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 yet, I’d encourage you to start there—it makes Part II make a lot more sense.

It is hard to say what turns ordinary worry into panic, or what unseen line the mind crosses before fear takes up 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 as dusk falls—claiming its place as though it had always belonged, until panic begins to speak for the body, and the body mistakes it for a command.

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 all-consuming. It can arrive anywhere—at a movie theater, in an Uber, during a meeting, after waking from a nap. There is no reliable trigger, no clear warning. Only the sudden, unmistakable sense that something inside has gone awry.

As an elementary school kid, I yearned to be with Dad—to feel the unmistakable bond between father and child. Yet even then, my body knew something my mind did not.

For most of childhood, or at least the part I remember, my parents were separated, and I lived full-time with my mother. 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 beat so loudly I could hear it in my ears, and I was overcome by a lightheaded sensation in my chest, as if the air itself had thinned. It is a very particular feeling—panic, that is. The chest grows heavy, almost exhausted. The stomach twists into knots, the insides churning to the rhythm of tachycardia. The nose and mouth feel 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 my mother’s office after school, acting as though 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 running 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. And knowing he was there—not just on his way, but there—only led my body to revolt even more, as if some hidden alarm had been struck, warning me of a danger I didn’t yet know existed. Was I sick? Was it food poisoning, 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 my father; I longed to spend time with him. And yet, somewhere deep within the hidden chambers of the mind, I understood that to be with him was to step onto uncertain ground. One could never be certain which version of Dad would arrive—sometimes tender, sometimes volatile, and often—too often—never quite the version of him I hoped for.

No one teaches a child how to reconcile 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 long before their brains mature in full. They know in their muscles, in their breath, in the tightening of their gut. They know in the silence between words, in the glaring eyes of a parent, in the trembling of their hands. 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 live without it. Love, tangled and unadorned, can wound as faithfully as it warms.

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

The doctors say it activates the parasympathetic nervous system—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 a science-based method, a way to slow the pulse and 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 the godless, it feels like a kind of prayer. It’s 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, no 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 East Tennessee Children’s Hospital for blood tests. The tests came back perfectly normal. What plagued me was something lab results could not detect. And 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, tried to move through the world as if I were like everyone else. But it became a small mystery among the 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—until bedtime crept close and panic began to gather within me, silent but merciless.

While my friends played video games or drifted asleep, I hid in the bathroom, calling my mother in a trembling voice, begging her to come get me. 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 breath sharp, 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 or hit tennis balls against the garage door, 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, practical tone reserved for children who refuse to see reason.

Yet, the thought of being alone inside our house—of being enclosed by its walls, unreachable and unheard—felt far more threatening than anything that could meet me in the open air. Why I felt this way is something I still don’t fully understand. But I’ve come to recognize that 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.

During this time, I was scared almost constantly. On numerous mornings, I would slip through the shared bathroom into the next room to lay on the carpet floor between my brother’s 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 behind my brother and the door. My brother was a menace to me growing up, and took delight in getting on my nerves any and every way possible. He was an endless source of small, petty miseries. Yet his adoration for me was unwavering and in moments like these—and in moments when my fear was not imagined but real—he was someone I hid behind instinctively.

That fear followed me in other moments, too. One weekend I was home alone for the day, not expecting anyone home until 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 wandered—uneasy, alert, listening for every sigh of the house, every creak, every gust of wind. For hours, I startled at shadows, mistaking a gust against the window for an intruder. Then came the sound I had feared all morning: the giggle of the front door. A metallic tremor. Someone trying to get in.

I stepped behind the wall of the adjacent room, watching the door handle jerk and twist as though someone were working a lockpick. 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. But then the door popped open—hinges releasing, 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 80-pound body could gather. I heard a scream—a sharp, startled pain—and when I pressed my face to the narrow window beside the door, a dark-haired man was stepping away from the door. And then I began to recognize a voice. When he finally turned around, clutching his wrist, I saw my oldest brother staring back at me—his eyes filled with a mixture of shock and fury.

Fear does strange things to the body. It does not ask your permission. And when terror rises high enough, when it floods every aspect of your mind, the body lets go. Non-essential functions fall away; control dissolves. So it wasn’t until I unlocked the door and let my brother inside, when the tide of panic began to slow, that I realized I had peed myself as I had charged the door.

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. It is the body’s oldest instinct speaking in the only language it knows: 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 the body letting go in those moments when their courage demands more of them than their bodies can bear. The body makes its own decisions long before the mind can form a thought. We all carry that same ancient reflex.

At first, my brother was furious—understandably, since I had slammed his wrist in a door—but he ultimately saw the wreckage of my fear for what it was. Later, he told me that what I did was, in its own way, brave.

What I did not yet understand—what I would not understand for years—was 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 unsophisticated, 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.

One of the cruelest features of Dad’s addiction was his ability to vanish, slipping into silence for days at a time. I would call over and over. Each time my call went unanswered tightened a knot of fear inside me. At last, after a couple of days with no communication, I asked my mother 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 sat in its usual place, unmoved, indifferent. I stepped out into the winter cold and knocked on the front door, listening to the hollow echo of my own insistence. Still, nothing. So I did what I had done too many times before when he’d locked himself out, or when I needed something from the house and he wasn’t home: I crawled through the dog door into the finished garage upstairs, the small passage I had long ago learned to navigate.

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 his dog, Auggie, greeted me with a gentleness that made the silence feel all the more ominous. I walked down the dark hallway to the master bedroom: empty, save for the usual heap of unclean clothes on the bed. The living room was the same—vacant but for the flicker of King of the Hill playing on mute, as though the house were trying to impersonate life in Dad’s absence.

At last, I 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, promising he’d be right back. I cracked open the door. In the darkness I could make out the faint outline of a body on the bed. I stepped inside, 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, screaming—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. The closest comparison I could summon was the chainsaw-wielding man in a haunted corn maze, except this was worse—far worse—because here there were no actors, no boundaries between the terror and the truth. Dad never hurt me; and I never honestly feared that he would. But his display of pure, unadulterated anger was unnerving.

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, its resistance for betrayal. I wanted my fear—my anxiety—to be an error, something to be corrected, silenced, 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, however briefly, when the world feels unmoored. How to find small islands of quiet even when certainty is nowhere to be found. This, too, is an inheritance—less visible, less 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, not to deny the darkness that shaped us, but to listen more carefully to what that darkness was trying to teach. To bear the light without pretending it was found easily, or without a cost. To recognize that panic, for all its cruelty, can be—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 had been 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 swelled slowly at first 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 much 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 he told me.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when this happened. Old enough to remember, but not old enough to know that it was an experience I should have told my mother about no matter how many times Dad asked me not to. He often asked me not to tell my mother things. After all, withholding the whole truth was a white lie. And a white lie was a harmless lie, he said. 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’d reemerge after just a few minutes. But on others, he would stay 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’d 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 would wrap 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, the 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 slipped beyond the horizon, I would retreat 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’d lie there quietly, waiting, hoping to hear the soft squeak of the bathroom door as it opened again. 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 had 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. He 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, stuffy basement, where Dad had spent the early morning hours preparing a breakfast of eggs, sausage, biscuits, and coffee. His guys, as he would call them, would spend the next hour or so sitting around a dusty laminate table talking about anything and everything. Both Dad and his employees made sure that little Lowell, as they called me, felt like I was just one of the guys—and I believed I was. That table was a sort of a 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.

Those were some of my favorite mornings. 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 down the road 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’d drive off to their job sites for the day. Once it was just me and him, Dad would ask me to stay in the car while he went back inside the gas station. He’d return with a plastic bag full of water and drinks for the day, a Yoo-hoo for me and a Redbull for him. But sometimes, he’d leave his own 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 projects, 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 something—another aluminum 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 much thought. The first time, he told me it was just a mistake—that he didn’t know the drink had alcohol in it. And as it continued to happen, 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’d worked on his truck the prior day had left it there. I believed him, if only because it’s 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—too 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 experience 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 that seemed almost to hang in the air between us. And 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. And 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 on a shared understanding of what would and would not be spoken aloud. Silence was the 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 that I wanted to see—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 like a momentous occasion.

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 could make me laugh from the way he taught me to keep secrets I didn’t want 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. Perhaps that is what makes the human experience so complicated: it refuses to be neat, 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 very 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, to let their goodness stand even when the fractures run deep.

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’s all that exists, but because it’s still there—at times unseen, dimmed by weather and fatigue, yet unextinguished, like how the sun never ceases to shine even when the clouds obscure it from sight. 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.

Knoxville isn’t the same as it once was. Once a bastion of affordability, the region has seen housing costs skyrocket, vastly outpacing the growth in earnings. The pandemic accelerated this trend—spurring an influx of new residents from high-cost areas that, combined with record low interest rates, boosted housing demand far beyond what the market could readily absorb.

Regardless of how we got here, one thing is clear: the chronic shortage of housing is why prices continue to climb upward. Affordability has been steadily deteriorating for more than a decade, exerting enormous pressure on the working families, and a broken land use system continues to constrain new supply—especially in the places where people most want to live. The consequences have become impossible to ignore.

The chronic shortage of housing and erosion of affordability isn’t just a social or moral concern. It’s a structural problem with broad economic consequences for Knoxville's future.

The High Cost of Not Enough Housing

Since at least the New Deal era, when the federal government helped birth the 30-year mortgage, Americans have viewed housing as both shelter and strategy—a place to live and a mechanism to build wealth. But in cities across the country, and increasingly in places like Knoxville, that foundational promise is increasingly out-of-reach for the typical family.

Part 1: Affordability

Deteriorating affordability is most obvious consequence of too little housing.

Knoxville has consistently ranked among the top U.S. metro areas for home price growth in recent years, with inflation-adjusted home prices increasing by 60% from 2019 to 2025, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

A recent study by the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com demonstrates that, while for-sale inventory has largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, there is still a significant affordability gap. As of March 2025, an annual income of $75,000 was enough to afford just 13.2% of the homes listed for sale in Knoxville—meaning more than half of households can afford less than 1/5 of homes listed for sale. In a balanced market, an annual income of $75,000 would be enough to afford 50% of listings.

