reduced to life imprisonment—after the state has already incurred the inflated costs unique to capital prosecution.

What makes this arrangement especially difficult to justify is that these inflated costs do not provide much, if any, public benefit. They purchase procedural caution—an acknowledgment, embedded in law, that killing someone in the name of the state demands extraordinary care. That acknowledgment is itself revealing.

The Deterrence Myth

There is also the issue of deterrence. Proponents contend the death penalty prevents crime in the first place. But that argument has withered underneath decades of research that has found no credible evidence the death penalty reduces violent crime. States without capital punishment consistently record violent crime rates equal to—or lower than—states that retain it.

That isn’t exactly surprising. The deterrence theory assumes a level of calculation and levelheadedness that rarely exists in moments of extreme violence. Most homicides are crimes of passion or desperation, committed impulsively, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, during domestic disputes, or amid mental health crises—conditions in which distant legal consequences exert little influence over decision making. The marginal difference between life imprisonment and death is not something most offenders meaningfully weigh before acting—the certainty of punishment matters far more than its severity.

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Nor does the death penalty deliver deterrence through visibility or speed. Executions are rare, delayed, and legally obscured by years—often decades—of appeals. Whatever symbolic force they might carry is diluted by time, distance, and procedural complexity. A punishment so infrequently and unevenly applied cannot plausibly serve as a general warning to society at large.

What is striking is that this conclusion—that the death penalty does not deter crime—is not all that controversial. Americans across ideological lines have absorbed and accepted the evidence. According to Pew Research, more than six-in-ten Americans, including about half of those who support the death penalty, say it does not deter people from committing serious crimes.

If deterrence is the goal, capital punishment has proven an abject failure.

The Fallibility Dilemma

Then, there is the matter of error. In a system built by humans, certainty is always borrowed—temporary, contingent, subject to error and to time. The American criminal justice system is no different. It is fallible, prone to error even in the surest of circumstances.

Some argue that advances in modern forensics and the burden of proof are so high as to make concern about the potential for error unnecessary. On its face, such a position is not entirely implausible. But it does not withstand empirical scrutiny. Since 1973, over 200 people sentenced to death were later exonerated. That figure may be small compared to the thousands who have faced capital charges, but it is not an abstraction. It represents hundreds of individuals who stood on the brink of death on account of crimes they did not commit.

A system that can take life cannot allow for error—and yet errors happen because the American justice system, for all its virtues, cannot escape human fallibility.

Courts are not sanctuaries. They are human institutions, governed by rules and staffed by people operating under pressure and constraint: police departments under pressure to clear cases; prosecutors operating under professional incentives that, implicitly or explicitly, place weight on convictions; defense attorneys stretched too thin; jurors asked to compress an entire life into a verdict after days of testimony; judges bound by procedures that are necessary, though sometimes merciless. Even when each actor proceeds in good faith and performs their task honorably and with rigor, the system remains what it is—human, fallible, and therefore vulnerable to haste, bias, misjudgment, and chance.

The death penalty demands something more than competence; it demands near-omniscience. Not merely that the facts were right, but that everything was right—the identification, the timeline, the science, the confessions, the incentives, the witnesses, the undisclosed evidence, the defendant’s mental state, even the meaning of “beyond a reasonable doubt” in the minds of twelve jurors. And it demands that we get everything right not just once, but reliably—across decades, across counties, across election cycles, across the uneven pursuit of capital prosecution, across changing forensic standards.

That is the certainty capital punishment requires, and it is not a certainty human institutions can honestly promise.

The Ritual Beneath the Law

The French-Algerian philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, in his 1957 essay Reflections on the Guillotine (link), lays bare the brutality of execution in a way that stirs the same moral unease provoked by Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent.

Shortly after World War I, Camus recounts, his father attended the execution of a man convicted of murdering a family of farmers, including multiple children, in Algiers. Deeply appalled by the killing of children, his father vowed to attend the execution expecting the grim reassurance of justice carried out. Instead, he returned home shaken, compulsively vomiting, and unable to eat. “He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked,” Camus writes. “Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.”

That single morning, Camus writes, transformed his father’s view of capital punishment. The execution did not restore order or affirm the rule of law; it revealed something far more disturbing. Stripped of legal ritual and civic justification, the execution appeared for what it was: a deliberate, intimate act of violence, administered by the state. Camus does not argue in terms of theory or statistics. He insists instead on confronting the reality the law and its legalese can obscure—that capital punishment is not an idea or a deterrent, but a human body destroyed in the name of justice.

“When the extreme penalty simply causes vomiting on the part of the respectable citizen it is supposed to protect, how can anyone maintain that it is likely, as it ought to be, to bring more peace and order into the community?” Camus continues. “Rather, it is obviously no less repulsive than the crime, and this new murder, far from making amends for the harm done to the social body, adds a new blot to the first one.”

Indeed, capital punishment is best understood exactly as Camus conceived of it: ritualistic violence. The death penalty claims to achieve closure and finality—some moral balancing of the ledger. But violence does not launder violence; it only changes who gets to call it lawful. An execution does not resurrect the victim. It does not unbreak the family. It does not undo the years of fear or grief or absence. What it can do—what it often does—is extend the life of the crime, keeping it on a procedural ventilator through appeals, hearings, headlines, and anniversaries. The state offers “closure” and delivers a second, slower trauma: a long public countdown that forces families to rehearse the worst day of their lives again and again, until the killing is carried out in their name.

The death penalty, then, amounts to the chasing of an illusion. It chases epistemic certainty in a world that cannot supply it. It chases moral finality in a world where nothing that matters is ever that clean. It pretends we can perfect what is, at best, a managed imperfection—and that we can heal loss with another death.

In Support Of Life Without Parole

The truest mark of humility in justice is to recognize the limits of what we can know and what we can repair. A restrained society punishes decisively and protects the public—without making a sacrament out of killing, and without claiming a godlike certainty it does not, and cannot, possess.

Life without parole offers a more restrained moral posture—one that also achieves every legitimate aim of punishment. It is severe and permanent, yet restrained. It punishes without spectacle, incapacitates without imitation, and upholds an ideal that justice is about protecting the future rather than reenacting the past. It insists on accountability while refusing to surrender to vengeance. It affirms that even those who have committed the worst crimes imaginable remain human beings—culpable, dangerous, deserving of harsh punishment, but not inhuman. And crucially, it preserves the possibility, however rare, of correcting a wrongful conviction.

