Earlier this month, I joined WBIR’s Inside Tennessee, alongside Knoxville Community Development Corporation’s Ben Bentley, for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of growth and housing across our region.
We covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time—where the housing market stands right now, how Knoxville’s growth is entirely driven by people moving here and not from within, and why a lot of people are feeling unhappy about where things are headed in a city that’s “thriving” on paper.
You can watch the full segment here:
A few highlights from the conversation:
Where the housing market stands today. The housing market has cooled significantly over the past two years, yet rents and home prices remain appreciably higher than they were five years ago. As I wrote in July, Knoxville home prices grew faster than any other city in America from 2020 to early 2026, leaving the typical household able to comfortably afford just 13% of homes listed for sale. Market conditions continue to normalize. This is especially true for the rental market, where apartment rents have declined for 16 consecutive months. But that’s little consolation for renters who’ve already watched rent consume a growing share of their budget, as even nearly two years of modestly negative rent growth isn’t enough to erase several years of double-digit increases.
Growth from migration, not from within. Knoxville’s growth is entirely a function of people moving here rather than reproducing from within. This raises real questions about the durability of the region’s recent success. Knoxville’s internal growth is among the weakest in the country, with the Knoxville metro ranking 379th among 387 U.S. metro areas for natural population growth from 2020 to 2025—placing it in the 2nd percentile nationally. Only eight U.S. cities experienced larger natural population losses. In my view, Knoxville’s struggle to “grow its own” will be the defining challenge for the decade ahead.
Knoxville is thriving on paper, yet a lot of people are unhappy with where things are headed. By most conventional economic measures, Knoxville is doing extremely well. But the region’s economic success sits in stark contrast with the fact that a lot of people are feeling like things are headed in the wrong direction. That reality showed up in the recent local elections, when Knox County voters wiped out nearly the entire political establishment.
If you’ve been reading along here for a while, none of this is new—it’s the same handful of topics I’ve been writing and talking about for quite awhile, just condensed into a half hour of TV.
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