Among the most jarring examples of our broken housing market is its disproportionate impact on the working class. In Knoxville, as in many mid-sized metros, the affordability crisis hasn’t just priced out the lowest-income families. It has also priced out the types of workers that our communities cannot function without—firefighters, police officers, teachers, nurses.

According to a similar analysis from 2023, the starting salary for a Knoxville Police Officer was enough to afford just 2% of homes on the market. The message is implicit but unmistakable: even those tasked with safeguarding and educating our community can no longer afford to live in it.

(Note: Percentage differences between the two charts reflect varying assumptions. The first chart, from NAR, uses 2025 data and variable down payment scenarios. The second chart, created by the author, uses 2023 data and assumes a fixed 5% down payment when calculating affordability thresholds.)

One of the clearest lenses through which to view Knoxville’s affordability crisis is deceptively simple: the price-to-income ratio. By comparing the median cost of a home to the median household income, the PTI ratio metric 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.

As a result, nearly half of all renters in Knoxville are considered cost-burdened—which according to the federal government is defined as spending 30% or more of one’s income on rent—and first-time homebuyers have nearly become an endangered species, forced to delay homeownership and, with it, years of forgone housing wealth.

Part 2: The Geography of Opportunity

At a macro level, the housing shortage is broad-based. Aside from long-time homeowners with fixed mortgage payments, few families have been able to avoid the dramatic rise in cost-of-living. But the housing gap is most severe in the places people most want to live—high-opportunity neighborhoods with strong schools and access to good jobs. This geographical disparity is especially important because where a child grows up can profoundly shape their future.

Groundbreaking research by economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren shows that economic mobility—or one’s ability to improve their economic status over time—is deeply influenced by place, social connections, and access to opportunity. Drawing on anonymized IRS and Census data, their team tracked over 20 million children born between 1978-1983 and linked their adult outcomes—such as income, education, and incarceration rates—to the neighborhoods where they grew up, allowing them to explore how much a person’s life outcomes are shaped by the economic circumstances and neighborhood they were born into.

The results of their research are as uncomfortable as they are undeniable: opportunity is not evenly distributed. It’s clustered in specific neighborhoods—often the very ones that use zoning and land-use restrictions to prevent new development.

In the Knoxville area, for example, low-income children who grew up in Parkridge had an average household income of just $17,000 by age 35. In contrast, their peers who grew up in Farragut averaged $53,000—despite coming from families with similar economic backgrounds.

These disparate outcomes are even more pronounced for males from the lowest income households. For those who grew up in Parkridge, only 48% were employed at age 35. By contrast, among male children from similar economic circumstances but who instead grew up in Farragut, more than 95% were employed by age 35.

And the disparities aren’t limited to income. By age 35, low-income children who grew up in Parkridge were less likely to be married and almost 6 times as likely to be incarcerated than low-income children who grew up in a high-income, high-opportunity suburb like Farragut.

Even the high school you attend can shape your future by influencing your social network. Chetty’s more recent work found that communities where low- and high-income people interact more frequently tend to produce better outcomes for low-income children. These cross-class friendships, often formed in schools, are among the strongest predictors of upward mobility. Children embedded in stronger networks are more likely to have access to internships, jobs, and support systems that provide the stability and resources to take productive risks, such as pursuing higher education or starting a business.

Consider the contrast between attending different high schools across Knox County. At Austin-East Magnet High School, Chetty's data shows that low-income students have social networks in which just 19.7% of their friends are high-income. At South-Doyle High School, that figure rises to 31.1%. And at Bearden and Farragut, it jumps to 71.2% and 76.5%, respectively.

These disparities in exposure to opportunity and social capital reinforce the importance of ensuring that more families can access high-opportunity neighborhoods, if they so choose. Yet, opposition to new housing—and especially the types of housing that are affordable to working class families—is strongest precisely in the areas where it would produce the most benefit. High-opportunity neighborhoods often have the most restrictive zoning, the most vocal resistance to development, and the highest barriers to entry—effectively shutting out lower- and middle-income families who stand to gain the most from living there. In other words, the very neighborhoods best positioned to expand opportunity have proven to be the least willing to share it.

Part 3: How Exclusion Amplifies Gentrification

New development—whether residential or commercial—tends to face the strongest opposition in high-income, high-opportunity areas. That resistance creates a powerful incentive for developers to concentrate their efforts elsewhere, in neighborhoods where public pushback is less organized or less intense.

It’s not hard to see why. Public opposition creates uncertainty, delays timelines, and can ultimately sink a project altogether. For developers, every month of delay means higher carrying costs and greater financial risk. And if a project is denied, all the time and money invested are lost.

The result is a perverse but predictable dynamic: development is steered away from high-opportunity neighborhoods—where access to good schools, jobs, and amenities is greatest—and funneled instead into lower-income areas, where public opposition is weaker but the risk of displacement is higher. “If you’re in a wealthy neighborhood, and they’re educated, they’re going to be harder to deal with,” one small developer told Yoni Applebaum for his book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. “If you’re in a poor neighborhood that’s less educated, they’re probably going to be easier to deal with.”

This dynamic is one of the most overlooked aspects of local housing policy. When new homes can’t be built in desirable areas because of neighborhood opposition, demand doesn’t disappear—it shifts. Buyers and renters compete for a limited number of homes in nearby, more affordable neighborhoods. As competition intensifies, so do prices, and longtime residents—often with fewer financial resources—face a greater risk of being displaced.

Ironically, the very policies meant to “protect neighborhood character” in affluent areas accelerate change in the neighborhoods least equipped to absorb it. And the net effect is stark: we preserve exclusivity at the top while amplifying instability at the bottom. We make it nearly impossible to add housing where demand is highest, while concentrating new development in the places most vulnerable to the negative effects of change.

This is how exclusion fuels gentrification. By walling off high-opportunity areas from new housing, we don’t stop growth—we just redirect it to the path of least resistance. The neighborhoods with the most to lose become the ones forced to change and, in doing so, our land use system quietly but powerfully entrenches inequality. It rewards resistance and punishes openness. It treats stasis in affluent areas as virtue and change in poorer ones as inevitability.

That’s why, if we truly care about preventing displacement and expanding opportunity, the solution isn’t to halt growth—it’s to share it.

A Better Path Forward

Knoxville’s affordability crisis isn’t inevitable. It’s a policy choice. And like any policy choice, it can be changed. For too long, we’ve accepted a land use system that allows a handful of neighborhoods and public hearing participants—which research shows tend to be older, wealthier, and more opposed to housing development than the general public—to decide where and how much housing gets built. The result has been a deeply unequal status quo where high-opportunity neighborhoods remain frozen in time, while lower-income communities shoulder the full weight of growth, gentrification, and rising costs. A better path forward will require rebalancing that equation and embracing a pro-housing agenda that removes arbitrary constraints on new construction and ensures growth is equally distributed.

The aim of policymakers shouldn’t be to relocate people. It should be to build a land use system that empowers individuals from every background to access opportunity—and to choose the kind of housing that best fits their needs. Growth, after all, isn’t the problem. Exclusion is. Gentrification determines who moves in; exclusion decides who never gets the chance. Growth will happen somewhere. The question is whether we allow it only in places where people lack the power to say no.

Knoxville is growing—and anyone who’s lived in the area for more than a few years can feel it. Home prices and rents have vastly outpaced income growth, traffic congestion is worse than ever before, and new subdivisions seem to appear at every turn. And growth and development has become the defining issue for nearly every aspiring political candidate.

The wave of growth isn’t exactly new. It began in earnest around 2015 but accelerated to unprecedented levels in the wake of the pandemic, as rapid in-migration and economic growth made Knoxville one of the nation’s fastest-growing housing markets. The growth in population, tourism, and economic activity has undeniably brought challenges—especially around housing affordability and infrastructure—but it has also been the key driver of many positive trends, including expanded air service with the entrance of Southwest Airlines and the arrival of new restaurants and national brands like Nordstrom Rack, Whataburger, and Topgolf. Indeed, growth has delivered conveniences, choices, and opportunities that would not have materialized if Knoxville’s population and economy had stayed flat.

Today, things have slowed down. Inflation ravaged the U.S economy for more than three years and is still running hot. More and more companies are reversing their pandemic-driven shift to remote work, which was a key driver of the region’s growth in recent years. But even as Knoxville and the broader United States faces economic headwinds, two realities remain: (1) Knoxville isn’t going to stop growing anytime soon, and (2) we weren’t prepared for the growth we’ve already experienced.

East Tennessee has long been immune to the boom-bust cycle that afflicts many other cities when economic conditions waver. But that resiliency, historically, stemmed from a well-supplied, affordable housing market that made it easy for families to settle down and invest in the community. Over the past decade, however, housing supply has fallen far behind demand and the result has been soaring costs, which have left many families struggling to make ends meet.

That’s why its time we embrace a pro-housing policy agenda. It is about more than just housing—it is about opportunity, affordability, and ensuring that Knoxville remains a place where people of all incomes can thrive. A logical starting place is to reform our zoning laws, which compound the affordability crisis by placing arbitrary constraints on new construction and driving up prices. These rules determine not only how much housing can be built, but where—and whether Knoxville is a place of economic opportunity or a place where only a few can afford to stay and thrive.

So, here’s what a pro-housing agenda might look like.

Allow Duplexes By-Right in Every Neighborhood

Duplexes were once a vital and familiar part of American neighborhoods, offering smaller housing options that are naturally more affordable for working families, retirees, and young professionals who prefer not to stretch their budgets for additional space they don't want or need.

Today, however, duplexes are often prohibited or subject to discretionary approval processes in areas where single-family homes are allowed by-right.

This regulatory disparity is difficult to defend.

Consider two homes, each with 3,000 square feet of space. One is a single-family home with four residents; the other is a duplex with two modest units, each housing two people. These structures have the same footprint, the same number of occupants, and the same impact on roads and infrastructure. The only real difference is a second front door. Yet one is permitted without question while the other is subject to intense scrutiny.