In a system created by human hands, wielding imperfect institutions, the death penalty asks for a certainty we do not possess in pursuit of an end we cannot achieve. Life without parole better balances our moral foundations. It protects society, ensures those who commit the gravest crimes never walk free, and avoids the irreversible injustice of wrongful execution. The death penalty may satisfy a visceral desire for retribution, but in practice—and in conscience—it asks the state, and its people, to claim a moral authority it cannot safely hold.

In the end, justice is not diminished by restraint; it finds its truest expression there.

Following the Supreme Court’s denial of a stay, the State of Alabama executed Mr. Boyd, 54, by nitrogen suffocation on October 23, 2025—the first execution in U.S. history using nitrogen hypoxia. What followed closely resembled the scenario Justice Sonia Sotomayor had warned of in dissent. Witnesses reported that nitrogen began flowing shortly after 5:55 p.m. By 5:57 p.m., Boyd’s body began reacting forcefully, straining against its restraints as his eyes rolled back and his legs lifted from the gurney. By 6:00 p.m., the convulsions had slowed, but they were replaced by prolonged, labored breathing that continued for more than fifteen minutes, each breath visibly shaking his restrained head and neck. At 6:16 p.m., Boyd was still taking deep breaths before becoming motionless several minutes later. State officials pronounced him dead at 6:33 p.m.—more than thirty-five minutes after the nitrogen gas was first administered.

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For decades, Knoxville’s housing market was defined by its relative affordability. The typical family could reasonably expect to afford a home—the quiet but powerful engine of the region’s growth. That era is over. Over the course of the past decade, and really the last five years, the balance between what homes cost and what families can afford has been fundamentally upended. The surge in prices during and after the pandemic, compounded by the sharp rise in mortgage rates, has pushed homeownership further out of reach for thousands of would-be buyers. What was once Knoxville’s economic advantage—an affordable path to the middle class—has now become one of its greatest challenges.

For some, the housing boom felt like a windfall; for others, it was a slow-motion car wreck. The good news is the boom is over—but the hangover is raging on.

Affordability Gap

Until 2022, there had never been a time in Knoxville’s history when the median sale price exceeded what the typical family could afford. Yet, as of September 2025, the median sale price exceeded the affordable home price—or the maximum price a family could afford without spending more than 30% of their income on housing—by more than $40,000. That is down from a gap of nearly $75,000 in June 2025, the largest on record.

The affordability gap is largely driven by the combined effect of rapidly rising homes prices and higher mortgage rates. Over the past three years, housing costs have grown far faster than household earnings, eroding purchasing power for both first-time buyers and move-up buyers alike. From 2010 to 2019, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate averaged just 4.1% and exceeded 5% only a handful of times—a low-cost borrowing environment that supported steady, predictable growth. But beginning in 2022, in response to the worst inflationary spike since the 1980s, tighter monetary policy pushed mortgage rates sharply higher. Since then, they’ve averaged roughly 6.4%, dramatically changing the math for would-be buyers.

Mortgage rates are forecasted to experience a slow but sustained decline over the next two years, which could help narrow the gap between what homes cost and what families can afford. In theory, a two percentage-point reduction in rates would be enough to bring affordability back within reach for many households. But in practice, such a significant drop would also unleash a surge in pent-up demand, exerting upward pressure on prices and offsetting at least part of the affordability gains. Falling rates may ease the pressure—and make for a much less anxious real estate industry—they won’t solve the underlying imbalance between supply and demand that created the gap in the first place.

Price-to-Income Ratio

Unlike the affordable vs. median home price comparison, the price-to-income ratio strips away the noise of interest rate fluctuations and demand-side subsidies, offering a more durable measure of affordability. When home prices rise significantly faster than incomes, the ratio reveals the strain that markets place on ordinary buyers, especially those trying to purchase their first home. In healthy markets, the price-to-income ratio typically hovers between 2.2 and 3.5—a level where a middle-class household can reasonably aspire to own a home without financial strain. But when the ratio exceeds 4.0, it signals growing affordability challenges.

Knoxville’s housing market for decades maintained a sense of balance, avoiding the boom-bust cycle that is common in many other cities, with the region’s price-to-income ratio hovering around 3.3 from 1980 to 2015. But that equilibrium began to shift in the mid-2010s, with the ratio inching up to 3.8 by 2020. Then came the pandemic—and with it, an unprecedented surge. By 2024, the price-to-income ratio climbed to an all-time high of 5.1. The spike was not driven by a speculative bubble or sudden collapse in wages, but by a deeper, structural imbalance: too many people chasing too few homes.

Land Prices

Why we aren’t building more $250,000 homes in East Tennessee? Land, land, land.

Land costs are one of the main drivers of housing prices—and unlike labor or materials, land is a finite resource. You can’t make more of it. Like many mid-sized metros experiencing strong population growth, Knoxville has seen land prices soar over the past decade. In 2012, the value of a quarter-acre lot in the Knoxville metro area was about $29,900, accounting for just 23.7% of a typical home’s value. By 2024, that same lot averaged $164,600, making up more than half—52.9%—of the cost of a typical home.

This rapid escalation in land values fundamentally reshapes what kinds of homes can be built, and the price appreciation among those that already exist. When the land alone costs more than $100,000, it is virtually impossible to deliver a finished home at $250,000 once construction costs, infrastructure, and regulatory expenses are factored in.

Compounding the challenge is how land is used. Local zoning policies, large minimum lot-size requirements, and infrastructure constraints effectively limit how many homes can be built on any given parcel. As a result, the high cost of land gets spread over fewer units, driving the per-home price even higher. Under present conditions, the math simply no longer works for modestly-priced housing.

Home Sales

Despite improving inventory conditions and slightly lower mortgage rates, home sales across Knoxville remain sluggish—a reflection of persistent affordability challenges and broader economic uncertainty that is keeping many potential buyers on the sidelines. While inventory has ticked up considerably and mortgage rates have inched down from their recent highs, these shifts have not been sufficient to fully offset the sharp erosion in buyer purchasing power over the past three years.

As of September, the pace of home sales has improved modestly but remains roughly 25% below its 2022 peak and about 10% lower than pre-pandemic levels. Current sales activity is hovering around 2015 levels—which was, by all accounts, a fairly strong year for the Knoxville housing market. But unlike 2015, today’s market is grappling with much higher prices and an entrenched lock-in effect, creating a stasis in which existing homeowners are reluctant to give up their lower mortgage rates, and first-time buyers struggle to qualify at current prices.

