When Will the Nashville Area’s Population Hit 2 Million?
by John Egan
February 13, 2017
Signs of the Nashville, TN, metro area’s population explosion abound. The residential and commercial construction boom, the worsening traffic congestion, and the hot and pricier housing market are among them. But if you’re a Nashville-area resident who wishes all this “progress” would cool off, you’re going to be let down.
According to a LawnStarter analysis of population projections from the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee, the Nashville metro area is on track to reach a population milestone -- 2 million -- sometime in 2020. That’s just three years from now. The latest headcount shows the region had a little over 1.8 million residents in 2015. Between 2015 and 2020, the region is expected to post population growth of 9.2 percent.
As a means of comparison, the 14 counties that now make up the Nashville metro area collectively had about 1.1 million residents in 1990 and almost 600,000 in 1950, according to a LawnStarter analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
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Nick Lindeman, economic data analyst at the Nashville Metropolitan Planning Organization, attributes the region’s continued growth to a strong economy adding jobs in sectors such as health care and manufacturing, a relatively low cost of living and a buzzworthy brand.
The hype over Music City is “enhanced by many media articles in recent years touting the ‘hipness’ of Nashville and by the ‘Nashville’ television program,” Lindeman says.
Matt Harris, a research assistant professor at the Boyd Center, says another factor in the rise of the Nashville area’s population is that “growth begets growth.” As more people move to the area to fill newly created jobs, he says, they’re creating a “ripple effect” in the economy -- boosting demand for goods and services and, therefore, boosting the need for more workers.
So, will growth keep begetting growth in the Nashville area?
“We can’t tell with perfect foresight whether Nashville will sustain its growth, but there are reasons to think it can,” Harris says. “First, Nashville is still experiencing strong job growth. Second, Nashville is still relatively low in population density compared to peer cities like Charlotte, Louisville and even Memphis, let alone Dallas or Atlanta.”
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