Such inconsistencies in zoning policy raise important questions: why do we regulate nearly identical structures so differently? Why are duplexes viewed as disruptive or undesirable, even when they blend seamlessly into existing neighborhoods? If there is no demonstrable difference in impact, what is the policy rationale for restricting them?

Zoning should protect against tangible harms—not enforce the subjective aesthetic preferences of surrounding homeowners. Where no tangible harm exists, government shouldn’t stand in the way. Allowing duplexes by-right in all areas currently zoned for single-family housing would constitute a modest but meaningful step toward expanding housing choice and improving affordability, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods.

Allow duplexes by-right in all zoning districts that permit single-family housing.

Make Accessory Dwelling Units Easier to Build

Accessory Dwelling Units, known as ADUs, are small secondary dwellings on the same lot as a primary residence, often referred to as a backyard cottage, granny flat, or garage apartment. These housing types are ideal for aging parents, young adults, or renters seeking modest, affordable housing—oftentimes neighborhoods they couldn’t otherwise afford.

In Knoxville, however, ADUs remain relatively uncommon due to restrictive zoning and regulatory barriers. This is significant because regulatory change can have an outsized impact on whether homeowners feel empowered to add these types of dwellings. Cities across the country have demonstrated that once barriers are lowered—such as reducing parking mandates, allowing ADUs by-right, or simplifying design standards—construction of ADUs increases substantially.

Unlike many other housing reforms, ADUs enjoy broad public support. Approximately 75% of Knox County residents indicating they favor more lenient regulations to make it easier to build ADUs, according to a poll released by East Tennessee Realtors. This makes ADUs not only an economically sound solution but also a politically popular one—a rare combination in today’s often polarized debates over growth and development.

The benefits extend beyond affordability. ADUs allow families to stay together across generations, provide seniors with opportunities to age in place, and give homeowners a potential source of supplemental income. They also make more efficient use of existing infrastructure, since they add gentle density without requiring major new road or utility expansions. In other words, ADUs offer a low-impact way to expand Knoxville’s housing supply while preserving the character of existing neighborhoods.

It’s no surprise, then, that AARP has become one of the nation’s strongest advocates for ADU reforms. With America’s population rapidly aging, AARP highlights ADUs as a practical, community-based tool to help older adults remain close to family, reduce social isolation, and live independently for longer. For Knoxville, where both affordability pressures and an aging population are real concerns, ADUs represent a commonsense reform that aligns with both demographic needs and voter preferences.

Allow ADUs by-right in all residential areas—regardless of whether the primary home is owner-occupied or rented.

Reduce Minimum Lots Sizes or Start Regulating Lot Width

Reducing minimum lot sizes is one of the most effective ways to make housing more affordable. When zoning requires large lots, it forces each home to carry the cost of more land and, ultimately, driving up the price of every new unit. By contrast, smaller lot sizes allow more homes to be built on the same parcel, lowering the land cost devoted to each home and making entry-level housing more feasible for builders and buyers alike.

Lot size reform also helps expand the overall supply of housing. Large-lot zoning limits how many homes a community can accommodate, artificially constraining supply even as demand continues to rise. By enabling more homes on the same amount of land, smaller lot requirements make it possible for the market to better keep pace with growth, moderating price increases over time.

Alternatively, Knoxville could stop regulating by minimum lot size altogether and instead regulate minimum lot width.

Regulating by minimum lot width focuses on what actually matters for neighborhood character and infrastructure: the frontage along the street. Lot width determines how homes line up, how walkable a block feels, and how much street, sidewalk, and utility infrastructure is required. A 40-foot lot width, for example, still ensures consistent spacing and form, but it allows flexibility in how deep the lot is. That flexibility makes it possible to create more lots, lower the land cost per home, and deliver housing that’s affordable to more people—all without sacrificing the look and feel of the neighborhood.

Reduce minimum lot sizes in targeted areas and/or regulate by lot width instead of lot size.

Revitalize Knoxville’s Commercial Corridors

Many of Knoxville’s major corridors—from Kingston Pike to North Broadway to Chapman Highway—are replete with underused strip malls, vacant parking lots, and dilapidated buildings. These areas have a tremendous amount of potential and could, if redeveloped, greatly expand the region’s housing supply.

However, redevelopment along corridors is often stymied by rigid zoning rules that are designed to facilitate exclusively mixed-use development, with a combination of housing and ground floor commercial space. This type of development should be encouraged through tax incentives and other public support but not mandated in every case.

For pedestrian-oriented businesses to succeed, they need enough population density and foot traffic to support the higher rents of new commercial space. Yet most major corridors in Knoxville are bordered by low-density neighborhoods with little pedestrian activity, and some have virtually no nearby housing—or even basic pedestrian infrastructure. To make mixed-use development financially feasible on these corridors, zoning regulations should encourage higher residential density not only along the corridor itself but also in the adjacent neighborhoods.

Importantly, developers have strong incentives to build mixed-use projects when sufficient demand exists. Ground floor commercial space yields significantly higher rents than residential space and can therefore boost a project’s profitability. But when local consumer demand is lacking, commercial spaces sit vacant or must be leased at below-market rates to non pedestrian-oriented businesses.

This disconnect between regulatory expectations and market realities produces a lose-lose scenario: developers struggle, businesses fail, and residents miss out on the vibrant, walkable neighborhoods they want. That’s why, rather than demanding perfection, Knoxville should focus on practical progress—removing barriers to more housing near corridors and letting demand for walkable businesses grow naturally over time.

To jumpstart redevelopment efforts, local leaders (both in the city and county) should establish a corridor redevelopment task force composed of community members, planners, developers, and business leaders charged with identifying regulatory barriers and making recommendations about targeted reforms.

Eliminate Residential Parking Requirements

Residential parking requirements are another example of well-meaning but counterproductive policy. Mandating a minimum number of parking spaces per unit drives up construction costs, limits design flexibility, and discourages more efficient land use—especially in areas near transit, employment, and schools.

Numerous studies have shown that surface parking can significantly inflate the cost of building new housing, adding an estimated $5,000 per surface space (and probably more). In some cases, parking can make make up 10% to 18% of typical building development costs, creating a barrier to redevelopment—raising financial barriers to building new housing, especially in older neighborhoods where space is limited.

Worse still, research indicates that parking minimums are frequently set above actual demand. Developers are then forced to build more parking than residents actually use, with the added costs passed on to renters and homebuyers.

Eliminating parking mandates doesn’t mean eliminating parking. Rather, it means giving developers the flexibility to provide parking based on the specific needs of each project and the context of the surrounding area. In walkable neighborhoods or near transit, less parking may be needed; in car-dependent areas, more may be provided.

A one-size-fits-all mandate, by contrast, often forces trade-offs that harm communities—turning what could be a neighborhood park, courtyard, or additional housing into an underutilized parking lot. If we’re serious about affordability, we need to rethink parking policy as part of a more flexible and context-sensitive approach to housing and land use.

Reduce or eliminate mandatory off-street parking minimums for all new residential development.

Conclusion

The housing crisis is undeniably complex. Higher incomes, better eviction prevention tools, and increased public investment in housing all have a role to play in improving affordability. But until we confront the root of the issue—the chronic shortage of housing—we will be merely reshuffling the pieces of a broken system.

If Knoxville wants a strong and growing economy, we need more housing. That requires modernizing outdated regulations and overcoming the resistance to change that has stalled progress for too long. Abundant, affordable housing isn’t a dream—it’s a policy choice. And the five zoning reforms outlined above are just a starting point.

We owe it to the next generation to say “yes” more often. Yes to new neighbors. Yes to more homes. Yes to a Knoxville that grows—not just in size, but in spirit.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination was dark moment in America’s history. Another name, another face, another wound in the body politic. In such times, we reach for what is familiar: This is not who we are. America is better than this.

Yet the harder truth is that violence is part of who we are—and who we have always been. To say “America is better than this” is to speak the language of hope and aspiration, not of evidence.

Violence has walked alongside us since the earliest days of the Republic—at the ballot box, on the courthouse steps, in the pulpit, and in the streets. Our country was birthed by revolution, valiant but bloody. In the decades that followed, mobs attacked abolitionists, duels were fought in cornfields and on riverbanks, and the nation descended into civil war over slavery.

Since then, bullets have claimed presidents from Abraham Lincoln to James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. They have taken the lives of political activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and wounded Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt. Governors, mayors, and countless other political figures have faced similar threats and attacks.

As Americans, we inherit that history—whether or not we care to claim it.

What is new is not the violence itself but the zeal that animates it. We no longer whisper about enemies; we shout into the digital void, where our rage is multiplied and rewarded by likes and clicks. Anger is no longer something to be restrained but embraced and amplified. Our politics does not simply endure polarization—it feeds upon it and packages it for mass consumption. Division has become our drug of choice, and violence the cost of using.

Kirk’s murder was a reflection of that division, and the aftermath seems only to have amplified some of the worst of our politics—especially on social media. On the left, many condemned political violence but hastened to fold his death into his politics—implying that somehow he invited it. On the right, prominent political figures rushed to blame the “radical left” and its rhetoric, as though causation were obvious and singular.

Both reactions are deeply misguided. To lay blame for Kirk’s assassination on the rhetoric of the left is no different than to suggest his murder was the inevitable consequence of his politics. Both assertions are a form of moral abdication—rationalizations that reduce murder to a predictable consequence instead of naming it for what it is: an irrational act of evil.

Words are not violence. To pretend otherwise rests on a dangerous premise that blurs the line between persuasion and coercion. Words are not powerless. Words can wound, mislead, and inflame, but they remain, at their core, a non-violent tool of expression—one that can be countered with reason and debate. Violence, by contrast, forecloses response; it compels through force and strips its target of agency. To conflate speech with violence is to invite peril—it legitimizes censorship under the guise of protection, empowers the powerful to silence dissent, and erodes the shared ground on which free societies deliberate their differences. Words may sting, but they do not tear through flesh like bullets or knives. Words may persuade and provoke, but they do not kill.

Amid the many statements condemning Kirk’s murder, a few stood out for their clarity.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox described, in painstaking detail, the depravity of the act and what it means for our nation, calling on Kirk’s political allies and foes alike to find unity in condemning violence. “If anyone… celebrated even a little bit at the news of this shooting,” Cox remarked, “I would beg you to look in the mirror and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere.”