Home sales volume is poised to improve over the next two years, even if mortgage rates do not fall as quickly as some forecasters once anticipated. As new inventory continues to hit the market and incomes slowly catch up, more buyers will likely return to the market. However, sales are unlikely to surpass the feverish post-pandemic boom anytime soon. That period was defined by extraordinarily low interest rates, an influx of out-of-market buyers, and a surge in demand that pushed the market to unsustainable highs—a unique set of trends that aren’t likely to coincide again soon.

Housing Inventory

The number of homes listed for sale in the Knoxville region is appreciably higher than at any other point in the past five years, marking a notable shift from the historically tight inventory conditions that defined much of the last five years. Even so, inventory remains roughly 40% lower than it was a decade ago—despite the region experiencing sustained population growth in the intervening years.

Still, the uptick in active listings has afforded buyers much more leverage, restoring some semblance of balance to the buyer-seller relationship. Homes are, on average, staying on the market a lot longer (although a quality, well-priced home can still move quick), and price reductions are more common. Buyers who just a year or two ago faced bidding wars and opted to waived contingencies as a means to make their offer more attractive now have space to use more discretion and still be competitive.

The shift in conditions hasn’t yet materialized into a full-fledged buyer’s market, but it has helped restore a measure of equilibrium to the buyer–seller relationship. In my opinion, the additional inventory has brought a welcome moderation to what had become an unsustainably hot market—offering some relief for buyers without undermining the stability of home values. With builders ramping new home production, housing inventory should continue to grow steadily over the next five years, with growth slated to slow as mortgage rates fall. The good news is more inventory is on the way; the bad news is that it won’t be nearly enough.

Final Thoughts

No matter how you look at it, the past five years have been a remarkably turbulent period for the housing market and the broader real estate industry. Going into 2020, the housing market was well-position for strong but steady growth before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which at first caused a dramatic decline home sales and then an utter explosion of market activity. For over two years, the market was red-hot and routinely outpaced even the highest of expectations. But the boom was ultimately stopped in its tracks by a historic bout of inflation.

Adding fuel to the fire, in 2024, the National Association of Realtors agreed to a massive $418 million settlement in a class-action antitrust case alleging that NAR’s rules forced home sellers to pay inflated commissions. While the settlement did bring structural changes to how agent compensation and MLS disclosures operate, it didn’t—and won’t—bring the type of seismic change some real estate industry commenters predicted.

Even more, with the housing market hangover in full effect, NAR last week repealed its policy that required local MLSs to mandate membership in a Realtor association as a condition of access—broadly recognized as a move to avoid yet another massive antitrust suit. Under the new rules, access to an MLS “is a matter of local discretion,” so each MLS can decide whether to require belonging to a Realtor association for access. Unlike the commission settlement, this decision may in fact bring the seismic change many expected—felt more acutely by real estate practitioners than by consumers.

What’s clear today is that change is coming, both in market conditions and in the governing structure of the real estate industry itself. After all, change is inevitable.

A Note From Me:

I used to write a lot about my personal life when I was younger. But for a variety of reasons, I stopped. It is, after all, much easier to keep things to yourself and beyond the reach of others. But there’s also a quiet cost to self-containment—and something liberating about articulating your experiences and putting them out into the world. It’s an act of exposure, yes, but also of reclamation.

Since college, I’ve kept a journal filled with fragments of my life: moments I’ve tried to make sense of, questions I’ve wrestled with, small turning points that, taken together, shaped the person I am today. For years, I imagined gathering those fragments into a memoir. Perhaps that is still in the cards. But for now, I’ve decided to begin to share some of them here, in addition to my usual writing on politics, housing, and the rest.

I’ll distinguish these essays using the same name as the folder where they live, and the title I would give a memoir if I ever get around to writing one: (Re)Creating. The title is a reference to the idea that our lives are a continuous process of creating and recreating—that we are shaped not just by what happens to us, but by the ways we make sense of it and carry it forward.

I hope you find something of value within it.

There I was. Face down in the backseat of Dad’s white Ford F-150 with his hand forcing my torso into the floorboard of the back seat. Whether believed or not, his gesture created the illusion that somehow he could protect me from the man with a gun pointed directly at his chest. I looked up just once, catching only a glimpse of the black and silver handgun and the scrawny little man with his hands wrapped around its trigger.

I can’t recall if I recognized him. Maybe I did. I can’t say for sure. By then, my body was overtaken by the pounding rhythm of fight-or-flight. My heart was thumping too hard and too fast to think clearly—not because I was scared, per se, but because the intensity of the encounter grew slowly and then erupted all at once. The man with the gun had approached the truck with one of Dad’s employees—someone I had encountered many times before, usually in more amicable circumstances, and who, a few months later, would disappear after embezzling thousands of dollars from Dad’s company. Or at least that’s the story I was told.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was. Old enough to remember, but not old enough to know that it was an experience I should have told Mom about no matter how many times Dad asked me not to. He often asked me not to tell Mom things. Withholding the whole truth was a white lie after all. And a white lie was a harmless lie, he told me. Lies were okay if they didn’t hurt anyone.

Other times were more innocuous but no less unnerving for a child—like when he would lock himself in the bathroom when I spent the night. He would slip away quietly and only after my attention drifted from the living room television—where The Twilight Zone reruns played endlessly in the background—did I notice the bathroom door was closed. The exhaust fan hummed steadily, and a thin line of light seeped out around the doorframe. On the good days, he would reemerge after a few minutes. But on other days, he stayed sealed in that small, stuffy hallway bathroom for what felt like eternity. I would wait and wait. Eventually, I would knock. On the worst nights there was only silence. After enough time passed, anxiety would wash over me. I would bang on the door, begging him to emerge from the black hole that seemed to swallow him.

Alone in his living room, I would make sure the deadbolts were latched on every door. Aside from his dog, Auggie, I was entirely alone—and the weight of that silence wrapped itself around me. It was a strange, perplexing sort of abandonment. So often parents who leave do so permanently and without a notice, escaping into a new world, lost to everyone but themselves. But here, no one was lost. There was only a door—thin and tangible—between us. Knowing he was just on the other side, immersed in a world entirely apart from mine, yet unable or unwilling to be reached, made it all the more disconcerting. I couldn’t understand why he disappeared into that tiny hallway bathroom or why he wouldn’t answer my pleas—why he couldn’t offer even the smallest sound or faintest sign of life—partly because I didn’t yet understand the nature of the sickness that consumed him, or that he was sick at all.

