Source: Wikipedia.
The capital of the state of Tennessee, Nashville is a popular Southern U.S. city, especially if you like music. Nicknamed “Music City,” Nashville is a center for the music industry and has many venues where you can listen to music, both large and small. Nashville saw an economic boom in the 1990s when it became a more desirable place to live with new construction and revitalization of many neighborhoods. Today, Nashville is the second largest city in Tennessee – behind Memphis – with around 626,000 people living in all its municipalities, and there are nearly 1.6 million living in the metro area.
Safety in Nashville
Looking at crime data Nashville isn’t exactly considered to be a safe city when compared to others in the country. It’s safer than only 2 percent of the cities in the United States and has a far higher crime rate than the Tennessee average. The crime index is 52 percent higher here than in Tennessee as a whole, and you have a 1 in 17 chance of being a victim of crime.
Nashville ranks much higher on the violent crimes index and property crime index compared to the national average, according to City-Data.com. Nashville is policed by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.
Employment Opportunities in Nashville
If you’re part of the music industry then Nashville is a good place to live – it is the second biggest music production center after New York in the country and provides around 19,000 jobs to the Nashville area. Other than this the largest industry overall is healthcare, providing 200,000 jobs. Thanks to these sectors, as well as tourism, Nashville’s economy is fairly strong with unemployment rates below the national average for 2012 at 6.9 percent (compared to national average of 8.3 percent). Poverty levels are almost in line with national averages at 13.3 percent compared to the national 12.3 percent.
Cost of Living in Nashville
The great news is that the cost of living in Nashville is 10 percent less than the national average, with utilities, healthcare, and transportation all being more affordable, while housing is substantially cheaper than the national average at 32 percent less. Groceries are in line with the rest of the nation, but if you’re saving that much on housing this won’t have such a big impact on your monthly cost of living.
Schools and Education in Nashville
Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools is the school district for the city, taking care of more than 81,000 students within 76 elementary schools, 47 middle schools, 22 high schools, and 10 specialty schools. The International Baccalaureate program is being taught in nine schools in Nashville, and the city is home to the prestigious Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School which, along with Nashville School of the Arts, and Martin Luther King, are consistently ranked within the top 50 schools in the U.S. Nashville actually has a far higher percentage of students completing high school (81 percent) compared to the national average (58 percent).
One of Nashville’s nicknames is the “Athens of the South” because of its large number of colleges and universities, including Tennessee State University, Vanderbilt University, and Belmont University.
Air Quality in Nashville
The fact that Nashville is not the most walkable of cities in the United States goes some way to explaining the higher air quality index in the city. Nashville has an 18.9 percent higher air quality index than the national average, and the pollution index is 125 percent higher. Having said this, statistics show that there have been only three days in a year when air quality was considered to be poor.