In a similar vein, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, with characteristic bluntness, issued a four-minute video statement condemning political violence without condition or equivocation. “Political violence, in fact, is political cowardice,” Sanders rightly observed. “It means that you cannot convince people of the correctness of your ideas, and you have to impose them through force.”

Both Cox and Sanders used the moment to underscore the threat rising political violence poses to our democracy—acknowledging, if indirectly, that partisan policy priorities rest on the foundation of a non-violent democratic framework. They channeled a unifying moral clarity that is all too rare in American politics today, where tragedies are often exploited to advance political goals.

And the framework is, in fact, fragile. Persistent political violence corrodes not only trust between citizens but the functioning of institutions themselves. It discourages capable people from public service, intimidates those who remain, and fuels cynicism that government cannot protect its own leaders—let alone its people.

For when politics descends into violence, it ceases to be politics. As Ezra Klein observed in the New York Times, “There is no world in which political violence escalates but is contained to just your foes… We are all safe, or none of us are.” That is the lesson of history, sobering as it may be. Violence has been a constant companion in our democracy, but so has the struggle against it—the effort to prove, generation after generation, that America can be something more than the sum of its divisions.

So in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, with political violence on the rise, we are left to confront a harder truth: we are not yet who we claim to be.

It is not true, in a literal sense, to say America is better than this. But the idea of America is. Yet ideas alone do not protect a republic. America will only be “better than this” if its citizens demand it, defend it, and live it out in their daily lives. Our democracy does not rest on the absence of conflict but on the presence of courage—the courage to disagree without dehumanizing, and to resist the temptation of force when persuasion fails.

The challenge, of course, is not uniquely American. Around the world, democracies stand or fall on whether they can manage conflict without resorting to violence, and political polarization has tested the resilience of freedom. America is not exempt from the same pressures that have undone republics elsewhere. The exceptionalism we claim must be earned, not presumed.

As history has illustrated, the American story has always contained both promise and peril. Whether we fulfill that promise depends on how we respond in moments like this—whether we repeat old failures, or learn from them. It depends on our commitment to the idea that every citizen, no matter how wrong we think they are, possesses an unconditional dignity. It depends on rejecting the notion that to oppose someone’s ideas entails unseeing their humanity. It depends on whether we insist, with fervor and vigilance, that the right to speak freely without fear of violence is not merely a norm, but a bedrock principle of our democracy.

And it depends not only on leaders but everyday people. Citizens bear responsibility too. Democracy survives only if ordinary people defend it in their daily speech, conduct, and choices.

The promise of America is not that violence will never plague us—it always has—but that liberty and human dignity can prevail despite it.

Over the past decade, Knoxville has undergone a remarkable transformation—evolving from a quiet, mid-sized market in the foothills of Appalachia into one the nation’s most dynamic housing markets. Once steady and predictable, many Knoxvillians now keenly understand the change that comes with rapid population growth, surging demand, and a skyline with more cranes than ever before.

The migration wave that fueled the housing boom slowed in recent years, but Knoxville remains a popular relocation destination. Drawn by a lower cost of living and a high quality of life—at least relative to larger U.S. cities—newcomers continue to arrive in steady numbers. Knoxville regularly ranks among the nation’s top relocation destinations by companies like PODS and U-Haul.

The wave of growth is real and tangible. New rooftops are appearing in every direction, spilling past county lines and filling once-empty fields with neatly designed subdivisions. Apartment complexes exist on corridors once occupied by one-level strip malls and quiet two-lane roads now funnel traffic to sprawling subdivisions.

None of this growth is happening by chance—it’s a reflection of the Knoxville’s desirability and growing potential as a hub for research and innovation, with strong public-sector anchors like ORNL and UT. People don’t flock to cities with stagnating economies and limited opportunity; they move to places where jobs are available, quality of life is high, and the prospect of upward mobility feels within reach. And Knoxville, at least from an outsider’s perspective, is one of those places.

Against this backdrop, Knoxville’s housing boom is best understood as the product of intersecting market forces, policy choices, and demographic shifts. These dynamics don’t just explain why growth has occurred—they shape what kinds of homes are being built, where new development takes place, and ultimately, who can afford it.

The Rise of New Construction

Much of the national housing conversation focuses on the lack of housing production. Knoxville is not building enough to meet demand either, but it is bucking the national trend to a degree—not by keeping up, but by building more than it once did.

Historically, Knoxville’s population growth was steady but modest. Like most Sunbelt cities, the 2007–2008 financial crisis decimated the local homebuilding industry, driving many smaller builders out of business and pushing skilled trades workers out of the industry for good. In the years that followed, new construction played only a marginal role in Knox County’s housing market.

In 2012, newly built homes accounted for just 7% of all sales, easily overshadowed by existing-home transactions. But by 2024 that share had nearly tripled, with new homes making up almost one in five sales—a more than twofold increase over the past decade.

The increasing prominence of new construction reflects two things at once: the chronic shortage of existing homes and Knoxville’s growing appeal as a market with upside potential. That potential has attracted historic levels of multifamily investment and steadily rising single-family construction. Annual new-home production has climbed from just 422 units in 2012, when the local economy was still struggling to recover from the recession, to more than 1,500 units in 2024 with a median price of around $400,000. Behind this expansion is both a resurgence of local builders and the entry of D.R. Horton—the nation’s largest homebuilder—which entered Knoxville in 2016–2017, according to AEI date.

There has also been notable shifts in affordability. While new homes still sell at a premium, the gap between new and existing home prices is shrinking. From 2016 to 2018, the typical new home in Knox County sold for roughly 30% more than an existing home—a difference of about $70,000. By 2024, that premium had fallen to just 12%, or around $46,000.

The narrowing price gap might seem like progress. But in reality, it is evidence of a market plagued by a chronic undersupply of existing homes, where tight inventory conditions have led existing homes to appreciate more rapidly, especially at the lower end of the market. New homes haven’t gotten much cheaper—existing homes have simply gotten a lot more expensive.

At the same time, true entry-level new construction has all but disappeared. In 2012, about 19% of new homes sold for less than 80% of the county’s overall median sale price. By 2024, that share had dropped to just 7%. Meanwhile, entry-level existing homes appreciated about 13% faster than move-up homes over the past decade. So not only has entry-level construction slowed, many of the homes that once qualified as entry-level no longer meet that definition.

The narrowing price premium and collapse of entry-level home production point to underlying demographic, political, and economic shifts that are pushing builders to pivot toward smaller homes.

New Homes Are Getting Smaller. But Lots Are Getting Larger.

Like in other cities, new homes have been getting smaller over the past few years.

According to data from the American Enterprise Institute, the median gross living area for new homes built in Knox County fell to 2,141 square feet in 2024—down from an average of roughly 2,350 square feet from 2015-2019. At the same time, the average lot size for new homes grew to over 10,000 square feet in 2024, compared to just 8,500–9,000 square feet from 2015–2019.

These diverging trends—smaller homes and larger lots—reveal a fundamental disconnect in the U.S. housing market between market forces and the political process that governs development. Together, they offer a clear example of how land use regulations directly shape what kinds of homes get built, and by extension, how much those homes cost.

On the market side, home size is largely determined by demographic and economic trends. Research shows significant pent-up demand for smaller homes, driven both by affordability constraints and shrinking household sizes.

By contrast, lot size is primarily driven by government regulation. It is the product of local zoning and land use regulations—decisions often shaped by political considerations rather than consumer demand.

Understanding these competing dynamics is critical as it demonstrates how regulations can—whether intended or not—undermine affordability, and how the political process around land use often runs counter to what households actually want and need.

Smaller Homes for Smaller Families

Household sizes are shrinking, and an increasing number of individuals choosing to live alone. As of 2023, approximately 30% of households in Knox County consisted of just one person—reflecting a broader shift in household composition across the United States, which has seen its average household size fall from 3.25 to 2.5 over the past fifty years.

The sustained decline in household size, combined with the composition of the existing housing supply, has created a serious mismatch: 66% of households in Knox County consist of 2 people or less, yet only 37% of the region’s housing stock is 2 bedrooms or less.

Further analysis suggests there could be somewhere between 150,000 to 250,000 empty (or underutilized) bedrooms across Knox County, underscoring the scale of mismatch between the size of homes and the families who live in them. Importantly, some of these “empty bedrooms” are likely used as guest bedrooms or office space—especially in the age of remote work—but others are likely sitting empty.

When viewed through the lens of demographics, the trend toward smaller homes in new construction is perfectly logical: smaller families often want or need less space.

Use me as a case study. I live alone in a three-bedroom house—far more space than I needed or wanted. But in the neighborhood where I hoped to live, smaller options were virtually nonexistent. In the end, I had to buy a larger, more expensive home simply because it was the only choice available. I’m fortunate to have had the financial flexibility to absorb the extra cost, but many families can’t afford to pay for space they don’t need.

Affordability, Affordability, Affordability

At first glance, the recent decline in average new-home square footage might reflect a shift in consumer preferences—smaller households choosing smaller homes to match changing lifestyles. But the reality is more nuanced. While smaller households have certainly added to demand, the trend toward smaller homes is driven far more by affordability pressures than by choice.

Over the past five years, rising labor and construction costs have made it more expensive to build homes of any size. Builders, particularly in the starter-home market, have responded by trimming square footage to keep overall prices within reach of buyers.

At the same time, shifting political attitudes about growth and how to accommodate it have exacerbated the problem. Local policymakers, facing growth pressures and neighborhood resistance to density, have increasingly required larger minimum lot sizes. This increases the amount of land required for each home, driving up overall land costs and further squeezing builders’ margins. To offset higher land costs while keeping prices relatively affordable, builders must cut home sizes even more.

The result is a housing market shaped less by consumer preference than by economic and political constraints. Buyers may seem to be choosing smaller homes, but in reality they are navigating limited options created by rising construction costs, escalating land prices, and regulations that mandate larger lots. The homes being built are not simply the product of what consumers want, but of what builders can deliver within these bounds. In this light, the trend toward smaller homes is not a reflection of changing preferences, but an unintended byproduct of economic pressures and political decisions—an affordability squeeze reshaping the new-home market regardless of what consumers would truly prefer.