Once it was dark, the sun having safely retreated beyond the horizon, I would retire to the guest room where I slept—its door directly across from that hallway bathroom. With Auggie curled up at the foot of the bed, I would lie there quietly, waiting, hoping to hear the soft squeak of the bathroom door as it reopened. But more often than not I’d fall asleep to silence, only to be woken the next morning by a tap on the shoulder and Dad’s smile, greeting me as if the night before never happened.

Despite whatever had occurred the night before, I loved to spend the mornings with Dad and his employees. He owned a tile company—We Tile It, a name as corny as it was endearing—that he operated out of the unfinished basement of his house. When his addiction was stable, or at least workable, it was easy to understand why his business was so successful. Dad was a deeply charming man who, despite his flaws, loved with a recklessness that made you feel like the center of the world. He boasted that he had never lost an estimate—that every person he quoted ended up choosing him. Everyone knew that wasn’t literally true. But he told the story so easily, with such sparkle in his eyes, that disbelief felt almost beside the point. He made you want to believe it was true. Dad was also wonderfully quirky. Every one of his company’s vans had “You’re Behind the Best” printed in block letters across the back doors—a line he thought was equal parts clever and true and, at the very least, always something to talk about. It was so perfectly him: a mix of pride and humor, the kind that made people roll their eyes and root for him at the same time.

His devotion to his employees was equally admirable. At the height of his business, he had a dozen or so employees and each morning they would arrive around seven in the morning to that dark, musty basement where Dad had spent the early morning hours preparing a breakfast of eggs, sausage, biscuits, and coffee. His guys, as he called them, would spend the next hour sitting around a dusty laminate table talking about anything and everything. Both Dad and his employees made sure that little Lowell, as they liked to call me, felt like I was just one of the guys. And I believed I was. Those mornings were a sort of contradiction, a maze of lessons both virtuous and unseemly. It was where I first learned the F-word—not what it meant exactly but when and how to use it. Yet it was also where I learned the quiet value of caring for the people around you—not perfectly but as best you can.

That part of the morning I loved. But as the clock struck 8 a.m., the trouble usually began. That was when the guys would scatter to their work vans and converge at the gas station for their weekly fill-up. I would wander around the parking lot, chatting with them as they waited for Dad to pre-pay the pumps. Then, one by one, they would drive off to their job sites for the day. Once it was just me and him, I often stayed in the truck while Dad went back inside the gas station. He would return with a plastic bag of snacks and drinks for the day, a Yoo-hoo for me and an energy drink for him. He often left his drink in the cupholder while he filled up his truck. The nosy child I was couldn’t resist inspecting it, hoping it was something I’d like, only to find a warning label stamped on the side cautioning against drinking alcoholic beverages during pregnancy.

Some of these days would start out perfectly ordinary. We would drive from job site to job site checking in on project until, at some point, I would notice a subtle but distinct change in his demeanor. Whether it was intuition or simple curiosity, I scoured his truck these days looking for a clue and almost always found one—another can with a warning label or an empty airplane bottle stuffed under the driver’s seat.

Each time, I confronted him, and like any child would, I accepted his answers without suspicion. The first time he told me it was just a mistake—that he didn’t know the drink had alcohol in it. But as it happened again and again, his story changed: all drinks, even the nonalcoholic ones, have warning labels on them, he said. And when on a particularly fraught day I found a fifth of vodka wrapped in a brown paper bag under the passenger seat, he insisted the mechanic who had worked on his truck the prior day had left it there. I believed him, if only because it is in a child’s nature to believe their parents. But even as he insisted he was telling the truth, he still asked that I not tell Mom. And I was too young and naive to know that the truth, when it is innocent, is rarely something that needs to be hidden.

That I successfully kept these moments to myself still conjures up a weird sense of pride. I was not a child built for silence. However mundane or embarrassing, I was always eager to narrate the small dramas of my life, much to the chagrin of my family at times. But in these circumstances, Dad’s pitch for my silence was compelling. If I told Mom about our dodgy encounter with the gun—or the countless times I caught him drinking in the car—she wouldn’t let me see him anymore. It wasn’t a threat so much as a subtle statement of fact, one that seemed almost to hang in the air between us. He was right. So I learned, in that small but irreversible way, how to keep a secret.

That was part of the deal to have a relationship with Dad: the quiet withholding of things I knew, even then, I shouldn’t keep to myself. Those sketchy moments—things I could never tell Mom about—were an ever-present feature of time with him. And whether intended or not, his repeated requests for silence were a lesson: nothing in life is free. Every experience exacts a price, and to live is to engage in a perpetual cycle of giving and receiving. Everything of value demands something in return. The hardships we endure—whether forced upon us or of our own making—exact their toll. Even good things, I learned, come with terms.

I didn’t understand it then but those moments became the architecture of our relationship—built not on trust but a shared understanding of what could and could not be spoken aloud. Silence was a cost of being a part of his world. Because to let someone else in would have meant losing him, or at least losing the version of him I idolized—the one who picked me up on weekends, who let me take the steering wheel of his truck on the backroads, who made ordinary life feel invigorating.

A child will accept almost any bargain if it means keeping love intact. And Dad’s love, however complicated or costly, was all-encompassing. That is the irony. For a long time, I tried to separate the disparate pieces of him—the good father from the broken one, the way he made me laugh from the way he taught me to keep secrets I shouldn’t have had to carry.

But what I’ve come to understand is that people are rarely one thing. Every human, in one way or another, is a collection of contradictions—kindness and cruelty, generosity and selfishness, light and darkness. That is what makes the human experience so complicated: it refuses to be neat or to let us hold only one version of the people we love. Dad’s flaws didn’t erase his kindness any more than his love absolved the pain he left behind. They existed together—contradictory, yes, but inseparable. That realization rests at the heart of what it means to love anyone. To love someone fully requires holding disparate truths together: to see fault lines without letting them occlude everything else.

That, I think, is the light Baldwin was speaking of: a love that lives in tension, that keeps searching for the good not because it is all that exists but because it is still there—at times unseen, dimmed by weather and fatigue, yet still there, like how the sun never ceases to shine even when the clouds obscure it from view. That light lives in every human being, waiting to be rediscovered each day, remembered and practiced again and again, lest it fade from view.

