Apartment hunting in Nashville Apartment hunting in Nashville (October 01, 2004)

by Jeb Bing

I 've just returned from Nashville, where my daughter Jenny had a successful job interview and where I joined her in her search for a place to live when she moves there later this year. It turns out that finding a job in this surprisingly bustling Tennessee capital may be a lot easier than finding an apartment. The city is teeming with 20- and 30-year-olds, many of them connected in some way to the city's $3.5 billion music business or hoping to be. Even the Music City's byname is "Sounds." You see the word everywhere, from the minor league Nashville Sounds baseball team to the state's license plate motto "Sounds good to me." Studios, production crews and top recording artists have followed the old-school country music singers to Nashville to take advantage of lower operating and production costs, with names like Sony and RCA atop new buildings and many others in office buildings and converted homes along Music Row. For the young and aspiring, this is the neighborhood to be seen, to make contacts and to live, along the 21st Street corridor west of downtown and near Vanderbilt University. Like the Soho district in New York or North Beach in San Francisco, it's an area filled with late night coffeeshops, trendy restaurants and shops, and never-ending, bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Of course, this crowded neighborhood is also where we searched for housing, finding that monthly rents ranged from $1,200 in elegant high rises to half that for small studios in older buildings. I feel that I'm now qualified to hire myself out as a Nashville apartment-finding consultant. I can sniff out, track down and chase a worthy lead like the best of the best. We searched at break-neck speed and saw our share of "sketchy," as Jenny would say, places. A listing I found on a bulletin board at Vanderbilt's Graduate School of Business led us to a breezy, one-bedroom corner apartment and Mrs. Deckert, the apartment complex manager who spent considerable time sizing up this young Californian to make sure she'd fit in with the conservative, southern lifestyle she looked for in prospective tenants. Now 85, Mrs. Deckert is a retired inspector with the U.S. Department of Consumer Affairs. When she learned we're from Pleasanton, the headquarters city for Safeway stores, where she spent considerable time, we became more like family and Jenny got the lease.

Back in the days when I was a student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Eastern Tennessee was the progressive part of the state and Nashville was the Old South, with an economy centered on the state government. That's changed. An abundance of auditoriums, concert halls, performing arts theaters and the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center, along with its downtown arena and Grand Ole Opry enterprises, have made Nashville a cultural and entertainment center. Tourists stand in line for "Platinum Passports" to mid-day showboat cruises on the Cumberland River, lunch at the Wildhorse Saloon downtown and the Grand Ole Opry shows that are performed almost every night. And the prices are right. A complete lunch at the Wildhorse was $6; the evening meal at an outdoor restaurant across the street was $9. Gasoline is $1.89 a gallon.

Besides rents at about half the rate of Pleasanton's, 3,000-square-foot homes on 1-acre lots start in the mid-$400,000s, with smaller, comfortable-looking houses listed in the low $200,000s. Only traffic compares to Pleasanton's, with freeways jammed during the rush hours and arterial streets even more crowded than ours. We thought of Pleasanton and its obsession with multiple-phased traffic lights when we would find ourselves faced with a single small signal hanging from an overhead wire. At many busy corners there aren't any, leaving motorists on their own to work their way into traffic. Still, we found the southern tradition of patience and courtesy working just as well on the road as in everyday life in Nashville.

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