As is often the case, understanding the housing market means recognizing that two seemingly contradictory facts can both be true: smaller households have boosted demand for smaller homes, but affordability remains the dominant force driving this shift.

Conclusion

If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: what’s being built in Knoxville today is not simply a reflection of consumer demand—it’s a reflection of the policies we adopt and the incentives they create. Rising prices, shifting preferences, and evolving demographics all play a role, but so too do zoning regulations, permitting processes, and political choices about where and how growth should happen.

As Knoxville continues to grow, its ability to meet the housing needs of current and future residents will depend on our ability to align policy choices with the market forces that ultimately shape the housing supply. To make that happen, we need political leaders willing to embrace a systemic, data-driven approach that prioritizes our region’s long-term housing needs—not just today’s grievances.

Because in the end, the homes we build—how big they are, where they go, and how much they cost—will shape the trajectory of Knoxville’s future.

If you’re a Knoxville city resident, there’s no shortage of opportunities to cast a ballot for your elected representatives. But to make your voice fully heard, you have to show up to the ballot box more often than most.

Over any given two-year span, city voters can participate in at least five separate elections. In odd-numbered years, there are two nonpartisan city elections—a primary in August and a general election in November. In even-numbered years, when most races are partisan, the electoral calendar includes a county primary in the spring (March in presidential years, May in non-presidential years), a federal/state primary and county general in August, and a federal/state general election in November.

For the casually engaged voter, that’s a lot of trips to the ballot box. Such frequent elections elicit what political scientists call voter fatigue. That fatigue, as the evidence shows, has consequences: the more often people are asked to vote, the less often they do. And elections also cost taxpayers a lot of money. Each additional election requires printing ballots, staffing polling locations, and devoting resources to administering what often end up being low-turnout affairs.

Knoxville’s turnout history illustrates the problem. Nearly 35,000 residents cast ballots in the 1987 mayoral race between Victor Ashe and Randy Tyree, with Ashe winning nearly 19,000 votes. In 2019, turnout had slipped to just over 25,000, with Indya Kincannon winning the mayor’s office with around 13,000 votes. By 2023, participation fell again—just over 16,000 people voted in the mayoral contest, with Kincannon reelected on roughly 9,500 votes. Yet in November 2024—when two high-profile city charter amendments appeared on the ballot alongside state and federal contests—more than 70,000 city residents turned out. The contrast speaks for itself.

Which invites an obvious question: why not align Knoxville’s city races with county and state elections?

The Structure of City Elections

To answer that question seriously, it helps to know why Knoxville’s election calendar is structured this way. Unlike many levels of government, Knoxville’s city elections are nonpartisan—meaning candidates appear on the ballot without an “R” or “D” beside their name.

Nonpartisan elections first gained prominence in the early 20th century as part of a broader wave of progressive-era reforms intended to combat what reformers viewed as corrupt, patronage-driven city governments. Celebrated as a hallmark of good government, the shift to nonpartisan elections was rooted in the idea that local governance should be more about competence than ideology and insulated, as much as possible, from the tribalism of party politics. To that end, removing party labels encourages voters to evaluate candidates on their merits rather than on party affiliation. Similarly, the odd-year electoral cycle separates local races from the partisan atmosphere of state and national elections and generally draws voters who are more attuned to local issues.

The rationale still makes sense. Local government is, at its core, about service delivery—fixing sidewalks, managing traffic, maintaining parks. These issues rarely sort neatly along partisan lines. We saw this dynamic recently in our own community, when Republican County Commission Chair Gina Oster worked with Democratic City Council Member Andrew Roberto—and his wife, Sarah—on traffic safety upgrades along Schaeffer Road after the tragic loss of their daughter in a head-on crash. That’s local government at its best: rooted in pragmatism, not partisanship.

Of course, simply removing the “R” or “D” from the ballot can only accomplish so much. No serious observer believes Knoxville’s city elections are untouched by partisanship. To the contrary, candidates can and often do align with parties and court partisan endorsements. Many even share campaign staff and infrastructure.

Still, the absence of party labels on the ballot itself matters. It shapes how voters encounter their choices—and in turn, how they make them. But while removing party labels from the ballot conveys clear benefits—and should be maintained—the value of Knoxville’s odd-year election calendar is less clear. What the odd-year calendar does impact, with near-certainty, is how many people show up to vote.

When elections are held can determine how many people vote and who votes.

Odd-year city elections in Knoxville routinely draw only a small fraction of eligible voters—sometimes barely in the double digits. This year’s city election is no different and appears headed for historically low participation. That ought to trouble anyone who believes legitimacy rests, at least in part, on the breadth of voter participation. If only a thin slice of the public is choosing its leaders, the claim that such elections reflect the community’s will becomes ever harder to defend.

The dismal turnout in recent city elections is at least partly due to Knoxville’s election calendar. When elections are held off-cycle—that is, outside of November in even-numbered years—voter turnout is almost always much lower.

The MIT Election Lab has documented the effect nationally: when local elections are held on the same day as state or federal elections, turnout rises dramatically. When they are held off-cycle, turnout falls. So there’s a clear tradeoff: off-cycle elections draw fewer voters but those who do participate tend to be more informed, while on-cycle elections bring more voters to the polls but with less attention to local issues.

How one weighs that tradeoff is a legitimate debate, and reasonable people can disagree. What’s hard to dispute, though, is that aligning Knoxville’s city races with county and state elections would boost voter participation. Baltimore offers a striking example: its municipal turnout once hovered in the low teens. But after aligning city elections with presidential ballots, participation nearly quadrupled.

The solution, then, seems fairly simple. If increased civic participation is the goal—and it should be—Knoxville should keep elections nonpartisan, but hold them when more people are already voting.

None of this means abandoning the principle of nonpartisan local elections. In fact, that principle is worth defending. But the virtues of nonpartisan local government are not undermined by holding elections alongside county and state contests. If anything, they are strengthened by the legitimacy that comes with more voters participating. The question, then, isn’t really whether or not partisanship will creep into city politics—it always has—but whether we want decisions about our local future made by 15 percent of the electorate or by 50.

It’s hard to dispute that the timing of an election also shapes the composition of the electorate that actually turns out. Generally speaking, even-year elections attract a larger share of partisan voters—people who are more invested in national political issues. This is evident from the sizable number of citizens who routinely vote in state and federal contests but sit out local ones. Yet the mere presence of more partisan voters—who, after all, have the same right to participate as anyone else—does not necessarily make elections themselves more partisan. In fact, synchronizing city elections with state and federal elections could, somewhat counterintuitively, reduce the influence of political parties.

Political parties have limited time, money, and volunteer capacity. When city elections occur alongside partisan races, parties themselves are far more likely to channel their resources into their partisan nominees for county, state, and federal offices. By contrast, in odd-year city elections—when there are no partisan campaigns competing for attention—political parties have more time to promoting their preferred candidates in local races. With no partisan contests on the ballot, parties can—and often do—devote more energy into backing their preferred candidates for mayor or city council.

Put differently: odd-year elections give parties an open playing field, while even-year elections dilute their focus. From this perspective, synchronizing city elections with state and federal contests might actually weaken—not strengthen—the partisan pull on nonpartisan municipal races.

For a policy wonk like me, this makes for an interesting thought experiment. But there are serious hurdles to making a change like this happen. Moving city elections to even-numbered years would require amending the city charter—something that can only happen if City Council agrees to put the question on the ballot and voters approve it at the polls.

But the central question I pose here is not one about feasibility but merit: are the tradeoffs of odd-year city elections truly worth it?

In my view, the core value of nonpartisan elections lies in removing the “R” or “D” from the ballot. The odd-year scheduling is an accessory to that goal, but not the centerpiece. If the price of higher participation is having nonpartisan city elections in the same year as partisan ones, that seems like a trade worth making.

Knoxville’s election calendar isn’t immutable. It is a choice—and it might be time to choose differently.

Housing affordability is top of mind for nearly everyone in East Tennessee.

Soaring home prices—fueled by migration and years of pent-up demand—have quickly eroded consumer purchasing power even in the face of robust wage growth, leaving East Tennesseans across the income spectrum feeling squeezed.

A public opinion poll by East Tennessee Realtors underscores the scale of the concern: 67% of Knox County residents say housing affordability is a big problem. That’s the kind of crisis-level concern you expect to see in expensive coastal states like California and New York—not Tennessee.

Against this backdrop of rising cost-of-living concerns and an ongoing debate over how best to accommodate growth, few names generate as much discussion—or division—as D.R. Horton. As the largest homebuilder in the country, the company plays an outsized role in shaping the built environment of suburban America and, increasingly, East Tennessee.

As recently as 2017, D.R. Horton accounted for just 2% of new home sales in Knox County. Yet by 2024, that number surged to nearly one in three new homes—a dramatic shift in market share for a community long dominated by small, locally-owned builders.

For some, D.R. Horton is an imperfect but necessary partner in a region that desperately needs more housing at nearly every price point. For others, however, the nation’s largest home builder represents something else entirely: a symbol of unbridled sprawl and dystopian, cookie-cutter neighborhoods—the type of development that has invited fierce anti-growth backlash and fueled political battles so personal and bitter they’ve fractured neighborhoods and ended long-time friendships.

The reality, as is often the case, is frustratingly complicated. It’s a debate that can’t and shouldn’t be reduced to the moral absolutism of right or wrong—it is, at its core, a clash of priorities and values in a once-sleepy region that today has no choice but to change.

On one hand, it is impossible to deny the immense role D.R. Horton plays in delivering relatively attainable new housing, injecting hundreds of new homes into the market each year. While many developers target the luxury or move-up market, and even more so given the evolving economics of residential development, D.R. Horton is unique in that it mostly builds homes near the lower end of the price spectrum—homes that many working- and middle-class families can actually afford.