A Note From Me:

I used to write a lot about my personal life when I was younger. But for a variety of reasons, I stopped. It is, after all, much easier to keep things to yourself and beyond the reach of others. But there’s also a quiet cost to self-containment—and something liberating about articulating your experiences and putting them out into the world. It’s an act of exposure, yes, but also of reclamation.

Since college, I’ve kept a journal filled with fragments of my life: moments I’ve tried to make sense of, questions I’ve wrestled with, small turning points that, taken together, shaped the person I am today. For years, I imagined gathering those fragments into a memoir. Perhaps that is still in the cards. But for now, I’ve decided to begin to share some of them here, in addition to my usual writing on politics, housing, and the rest.

I’ll distinguish these essays using the same name as the folder where they live, and the title I would give a memoir if I ever get around to writing one: (Re)Creating. The title is a reference to the idea that our lives are a continuous process of creating and recreating—that we are shaped not just by what happens to us, but by the ways we make sense of it and carry it forward.

I hope you find something of value within it.

There I was. Face down in the backseat of Dad’s white Ford F-150 with his hand forcing my torso into the floorboard of the back seat. Whether believed or not, his gesture created the illusion that somehow he could protect me from the man with a gun pointed directly at his chest. I looked up just once, catching only a glimpse of the black and silver handgun and the scrawny little man with his hands wrapped around its trigger.

I can’t recall if I recognized him. Maybe I did. I can’t say for sure. By then, my body was overtaken by the pounding rhythm of fight-or-flight. My heart was thumping too hard and too fast to think clearly—not because I was scared, per se, but because the intensity of the encounter grew slowly and then erupted all at once. The man with the gun had approached the truck with one of Dad’s employees—someone I had encountered many times before, usually in more amicable circumstances, and who, a few months later, would disappear after embezzling thousands of dollars from Dad’s company. Or at least that’s the story I was told.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was. Old enough to remember, but not old enough to know that it was an experience I should have told Mom about no matter how many times Dad asked me not to. He often asked me not to tell Mom things. Withholding the whole truth was a white lie after all. And a white lie was a harmless lie, he told me. Lies were okay if they didn’t hurt anyone.

Other times were more innocuous but no less unnerving for a child—like when he would lock himself in the bathroom when I spent the night. He would slip away quietly and only after my attention drifted from the living room television—where The Twilight Zone reruns played endlessly in the background—did I notice the bathroom door was closed. The exhaust fan hummed steadily, and a thin line of light seeped out around the doorframe. On the good days, he would reemerge after a few minutes. But on other days, he stayed sealed in that small, stuffy hallway bathroom for what felt like eternity. I would wait and wait. Eventually, I would knock. On the worst nights there was only silence. After enough time passed, anxiety would wash over me. I would bang on the door, begging him to emerge from the black hole that seemed to swallow him.

Alone in his living room, I would make sure the deadbolts were latched on every door. Aside from his dog, Auggie, I was entirely alone—and the weight of that silence wrapped itself around me. It was a strange, perplexing sort of abandonment. So often parents who leave do so permanently and without a notice, escaping into a new world, lost to everyone but themselves. But here, no one was lost. There was only a door—thin and tangible—between us. Knowing he was just on the other side, immersed in a world entirely apart from mine, yet unable or unwilling to be reached, made it all the more disconcerting. I couldn’t understand why he disappeared into that tiny hallway bathroom or why he wouldn’t answer my pleas—why he couldn’t offer even the smallest sound or faintest sign of life—partly because I didn’t yet understand the nature of the sickness that consumed him, or that he was sick at all.

Once it was dark, the sun having safely retreated beyond the horizon, I would retire to the guest room where I slept—its door directly across from that hallway bathroom. With Auggie curled up at the foot of the bed, I would lie there quietly, waiting, hoping to hear the soft squeak of the bathroom door as it reopened. But more often than not I’d fall asleep to silence, only to be woken the next morning by a tap on the shoulder and Dad’s smile, greeting me as if the night before never happened.

Despite whatever had occurred the night before, I loved to spend the mornings with Dad and his employees. He owned a tile company—We Tile It, a name as corny as it was endearing—that he operated out of the unfinished basement of his house. When his addiction was stable, or at least workable, it was easy to understand why his business was so successful. Dad was a deeply charming man who, despite his flaws, loved with a recklessness that made you feel like the center of the world. He boasted that he had never lost an estimate—that every person he quoted ended up choosing him. Everyone knew that wasn’t literally true. But he told the story so easily, with such sparkle in his eyes, that disbelief felt almost beside the point. He made you want to believe it was true. Dad was also wonderfully quirky. Every one of his company’s vans had “You’re Behind the Best” printed in block letters across the back doors—a line he thought was equal parts clever and true and, at the very least, always something to talk about. It was so perfectly him: a mix of pride and humor, the kind that made people roll their eyes and root for him at the same time.

His devotion to his employees was equally admirable. At the height of his business, he had a dozen or so employees and each morning they would arrive around seven in the morning to that dark, musty basement where Dad had spent the early morning hours preparing a breakfast of eggs, sausage, biscuits, and coffee. His guys, as he called them, would spend the next hour sitting around a dusty laminate table talking about anything and everything. Both Dad and his employees made sure that little Lowell, as they liked to call me, felt like I was just one of the guys. And I believed I was. Those mornings were a sort of contradiction, a maze of lessons both virtuous and unseemly. It was where I first learned the F-word—not what it meant exactly but when and how to use it. Yet it was also where I learned the quiet value of caring for the people around you—not perfectly but as best you can.

That part of the morning I loved. But as the clock struck 8 a.m., the trouble usually began. That was when the guys would scatter to their work vans and converge at the gas station for their weekly fill-up. I would wander around the parking lot, chatting with them as they waited for Dad to pre-pay the pumps. Then, one by one, they would drive off to their job sites for the day. Once it was just me and him, I often stayed in the truck while Dad went back inside the gas station. He would return with a plastic bag of snacks and drinks for the day, a Yoo-hoo for me and an energy drink for him. He often left his drink in the cupholder while he filled up his truck. The nosy child I was couldn’t resist inspecting it, hoping it was something I’d like, only to find a warning label stamped on the side cautioning against drinking alcoholic beverages during pregnancy.

Some of these days would start out perfectly ordinary. We would drive from job site to job site checking in on project until, at some point, I would notice a subtle but distinct change in his demeanor. Whether it was intuition or simple curiosity, I scoured his truck these days looking for a clue and almost always found one—another can with a warning label or an empty airplane bottle stuffed under the driver’s seat.

