Music City is making a big overture to Chicago’s tech workers.
Amid a population boom and Big Tech creating outposts there, Nashville has launched a marketing campaign to woo tech workers from Chicago and other big cities by touting the fact it has no state income tax, shorter commute times, milder weather and a famous music scene.
If this type of poaching stunt sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because Chicago’s given as good as it gets. In September, World Business Chicago, the public-private operation that serves as the city’s economic development arm, took out a full-page ad in the Sunday Dallas Morning News, inviting corporations to head north for more liberal abortion and voting laws — a swipe at restrictive legislation the Lone Star State passed in recent months.
While there are plenty of Chicago cheerleaders prepared to offer counterpoints to all Nashville says it has on offer, there’s some data out there suggesting the Chicago-to-Nashville pipeline is humming. Between 2014 and 2018, the net migration of residents moving from the Chicago region to Nashville was 1,629 annually, a spokeswoman for the Nashville campaign says, citing U.S. census data. That would make the Chicago region, defined by the Census Bureau as the city, suburbs, parts of southern Wisconsin and northwest Indiana, the largest source of new residents in the Nashville region.
And it’s not just Chicagoans relocating there. Nashville saw an impressive population boom over the last decade, driven largely by Middle Tennessee, where multiple counties make up the Nashville metropolitan statistical area.