In 2024, the median sale price of a D.R. Horton-built home in Knox County was about 85% of the county’s overall median price for new homes—the difference between roughly $355,000 and $420,000—according to data from the American Enterprise Institute. Even more striking, 71% of D.R. Horton homes built in the same year were classified as entry-level, while just 22% of homes from all other builders met that threshold. At a time when the cost of housing has surged far faster than incomes, and new construction remains largely inaccessible for first-time buyers, D.R. Horton's contributions to affordability are undeniably significant.

Moreover, despite the frequent cries of “we don’t want you here” at planning meetings and across local TV airwaves, the company is meeting real demand. People are buying their homes—not just in booming metros, but in small towns and rural counties where housing options have long been limited. And for all the criticism about their one-size-fits-all approach, the steady stream of buyers and D.R. Horton’s growing market share suggest the company is filling a gap that much of the market has failed to address: delivering entry-level homes at scale, in places where few others are building them.

No amount of criticism can change one simple fact: D.R. Horton provides homes for people who need and want them—people who will treasure their home and, perhaps, even build a family there. To suggest such homes are entirely unwanted or devoid of value is to engage in a kind of willful ignorance—not just of the economic realities facing middle-class families, but of the significance that homeownership represents for millions of Americans.

In a perfect world, supplying much-needed housing would be enough. But in practice, development has become an inherently political process—shaped as much by perception and emotion as by policy and need.

D.R. Horton’s approach to development—rapid, large-scale, and often visually homogeneous—has made it a lightning rod in local politics. Through my years of work as a housing advocate, it is something I’ve experienced first-hand. In many communities, particularly those unaccustomed to the oftentimes transformational growth that any national builder brings, new D.R. Horton subdivisions have become the poster child for what residents and politicians alike refer to as “bad development.”

Their subdivisions—easily distinguishable by their uniform home designs, minimal landscaping, and sparse amenities—oftentimes replace what was once a densely forested area or an open field where fertile soil once provided an entire town’s worth of crops like corn or soybeans. To the casual observer, who isn’t much interested in long-term planning or the consequences of housing scarcity, it is a distinctly modern form of blight—soulless, monotonous, and emblematic of everything wrong with suburban growth.

It should come as no surprise, then, that such projects regularly spark intense opposition from neighboring residents and have, in some cases, spurred dramatic policy responses. In many of the rural and suburban jurisdictions in which I’ve worked, D.R. Horton developments have been the catalyst for moratoriums on new subdivisions and new land use restrictions explicitly designed to ward off large-scale development. Elected officials—emboldened both by vocal public resistance and their own animus—often go so far as to cite these neighborhoods, and even D.R. Horton by name, when justifying more restrictive land use policies.

This reactionary form of policymaking poses its own set of harms. While any particular development may raise legitimate concerns about quality or infrastructure impacts, the backlash it provokes can reverberate far beyond a single project. In communities where development capacity is suddenly and dramatically curtailed in response, the long-term consequence is a worsening housing shortage—particularly for the very households national home builders and their modest price points are intended to serve. In this way, a large builder like D.R. Horton’s presence in certain markets can undermine the cause of housing affordability it ostensibly helps to advance.

So, does D.R. Horton do more harm than good? That is an impossible question. And the answer likely depends on the lens through which one looks.

From a macro perspective, companies like D.R. Horton are undeniably helping to increase housing supply at a time when it is desperately needed. In Knox County, for example, two national builders—D.R. Horton and Clayton Homes—are responsible for almost 500 of the roughly 1,600 or so new homes built each year. But at the micro level, especially in more rural or fast-growing areas, the large-scale and visually homogeneous development style that’s common among national builders inflames opposition, triggering policy responses that devastate housing supply growth over the long run.

The problem isn’t necessarily that D.R. Horton, or companies like it, are building homes—it’s how they build, where they build, and whether they do so with any regard for local context and community perception.

If there’s a path forward, it’s not about vilifying large home builders or celebrating them uncritically. It’s about encouraging all builders—especially the largest ones—to view raising the bar on design and livability as an investment in their long-term success and continued license to build. Likewise, local leaders have an obligation to resist the temptation to overcorrect with draconian restrictions that attempt to halt the inevitable forces of growth in response to a few contentious developments.

The challenge before us is not how to stop large homebuilders, but how to harness their scale and production capacity in ways that contribute to—not compromise—growth.

After all, people need a place to live.

Each time a new housing development is proposed, residents pack meeting rooms—not to oppose growth in general, but to reject a particular development in a particular place. Sit through a few local planning or city council meetings and you'll quickly recognize a common refrain: "I’m not against development, but..."

Over the last decade, residents in rural and suburban communities alike have grown increasingly divided on questions of how and where growth and development should occur.

Opinion polling shows an overwhelming share of Americans believe housing is too expensive and too scarce. In a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 69% of Americans reported being “very concerned” about the cost of housing, and a staggering 90% said they support building more single-family houses, with 81% supporting such developments in their local areas.

And yet, that consensus seems to vanish when theoretical support meets hyper-local reality. Despite growing concern about housing affordability, Americans are nonetheless broadly supportive of policies that have the practical impact of limiting new construction. A 2023 poll found that 58% of Americans supported giving residents veto power over new developments, while only 32% favored removing regulations and codes that prevent developers from building more housing.

This tension is nothing new. In fact, the roots of our current housing challenges stretch back decades. In the postwar era, federal housing policy explicitly promoted suburban expansion through mortgage subsidies, highway construction, and zoning laws that prioritized single-family homes over other housing types. These policies helped build the American middle class—but they also segregated it economically, and entrenched a suburban development pattern that is now embedded in the American psyche.

Starting in the 1970s, as cities grappled with inflation, disinvestment, and political unrest, many communities turned inward. Growth was no longer something to be welcomed, but something to be controlled. Local governments layered on new zoning restrictions, downzoned large swaths of land, and created permitting processes that empowered vocal opposition. The idea of neighborhood “character” became a political force, often used to justify blocking new housing, especially multifamily or affordable projects.

Today, the consequences of these policies are everywhere. We have a national shortage of millions of homes, especially in high-opportunity areas where people most want to live. Even in fast-growing Sun Belt cities like Knoxville, where developable land is more plentiful, restrictive land use policies have constrained housing supply, driving up costs and pushing working families farther out into the suburbs and surrounding counties.

What is striking, if not unusual, about Americans’ views about growth is the absence of a clear partisan divide—at least not along the traditional right-left divide.

In many ways, the politics of growth transcends conventional ideological boundaries, and party identification has become virtually meaningless as an indicator of one’s views on issues of growth and development. For instance, polling shows that a plurality of both Republicans and Democrats, 45% and 46% respectively, oppose removing regulations and codes to make it easier to build more housing.

Despite historically favoring less government intervention, Republicans approve of more restrictive government regulation of growth at a higher rate than Democrats. According to a 2023 YouGov survey, Trump voters (71%) were far more likely than Biden voters (58%) to say they support government giving residents veto power over new developments—though notably, a substantial majority of both groups support what is in practice an anti-growth policy.

For Republicans, there is a growing tension between free-market principles and local control, with many Republican voters favoring restrictive policies to slow growth and limit change. For Democrats, there is similar tension—between progressive commitments to affordability and environmental sustainability, and a growth-resistant impulse rooted in fears of gentrification and broader skepticism toward developers.

In both cases, the politics of growth are shaped by internal contradictions. Some Democrats have begun to advocate for deregulation as a means to expand housing supply, even if it means siding with developers they might otherwise distrust. More conservative constituencies, once champions of private property rights and minimal government, now favor heavy-handed land-use controls to control or limit growth. In each case, ideology takes a back seat to outcomes.

Any attempt to neatly categorize the full spectrum of opinions on growth is bound to fall short—people are simply too varied in their beliefs and motivations. But there are, however, a set of common archetypes that are prevalent enough not to ignore.

These archetypes aren’t defined by party affiliation so much as by geography, socioeconomic status, and proximity to growth itself. Together, they form a messy but revealing picture of how growth is debated in America—not as a simple ideological battle, but as a hyperlocal and often contradictory negotiation over what kind of communities we want to live in.

Over the past decade, four major archetypes have emerged in the conversation about growth: YIMBY Progressives, Main Street Republicans, Old School Democrats, and Right-Wing Populists.

These factions exist in communities across the United States and have upended traditional political alliances. Again, these four archetypes are not comprehensive but they nonetheless provide a framework for understanding the political constituencies driving local decision-making about growth and development.

YIMBY Progressives (Pro-Growth, Left-Leaning)

The YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) Progressive archetype draws on urbanist traditions that stretch back to Jane Jacobs’ famous 1961 critique, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," which challenged mid-century zoning orthodoxies and advocated denser, mixed-use urban neighborhoods. Today's YIMBYs view building more housing as a moral imperative—essential to addressing housing affordability, reducing economic inequality, and combating climate change. Though traditionally supportive of government intervention, YIMBY Progressives have come to embrace a deregulatory approach to development and zoning, arguing that overly restrictive land use regulations have exacerbated the housing crisis and encouraged urban sprawl. They often advocate for up-zoning, transit-oriented development, and policies that legalize new types of housing. While generally supportive of pro-growth policies, YIMBY Progressives sometimes embrace overly idealistic proposals that clash with the economic realities of the real estate market.

Main Street Republicans (Pro-Growth, Right-Leaning)

Main Street Republicans follow a long American tradition of viewing development as synonymous with economic growth, opportunity, and prosperity—echoing post-WWII attitudes that led to rapid suburban expansion, highway construction, and industrial growth. Subsequently, Main Street Republicans view increasing the housing supply as an economic imperative—they see development as a driver of job creation, tax base expansion, and overall economic competitiveness. This faction has long favored reducing regulatory barriers and streamlining permitting processes to encourage investment and market-led growth.

Old School Democrats (Anti-Growth, Left-Leaning)

Rooted in the mid-20th century progressive tradition of community planning and activism, Old School Democrats are generally comfortable with government intervention and often emphasize neighborhood preservation and community control. In practice, this often translates into deference to local opposition—empowering neighborhood groups to block or delay development, even when their reasoning is dubious. Often motivated by concerns about gentrification, displacement, and environmental impact, this faction’s support for strict zoning and planning regulations frequently aligns with broader anti-growth outcomes.