Each time, I confronted him, and like any child would, I accepted his answers without suspicion. The first time he told me it was just a mistake—that he didn’t know the drink had alcohol in it. But as it happened again and again, his story changed: all drinks, even the nonalcoholic ones, have warning labels on them, he said. And when on a particularly fraught day I found a fifth of vodka wrapped in a brown paper bag under the passenger seat, he insisted the mechanic who had worked on his truck the prior day had left it there. I believed him, if only because it is in a child’s nature to believe their parents. But even as he insisted he was telling the truth, he still asked that I not tell Mom. And I was too young and naive to know that the truth, when it is innocent, is rarely something that needs to be hidden.

That I successfully kept these moments to myself still conjures up a weird sense of pride. I was not a child built for silence. However mundane or embarrassing, I was always eager to narrate the small dramas of my life, much to the chagrin of my family at times. But in these circumstances, Dad’s pitch for my silence was compelling. If I told Mom about our dodgy encounter with the gun—or the countless times I caught him drinking in the car—she wouldn’t let me see him anymore. It wasn’t a threat so much as a subtle statement of fact, one that seemed almost to hang in the air between us. He was right. So I learned, in that small but irreversible way, how to keep a secret.

That was part of the deal to have a relationship with Dad: the quiet withholding of things I knew, even then, I shouldn’t keep to myself. Those sketchy moments—things I could never tell Mom about—were an ever-present feature of time with him. And whether intended or not, his repeated requests for silence were a lesson: nothing in life is free. Every experience exacts a price, and to live is to engage in a perpetual cycle of giving and receiving. Everything of value demands something in return. The hardships we endure—whether forced upon us or of our own making—exact their toll. Even good things, I learned, come with terms.

I didn’t understand it then but those moments became the architecture of our relationship—built not on trust but a shared understanding of what could and could not be spoken aloud. Silence was a cost of being a part of his world. Because to let someone else in would have meant losing him, or at least losing the version of him I idolized—the one who picked me up on weekends, who let me take the steering wheel of his truck on the backroads, who made ordinary life feel invigorating.

A child will accept almost any bargain if it means keeping love intact. And Dad’s love, however complicated or costly, was all-encompassing. That is the irony. For a long time, I tried to separate the disparate pieces of him—the good father from the broken one, the way he made me laugh from the way he taught me to keep secrets I shouldn’t have had to carry.

But what I’ve come to understand is that people are rarely one thing. Every human, in one way or another, is a collection of contradictions—kindness and cruelty, generosity and selfishness, light and darkness. That is what makes the human experience so complicated: it refuses to be neat or to let us hold only one version of the people we love. Dad’s flaws didn’t erase his kindness any more than his love absolved the pain he left behind. They existed together—contradictory, yes, but inseparable. That realization rests at the heart of what it means to love anyone. To love someone fully requires holding disparate truths together: to see fault lines without letting them occlude everything else.

That, I think, is the light Baldwin was speaking of: a love that lives in tension, that keeps searching for the good not because it is all that exists but because it is still there—at times unseen, dimmed by weather and fatigue, yet still there, like how the sun never ceases to shine even when the clouds obscure it from view. That light lives in every human being, waiting to be rediscovered each day, remembered and practiced again and again, lest it fade from view.

This Tuesday, City of Knoxville voters will determine the fate of Mayor Indya Kincannon’s proposal to increase the local option sales tax to fund a range of legislative priorities, from affordable housing to new sidewalks and road paving. If approved, the sales tax rate within the city would increase from 9.25% to 9.75% — generating an estimated $47 million in additional tax revenue each year, or roughly $235 million over the next five years.

With Election Day approaching, here are a few observations about the politics of the sales tax referendum—and how the vote might turn out.

A Stronger-Than-Expected Pro-Tax Campaign

By most conventional measures, the campaign in support of the tax increase—operating under the banner Neighbors for Knoxville—has been surprisingly strong, despite having been launched just a few months ago. The group has run a message-focused, data-driven campaign emphasizing that the revenue would stay local and fund visible improvements to city infrastructure. Their pitch frames the tax as an investment in the city’s future and overall quality of life.

Unlike the campaign in support of the recent city charter amendment, which relied on endorsements from city officials, and failed narrowly in 2024, the pro-tax campaign has embraced a more bottom-up approach, seeking endorsements from everyday citizens. Its social media feeds have been filled with dozens of short, testimonial-style videos and posts: small business owners, teachers, retirees, and community leaders explaining why they support the measure in their own words. In my opinion, this has been the most effective aspect of the pro-tax campaign. By broadening the cast of messengers and grounding the campaign in personal stories, the messaging comes across as approachable and relentlessly local—and that authenticity may be its greatest asset.

But a well-crafted message can only go so far if voters don’t quite know what it’s attached to. In what is, in my view, a major strategic error, the pro-tax group has leaned heavily into messaging eliciting support for the Neighborhood Investment Plan—i.e., the plan outlining how additional tax revenue would be spent—sometimes distributing materials that don’t even mention the words “sales tax” at all. While it’s understandable to feel uneasy about leading with a tax increase—an issue that naturally invites skepticism—the ballot itself asks voters whether they are for or against raising the sales tax, not whether they support a neighborhood investment plan. The approach is most evident in the group’s yard signs, which say “Vote FOR Knoxville” but make no mention of the “referendum” or “sales tax.”

Inevitably, there will be voters who do not make the connection between the two. This is a particular risk among those who vote regularly but only casually follow local politics—a not insignificant share of the electorate. As a fellow local politico said to me a few weeks ago, “You definitely live in a bubble if you know what the neighborhood investment plan is.”

By focusing so heavily on how the money would be spent, the campaign has made a clear case for what the tax would fund—but hasn’t necessarily answered the “why now” part of the “why this, why now?” question. Knoxville’s finances are relatively stable, and the city is not facing a fiscal cliff or looming crisis. Supporters have argued that the city’s needs are urgent and the costs of delay high, but that argument hasn’t always been front and center in their messaging. In an economic climate still defined by inflation and cost-of-living pressures, persuading voters that this is the right moment—not just the right idea—is a tough sell.

Outside of messaging, the pro-tax campaign has trounced its opposition in fundraising, bringing in over $120,000 since July. However, the massive fundraising haul is hardly a sign of widespread grassroots enthusiasm. Six individual donors accounted for more than 80%—or roughly $100,000—of that total, including a $50,000 contribution from philanthropist and real estate developer Phil Lawson. Of course, money is money regardless of its origins. But the fundraising total—though noteworthy—really doesn’t tell us much, if anything, about support for the referendum among the typical voter.