Right-Wing Populists (Anti-Growth, Right-Leaning)

Populist conservatives—including many rural and hard-right voters—have embraced zoning laws and development restrictions as tools to resist unwanted change, especially in suburban and rural areas experiencing high in-migration. This marks a sharp departure for a constituency that once decried zoning and its restriction on private property rights as egregious government overreach. Today, this faction favors strict local control, opposes high-density housing, and views new development as a threat to cultural and community identity. Their support for restrictive land use policies often reflects deeper anxieties about rapid demographic, economic, and political change.

These categories aren’t rigid, and many people fall somewhere in between. Still, this simple framework offers a way to better understand the political landscape of housing and development—and the underlying tug-of-war between ideology and outcomes. Across the political spectrum, factions have recalibrated their beliefs to achieve policy goals, underscoring just how complicated and personal this issue has become.

This political realignment helps explain why solving the housing shortage has proven so politically intractable: it is an issue that cuts across traditional partisan lines and scrambles long-standing alliances. It forces unlikely bedfellows into proximity—and yet, too often, just short of cooperation.

The debate over growth—how and where things get built—will always be impassioned. Zoning and land use decisions bring government closest to people's everyday lives, stirring passions and anxieties that don’t fit neatly into left-right politics. Views on development frequently transcend ideology, and it is precisely these unconventional divides that have stalled meaningful action.

It reminds me of the old adage: We agree on the goal, but differ on the path to get there. Yet in today’s climate of distrust and polarization, our ability to build broad, diverse coalitions—once the cornerstone of democratic progress—feels like a relic of a bygone era.

And that’s the root of the gridlock we see today. In a pluralistic democracy, real progress requires coalitions built not just on shared ideology, but on common cause. If we want to address the housing crisis, we’ll need to say yes—not only to growth, but to working with those we don’t always agree with to make it possible.

Note: Some articles may be behind a paywall. I’ll do my best to share gift links whenever I can.

What Is Israel’s Endgame with Iran? — Robin Wright, The New Yorker

Israel’s preemptive strike on Iran resulted in the most significant loss of senior Iranian military leaders since the Iran-Iraq War, provoking both praise and criticism from American political leaders across the ideological spectrum. Wright’s essay delivers a compelling and balanced exploration of the strategic crossroads at which Israel and Iran stand, neither romanticizing preemptive strikes nor underplaying the profound risks of a broader conflict in the Middle East. While there is broad consensus on the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, there is less consensus about the off-ramp. As the former head of Iran analysis for Israeli military intelligence recently observed, it remains unclear “how exactly . . . Israel intend[s] to end the war and preserve its achievements without entering a war of attrition” that risks becoming open-ended with no clear exit strategy.

Housing Reform Should Actually Add Housing — Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring

Too often, politicians tout housing reform on the campaign trail but ultimately champion proposals that do little, if anything, to grow housing supply. This shouldn’t come as a surprise if you pay attention to local politics. Few issues in local politics evoke as much debate as re-zonings and development proposals. Housing, and the lack thereof, is a politically toxic issue. Residents expect local governments to preserve neighborhood character and guard against perceived threats to quality of life—often leaving elected officials more incentivized to say “no” to new housing than to confront the structural shortage driving the affordability crisis. As a result, many so-called reforms focus on process rather than outcomes: adding new layers of public input, design standards, or affordability mandates that sound good in theory but often make it harder—not easier—to actually build more homes. Yglesias addresses this conundrum head on.

How Amy Coney Barrett Is Confounding the Right and the Left — Jodi Kantor, The New York Times

Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court was one of the most contentious in recent memory, coming just days after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and moving forward without a single Democratic vote. An academic at heart and the only parent of school-aged children on the court, Justice Barrett hasn’t aligned perfectly with the president that nominated her—provoking criticism from the political left and right. This incisive profile of Justice Barrett, which includes favorable comments from both liberals and conservatives, explores her expectation-defying stint on the court thus far and provides a glimpse into the personal realities of serving as a Supreme Court Justice as a Washington outsider. For a deeper look at internal dynamics on the Court, see Sarah Isgur’s piece “What’s Behind the Conservative Rift on the Supreme Court” in Politico.

America Is Losing Sight of Its Political Culture — Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal

There’s been considerable debate surrounding President Trump’s military parade and whether it enhances or undermines America’s standing in the world. Similarly, his decision to deploy National Guard troops—and later, U.S. Marines—to respond to the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles has sparked intense discussion. Contrary to some claims, this isn’t unprecedented. President George H.W. Bush also sent the National Guard to Los Angeles during the 1992 riots, though he did so with great hesitation. Noonan’s column serves as both a historical reminder and a cautionary reflection—underscoring why America has traditionally resisted the impulse to glorify military force, whether it be in the streets of Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.

Why the Euthanasia Slope Is Slippery — Ross Douthat, The New York Times

A thoughtful reflection on the proliferation of medically-assisted suicide and the laws governing its use. Since reading Atul Gawande’s incisive book on end-of-life care, Being Mortal, I’ve had a complicated thoughts about the morality of euthanasia, especially in the context of terminally-ill patients. While the primary focus of Gawande’s book is palliative care—not euthanasia—the book elucidates the physical suffering terminally-ill patients face in the final years of their life. In some ways, Gawande and Douthat approach the issue from similar vantage points despite ultimately arriving at different conclusions. Euthanasia is undoubtedly a weighty subject. But as more jurisdictions begin to legalize its use, it’s an issue worth examining with a critical eye.

That’s it for this month. If you read something that challenged, moved, or inspired you recently, I’d love to hear about it—drop it in the comments or shoot me a message. And if you found this roundup useful, feel free to share it with someone else who might enjoy it too.

But books aren’t just windows into the lives of other people and their stories; they are also the archives of our human history. From historical accounts that capture pivotal moments in time to novels that inspire change, books are a bridge between each generation and the next. They are a multitude of things—conduits for compassion, chroniclers of history, and catalysts for insight into the world and our place in it.

Candidly, I fell short of my annual reading goal but I still made time for a few worthwhile reads. If you’re looking for something new, I’ve put together a list the five books that impacted me the most in 2024. Each one, in its own way, stretched my mind and deepened my understanding of the world around me—as books always seem to do.

A LITTLE LIFE

By Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.

There are books that change you. That teach you things about yourself and the people around you. That inspire you to love with greater fervor. That accentuate anew the burdens others carry and arouse renewed compassion. That embody the preciousness of life and one of its inescapable truths: our friends and family—and the time we share with them—comprise just as much of who we are as the identity we create for ourselves. This is one of those books

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

by Joan Didion

A National Book Award Winner, The Year of Magical Thinking is a deeply personal exploration of grief, memory, and resilience in the face of devastating loss. Written in the wake of her husband’s sudden death and her daughter’s life-threatening illness, Didion meticulously recounts each moment of shock, denial, and emotional upheaval. Through her precise, insightful prose, she captures the powerful and often irrational nature of grief—what she calls “magical thinking.” This raw, reflective memoir ultimately underscores the extraordinary ways the mind and heart cope with unimaginable sorrow.

This book is absolutely beautiful, a starkly honest and tantalizingly intimate examination of grief. Few people can string words together like Joan Didion. She lays bare the disorienting nature of loss—how the mind clings to rationalizations and the faint hope of reversing reality. But her story isn’t merely about heartbreak; it’s also a testament to the resilience we discover in ourselves, however reluctantly, when faced with life-altering tragedy.

GIOVANNI'S ROOM

by James Baldwin

Giovanni’s Room is a groundbreaking exploration of identity, love, and desire set against the backdrop of 1950s Paris. The novel follows David, an American struggling to come to terms with his sexuality and torn between societal expectations and his feelings for Giovanni, an Italian bartender. Baldwin’s evocative prose captures the intensity of the men’s relationship, unraveling their deepest fears and longings as they grapple with issues of guilt, shame, and self-acceptance. Even decades after its publication, Giovanni’s Room remains a poignant and fearless portrayal of the complexities of human connection.

A courageous novel and some of Baldwin’s finest work. Giovanni’s Room is a beautiful yet tragic portrait of same-sex love and consequences of living in a world that does not understand or accept it—how societal norms and internalized expectations can derail the most genuine of human connections. The book’s significance is propelled even more by the context of its publication, which was discouraged by Baldwin's American publisher out of fear that a book with mostly white protagonists and “the theme of homosexuality would alienate him from his readership among black people.”

BLUEPRINT: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF A GOOD SOCIETY

By Nicholas A. Christakis

Blueprint explores how humans are biologically wired for cooperation, compassion, and social connection. Drawing on a blend of evolutionary biology, sociology, and historical case studies, Christakis illustrates the “social suite”—a set of universal behaviors like friendship, cooperation, and learning that shape how societies emerge and thrive. He argues that these traits have been baked into our genetic makeup over millennia, enabling communities to form resilient bonds even in challenging circumstances. By revealing the deep-rooted blueprint for goodwill and mutual aid, Christakis offers a hopeful perspective on humanity’s capacity for building healthier, more cohesive societies.

I’ve long been a fan of Nicholas Christakis and had intended to re-read this book for some time now. Admittedly dense, and at times painstakingly so, Blueprint is both revelatory and comforting—revelatory in its deeply researched survey of our evolutionary history and comforting in its premise that we, humans, are pre-wired to care for one another, even in such trying times. In his own words, “The arc of our evolutionary history is long. But it bends towards goodness.”

REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT: OVERSTORIES, SUPERSPREADERS, AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL ENGINEERING

By Malcolm Gladwell

Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Revenge of the Tipping Point delves into how subtle forces turn everyday ideas into global phenomena. Weaving real-world examples of viral movements and cultural shifts, Gladwell spotlights “superspreaders” who capture momentum at precisely the right instant. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics, he illustrates how overarching narratives reshape societies—ultimately prompting us to reflect on the moral implications of social engineering. If you prefer audiobooks, this is the book for you.

Truthfully, there are few Malcolm Gladwell books that I haven’t enjoyed and this one is no exception. In typical Gladwellian fashion, Revenge of the Tipping Point is insightful and offers a timely reminder of both the promise and peril of social engineering in an increasingly engineered world. It challenges us to consider why certain ideas proliferate and the ethical dimensions of these now-frequent viral transformations. Though with a slightly sub-par ending (or more aptly put, unpersuasive), the broader arch of the storyline is incisive.