The Opposition Has An Easier Task

Opposition groups, while less organized and far less resourced, have found traction with a simple, intuitive counter message: that Knoxville already has the tools it needs, and that a tax hike would disproportionately burden working families. And in the wake of the steepest inflation in forty years, that argument has power. Recent survey data by Gallup and others show a majority of Americans believe their financial situation is getting worse, and nearly every measure of consumer sentiment is near an all-time low.

While there has been little coordinated spending on the “no” side—likely less than $40,000 once all is said and done—skepticism often requires no campaign at all. Sometimes inertia is the most powerful opposition of all.

Still, opponents haven’t been uniformly effective in how they’ve framed their case. Some have focused their criticism on the spending plan itself—a tactical misstep, given that most of what the new revenue would fund is broadly popular. Few Knoxville voters object to paving roads, building sidewalks, or investing in affordable housing. The more pertinent question—and the one that truly animates this debate—is whether raising the sales tax is the right vehicle to fund those priorities, and whether now is the right time to do so.

In that sense, some opponents have undercut their own argument. To the extent that they’ve dismissed initiatives like affordable housing as unnecessary, they risk alienating voters who agree on the ends, even if they disagree on the means. The most compelling case against the referendum isn’t that the city’s goals are misplaced—it’s that the method and the timing is.

Higher-Than-Expected Turnout So Far

Early voting has been modestly higher than in past elections, which tends to benefit the opposition. “No” voters show up; “yes” voters have to be mobilized. That’s the structural reality the pro-tax campaign is up against.

So, in that sense, the higher-than-expected voter turnout so far isn’t exactly good news for proponents, as the uptick is likely attributable to more voters showing up to vote against the tax increase. Voters seldomly get excited to vote in favor of higher taxes, even when the revenue would fund things they care about. After all, there’s a reason why most politicians across the country—including Democrats and progressives—run campaigns premised on lowering taxes on the middle-class.

Even if the higher turnout is being driven by more centrist or left-leaning voters—those most amenable to supporting a tax increase—the pro-tax camp still faces a practical challenge: the ballot question itself. As required by state law, the question offers no context about how the new revenue would be used. It simply reads:

“Shall the two and one-quarter percent (2.25%) local option sales tax rate currently levied throughout Knox County be increased to two and three-quarters percent (2.75%) in the City of Knoxville?”

That matters a lot. Most voters are instinctively wary of raising taxes, particularly when they’re asked to approve a tax increase without knowing how the additional revenue would be spent. Indeed, one of the central arguments from proponents is that context changes minds: ‘once voters learn what the revenue would support, they’re far more likely to think the tax increase is a good idea and worth voting for.’ But that requires reaching voters before they get to the ballot box. Higher turnout, then, means the campaign must reach more voters in a limited amount of time. That’s why higher turnout—even if skewed toward a generally favorable voter base—is a downside risk for the pro-tax effort.

Should the referendum fail, it will be fair to question why the proposal wasn’t introduced earlier, when a longer runway might have allowed for a more effective campaign.

By The Numbers: A Narrow Path-to-Victory

Over the past five years, I’ve been involved in numerous polls examining city voters’ views on a wide range of policy issues. Whether surveying residents, registered voters, or likely voters, the political makeup of the city electorate has remained remarkably stable: roughly 55% Democrat, 30% Republican, and 15% independent.

If that distribution still holds—and recent election results suggest it does—the sales tax referendum will likely need the support of at least two-thirds of Democrats, a majority of independents, and around 15% of Republicans in order to pass. And even then, the proposal could still fall short.

That’s why, for all the ground the campaign has gained, the underlying math remains daunting. While garnering the support of two-thirds of Democrats is usually a forgone conclusion for a Democrat-aligned issue in the city, the sales tax referendum has elicited a significant amount of progressive pushback, driven by concerns that the increase is regressive and would fall hardest on lower-income households—concerns that have also featured prominently in the anti-tax messaging from the political right. Supporters counter that argument by noting the proposal doesn’t apply to groceries, making it less regressive than critics claim. It’s a fair and factual point, but politically, it’s a defensive one—and in any campaign, you rarely win the argument when you’re playing defense.

That tension makes the referendum somewhat unusual: opposition isn’t limited to predictable ideological lines. Conservatives oppose the measure as government overreach; progressives see it as inequitable; and more moderate voters aren’t at all motivated. The campaign’s challenge, then, is not simply to sell the benefits of new revenue, but to persuade a skeptical electorate that this particular tool—an increase in the sales tax—is both necessary and fair.

The Final Days

As Election Day approaches, the pro-tax campaign is hoping its closing message—one focused on local control and tangible benefits—will resonate with enough moderate and independent voters to overcome a reflexive resistance to raising taxes. But money and a robust ground game can only carry a campaign so far.

What seems to be missing is enthusiasm. Public opposition has been limited—a few yard signs and not much in the way of an organized campaign—but there also hasn’t been a groundswell of passion in support of measure either. The pro-tax campaign has managed to make its case, but with a short runway, it remains to be seen whether they’ve convincingly answered the question: why this, and why now?

That’s the paradox of politics: you can make a logical argument, but winning often requires an emotional one. And “trust us with more money” rarely stirs the soul. In a low-turnout environment, that apathy can—and likely will—prove fatal.

If the referendum passes, it will mark one of the most significant political victories in the city’s history—and I’ll be the first to admit the pro-tax campaign defied the odds. If it fails, it will have been the confluence of a campaign afforded too little time it make its case, an overzealous attempt to raise taxes in a faltering economy, and the enduring difficulty of asking voters to tax themselves.

Either way, Tuesday’s outcome will reveal more about Knoxville’s political landscape than its finances.

The word “lobbyist” has become shorthand for everything people distrust about politics. It conjures images of backroom deals and wealthy interests buying influence at the expense of ordinary citizens. But that stereotype decidedly misses the point.

At its core, lobbying is simply organized advocacy. It’s how groups of people—whether businesses, nonprofits, labor unions, or community organizations—translate their concerns into the political process. A neighborhood association pushing for traffic calming or changes to stormwater rules, an environmental group pressing for stronger stormwater rules, a small business coalition advocating for tax relief: all of that is lobbying. And in many cases, it’s only through professional advocates that these groups are able to navigate complex policy processes and make their voices heard.

Lobbyists also serve an informational role. Legislators and city council members have finite time and limited staff. A good lobbyist can distill complicated issues, explain the impact of a proposed ordinance, and point out potential unintended consequences. That doesn’t mean elected officials should take their arguments at face value—but it does mean that lobbyists are often a critical source of subject-matter expertise. For instance, when government makes decisions about healthcare, it only makes sense to include doctors and healthcare providers (or their representatives) in the decision-making process.

There’s also a practical truth: without lobbyists, decision-making would tilt even more heavily toward those with time, money, and connections. Professional advocacy helps level the playing field by giving groups that don’t have direct access to policymakers a way to be heard. For example, nonprofits and civic organizations frequently rely on lobbyists not to buy influence but to make sure their missions are understood in the policymaking process.

Of course, not all lobbying is virtuous. Money can warp the democratic process and influence can be abused. Done badly, lobbying corrodes trust. Done well, it helps decision-makers craft better, more informed policy. That’s why lobbying itself is not the problem—it’s a neutral tool. The real question is how transparent and accountable the process is, and whether the public can see who is advocating for what.

At the federal and state levels, this is standard practice. In Tennessee, anyone who spends more than $100 in a six-month period attempting to influence legislative or executive action at the state level must register with the Tennessee Ethics Commission. Their clients, expenditures, and activities are all a matter of public record. Congress requires even stricter disclosures, with lobbyists filing quarterly reports on their work.

Here in Knoxville, though, no such rules or regulations exist. Lobbyists who seek to influence City Council, County Commission, or the mayor’s office don’t have to register. They don’t have to disclose who they’re representing. And there isn’t a clearly defined set of rules or code of ethics governing what is and isn’t acceptable. In practice, the only limits are those set by personal discretion and the law—and that leaves quite a bit of space in between.

That doesn’t mean the City-County Building is replete with shadowy powerbrokers, or that there’s any evidence to suggest Knoxville has a lobbying problem that needs an urgent fix. As a former local lobbyist in Knoxville, I have firsthand knowledge. Special interest groups—at least in a traditional sense—have a far more limited influence on local government than people often assume. Knoxville politics tends to be driven less by professional lobbyists and more by the everyday dynamics of governing: neighborhood concerns, budget constraints, and the push and pull of local priorities like schools and infrastructure.

Most “lobbying” in Knoxville happens out in the open. Developers (or, more commonly, their lawyers) meet with planning staff and present projects at zoning hearings. Neighborhood associations turn out at Council meetings to support or oppose ordinances. Business groups press for policy changes that spur growth and development. Unions advocate for organized labor in big public projects. All of this is healthy, expected, and usually conducted in full public view.

But the absence of any rules governing lobbying does leave a gap. It blurs the line between ordinary citizen advocacy and professional influence work. And it creates a perception problem: in a time when trust in government is already fragile, the idea that someone could be paid to sway city or county government without any disclosure undermines confidence—even if the actual influence is limited.

But in politics, perception can be reality.

That’s why the City of Knoxville and Knox County should, at the very least, consider adopting an ordinance to regulate lobbying and establish a simple registration requirement—narrowly tailored, modeled on other cities, and written to avoid sweeping in ordinary residents. Professional advocates who are compensated to influence city or county policy would disclose who they represent, what issues they’re working on, and how much they spent doing it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Plenty of cities already do this, and their rules offer useful examples that could be simplified or expanded upon.

Nashville requires lobbyists to register if they’re paid specifically to influence Metro government, but exempts unpaid volunteers and grassroots advocates. Denver has a similar system, with thresholds that prevent one-off conversations or citizen testimony from being considered lobbying, while Miami-Dade has one of the most detailed, onerous systems in the country, requiring registration for individual issues and detailed breakdowns of lobbying-related expenses.

Knoxville could easily borrow from these models to craft something that fits our scale: minimal in scope, easy to administer, and clear in its purpose.

What Exactly Counts as Lobbying?

Not every conversation or email with an elected official is lobbying. Most cities that regulate lobbying draw a clear line between professional lobbyists and ordinary citizen advocates.

Lobbying usually means being paid to influence policy. If you’re compensated by a client, company, or organization to shape legislation, budgets, contracts, or regulations, you’re a lobbyist.

• Grassroots advocacy is exempt. Neighborhood groups, churches, nonprofits, or individual residents who contact officials on their own behalf are usually not considered lobbyists.

• Thresholds prevent overreach. Many cities set dollar or time minimums (e.g., spending more than $100, or engaging in lobbying more than a set number of hours per year) before registration kicks in.

Would such a reform upend local politics? Almost certainly not.

There’s no evidence to suggest Knoxville has a lobbying problem that needs an urgent fix. But requiring lobbyists to register and disclose lobbying expenses would be a modest, if mostly symbolic, step toward greater transparency in a time of proliferating distrust. And while it may be symbolic, symbols matter. They reinforce norms and set expectations. They tell citizens that their local government is not afraid of sunlight.

There’s another reason this conversation is worth having: Knoxville is growing. Local government decisions on development, housing, infrastructure, and public safety are only becoming more consequential. Growth inevitably attracts more attention from organizations with resources to invest in advocacy. That doesn’t mean outside interests will take over, but it does mean the stakes are rising.

A simple registration and disclosure system won’t change much in the near term, but it will ensure that influence is visible—and give citizens an idea of how much money is being used to influence decisions that will shape Knoxville’s future.

In my view, a simple system requires collecting just a few key data points:

1. General Information about the Lobbyist: Name, contact information, and whether they are an individual or part of a firm.

2. Client Information: The person, business, or organization on whose behalf the lobbyist is working.

3. Scope of Representation: A brief description of the issue(s), ordinance(s), or policy areas the lobbyist is seeking to influence.

4. Financial Disclosure: Disclosure of political contributions on behalf of a client or on the lobbyist’s own behalf.

In the end, adopting a lobbyist registration requirement would be less about policing bad actors than about affirming democratic values. Even if lobbying has limited sway at the local level, citizens deserve to know who and how much money is deployed to shape decisions that affect their city. A modest disclosure requirement won’t transform our politics, but it would make them just a little more transparent—and that’s worth something.

Disclosure: I previously worked as a local lobbyist in Knoxville, but I am no longer compensated to lobby on behalf of any person or organization on issues in the City of Knoxville or Knox County.