For my fellow podcast listeners, I highly recommend checking out Season Two of Puskin’s Fiasco, titled Bush v. Gore, which recounts what happened during the contested 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and the extraordinary legal battle that unfolded in Florida in the aftermath of Election Day.

If approved, City Charter Amendment No. 2 would remove district-level elections and move to a fully at-large system, where all council members, including those running for district seats, would be chosen by the entire city. This would result six district seats (with residency requirement) elected through city-wide primary and general, and three at-large seats elected through city-wide primary and general. Residents would vote on all nine council seats, including in districts of which they are not a resident.

If rejected, district seats will be elected by district voters and at-large seats will continue to be elected city-wide. This would result in six district seats elected through district-only primary and general, and at-large seats elected through city-wide primary and general. Residents would vote on all three at-large council seats + their own district seat.

For a broader discussion about the referendum and the electoral systems used by other cities across the state, I recommend reading a recent column by Bill Lyons in the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Here are a few reasons why you should vote no on City Charter Amendment No. 2.

What Does Representation Even Mean?

As I explained in a recent op-ed for Knox News, an at-large electoral system will result in the city’s wealthiest and least diverse neighborhoods having the greatest influence over who represents any given district in the city. Proponents of the measure suggest this isn’t true — but the data is abundantly clear.

Take, for example, the last five primary elections in which only district seats were on the ballot. Each district accounts for roughly 20% of the eligible voter population.1 In a perfect world — a world in which voter registration and voter participation rates are the same across all parts of the city — each district would make up roughly 20% of the vote.

However, research shows there are persistent gaps in voter turnout rates across different demographic groups. Higher-income citizens vote at higher rates than low-income citizens. Homeowners vote at higher rates than renters. White citizens vote at higher rates than non-White citizens. These findings are corroborated by scores of studies and empirical research (see here, here, and here).

Disparities in voter participation help to explain why District 2 and District 4 — two of the city’s wealthiest and least diverse districts — have accounted for a disproportionate share of voters in recent elections. Despite making up only ~20% of the eligible population each, District 2 has on average accounted for 29% of primary voters while District 4 has accounted for 30%. Together, District 2 and District 4 have accounted for at least 55% of all voters in the last five primary elections, despite representing ~40% share of the eligible voter population.

Centralizing electoral power among just a handful of districts is the core issue. Under a fully at-large system, high-turnout districts would have disproportionate influence, enabling them to effectively select representatives for the entire city—even for districts that may not share their interests or priorities. In fact, assuming the current turnout trends continue, an at-large system would give Districts 2 and 4 more control over who represents District 1, for example, than the actual residents of District 1.

While the figure above illustrates the variation in turnout across the last five primary elections, the disparities in turnout can be even more dramatic depending on the year.

For example, District 3 residents accounted for just 9% of all voters in the 2021 primary election. If an at-large system had been in effect at the time, 91% of the votes in District 3’s primary would have been cast by people who don’t reside in the district — leaving the actual residents of District 3 with very little influence over who represents them on city council.

This inevitably leads to the question: what is the purpose of a district representative if most of the voters who elect them don’t even live in the district?

Moreover, the inequity of at-large voting is evident even under the city’s current electoral scheme, which gives voters city-wide veto power over the preferences of any given district. Data from past city elections proves this point.

As shown above, the winner of the District 3 primary has lost in the city-wide general election 57% of the time over the past four decades. Meanwhile, the district’s preferred candidate in the District 6 race lost the city-wide general in three consecutive elections in 1989, 1993, and 1997 — meaning District 6 voters did not have their preferred candidate representing them for a span of 12 years and the entirety of the 90s.

Example: Hypothetical District 1 Election with At-Large Voting

Imagine Candidates A, B, and C are competing for the District 1 council seat, but instead of a district-only vote, they must compete in a city-wide primary. Assume about 15,000 residents cast ballots, with voter turnout across districts mirroring the average of the last five elections.

Candidate A focuses heavily on engaging with District 1 voters, attending local meetings and knocking on doors. This grassroots effort pays off—Candidate A secures 65% of the votes cast by District 1 residents. However, despite being well-known and supported within District 1, Candidate A is relatively unfamiliar in other parts of the city, leading to the lowest overall city-wide vote count. As a result, Candidate A doesn't advance to the general election despite being the top choice within their own district.

Candidates B and C thus move on to the general election. In the general election, assume about 20,000 people vote, with district turnout following the same pattern. Candidate C is particularly unpopular among District 1 voters, having lost both the primary and the general election within the district by a significant margin.

However, Candidate C focuses their campaign on high-turnout districts, like Districts 2 and 4, where they build strong support. This city-wide strategy leads to a decisive win in those high-turnout areas.

As a result, Candidate C wins the city-wide election by a margin of 53% to 47% and becomes the next city council representative for District 1 — even though they are the candidate with the least support from the voters of District 1.

Highest Turnout Districts Are Among the City’s Least Diverse

Higher turnout districts also tend to be less diverse than the city at-large, according to census bureau redistricting data compiled by Knoxville-Knox County Planning.

Minority residents (i.e. non-white residents) represent roughly 30% of the city’s overall population. All city council districts, except for District 5 and District 6, are less diverse than the city overall.2 District 6 remains the city’s lone majority-minority district (i.e., a district in which the majority of the constituents in the district are racial or ethnic minorities), with minority residents accounting for ~57% of the district.

As shown above, the two highest turnout districts — District 2 and District 4 — have a lower (1) minority share and (2) Black or African American share of the population than the city overall.

Put simply, if historical turnout trends continue, moving to an at-large system could result in the diminution of minority voting influence. This risk has long been recognized by prominent advocacy and civil rights organizations, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund explicitly opposes at-large voting for precisely that reason.

Does the Proposed Amendment Violate the Voting Rights Act?

Because of their dilutive effect, many at-large voting systems across the United States have been struck down by courts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Interestingly, there is even a relatively local example from a neighboring city in Tennessee. In the 1989 case Brown v. Board of Commissioners of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a federal district court struck down the City of Chattanooga’s at-large voting system, finding the system to be in violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

It is critical to note, however, that the mere potential for discriminatory outcomes under an at-large electoral system does not on its own constitute a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Instead, courts have relied on the Gingles test — a legal standard derived from the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles — to adjudicate claims of racial vote dilution under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The test establishes three preconditions that plaintiffs must satisfy:

• Size and Geographic Compactness: The minority group must be large and geographically compact enough to constitute a majority in a single-member district.

• Political Cohesiveness: The minority group must demonstrate that it is politically cohesive, typically voting similarly in elections.

• Majority Bloc Voting: The majority must vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the minority's preferred candidate.

Rising Cost of Representation

An at-large system will raise the cost of running for office and thus exacerbate the role of money in politics.

Wealthier districts not only have higher turnout rates but also tend to raise and contribute more to political campaigns. Candidates in high-turnout districts often attract more donations, while those in lower-turnout areas tend to raise substantially less. Moving to an entirely at-large system would require candidates to raise vastly more money to get their message out to the entire city instead of just their friends and neighbors.

In a city where the cost of elections is already rising, this shift risks sidelining candidates who are more representative of Knoxville’s neighborhoods but lack the financial resources to compete, especially against against well-funded challengers.

Proponents of the amendment suggest this isn’t true — but once again, data and logic should prevail.

Each city council district contains roughly 32,000 residents, and the city has around 190,000 residents overall. It is objectively cheaper to get your message out to 30,000 than 190,000 — especially when a candidate doesn’t have name recognition prior to running for office.

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Currently, Knoxville’s system balances district and city-wide representation. District representatives are nominated by their districts in the primary but elected by the whole city in the general election, while three at-large seats are chosen city-wide. This system ensures that council members are accountable to their neighborhoods, while also holding them responsible to the broader Knoxville community.

However, the state legislature recently outlawed Knoxville's current electoral system, overriding the city’s voter-approved Home Rule Charter despite strong local opposition. We stand together in the conviction that changes to the city's electoral system should be decided by city voters – not the state.

Despite our disagreement with the state legislature’s actions, we must now focus on establishing an electoral system that best serves the needs and interests of city voters.

As proposed, we believe City Charter Amendment No. 2 is flawed and threatens to disrupt the balance between district and city-wide representation. The amendment would eliminate true district representation, allowing candidates to win district seats with little to no support from the people living in those districts. While council members would still have to reside in their districts, residency alone is insufficient—representation means being chosen by your neighbors, understanding their issues, and advocating for their needs.

Knoxville once had an at-large electoral system. In 1960, the city voted to abolish districts and move to a fully at-large electoral system. Voters quickly realized it didn’t provide fair representation and brought back district elections in 1968. The logic was clear then, and it remains clear now: district-level representation ensures that council members understand the specific needs of their district, and it ensures that all neighborhoods have a voice in the political process.

If this amendment is defeated, district seats will be elected by district voters and at-large seats will continue to be elected city-wide—a proven system used by most major cities.

For these reasons, we urge city residents to vote “no” on City Charter Amendment No. 2.

Sincerely,

Hancen Sale, Former Government Affairs and Policy Director, East Tennessee Realtors

Virginia Babb, Former Knox County School Board Member, District 4

Courtney Durrett, Knox County Commissioner, District 2

Lynne Fugate, Knoxville City Councilwoman, At-Large Seat A

Eddie Mannis, Former Tennessee State Representative, District 18

Sam McKenzie, Tennessee State Representative, District 15

Phyllis Nichols, Former Chief Executive Officer, Knoxville Area Urban League

Hugh Nystrom, Former Knox County Commissioner, District 4

Matthew Park, Former Candidate for Knox County Commission, District 9

Amelia Parker, Knoxville City Councilwoman, At-Large Seat C

Randy Smith, Former Knox County Commissioner, District 3

Janet Testerman, Former Knoxville City Councilwoman, At-Large Seat B

George Wallace, Former Knoxville City Councilman, At-Large Seat A