Tennessee remained a top growth state last year, according to U-Haul, but Memphis didn’t help much.
The state ranked sixth in growth, according to the company’s data. But that is down from the top spot Tennessee earned in 2020 and last year’s third-place finish.
This year, people arriving in Tennessee in one-way U-Haul trucks dropped 7 percent from 2021, while departures fell 6 percent, as overall traffic slowed. However, do-it-yourself movers arriving in Tennessee still accounted for 50.3 percent of all one-way U-Haul truck traffic in and out of Tennessee (49.7 percent departures) to keep it a top-10 growth state for the third consecutive year.
“I think Tennessee dropped slightly in the U-Haul Growth Index because of the huge increase in tech jobs that became remote during the pandemic, and some of those people being called back to their California and New York offices in 2022,” Chris Hardin, U-Haul Company of South Nashville president, said in a statement. “But we continue to have a beautiful state that a lot of people want to make their home.”
Tennessee’s top growth city for 2022 was Nashville. Other growing markets included Maryville, Brentwood, Cleveland, Old Hickory, the Tri-Cities (Johnson City, Kingsport, and Bristol), Hendersonville, La Vergne, Sparta, Ooltewah, Manchester, Hermitage, Mt. Juliet, Greeneville, and Cookeville. Jackson and Germantown were the only two West Tennessee cities to make U-Haul’s growing-market list from Tennessee.
Texas was the leading growth state for the fifth time since 2016. Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia rounded out the top five. California ranks 50th and Illinois 49th for the third year in a row, indicating those states saw the largest net losses of one-way U-Haul trucks.
More people left Memphis over the last two years than any other part of the state. That’s a bad sign for the area’s economic growth, according to a Tennessee labor expert.
Marianne Wanamaker, a labor economist at the University of Tennessee, told state lawmakers Tuesday that — from an output perspective — the U.S. and Tennessee economies are “operating as though Covid never happened.” However, fewer people are working, and 95,000 employees are needed for jobs in Tennessee. Now, there’s only half that number of workers available in the state.
Bridging the gap between high output and fewer workers means those who are working spend more time at their jobs. Wanamaker said this may explain “why working Americans express feeling burned out and exhausted.”
The American labor supply “took a beating” during Covid, Wanamaker said, and is struggling to recover. She said it’s unlikely that the labor force participation rate (the amount of Americans working or actively looking for jobs) will ever return to the record 67-percent rate experienced in the late 1990s before the dotcom bubble.
More than 2.1 million Americans retired early in the pandemic, Wanamaker said. Unlike previous times, she does not believe many of those will “un-retire” and return to the workforce, wiping out a significant portion of the “bonus labor force.”
Many blamed the so-called worker shortage on emergency pandemic unemployment insurance benefits from the federal government. So sure of this notion, Tennessee Republican lawmakers opted the state out of said benefits to prod those taking the money back into the workforce. Wanamaker said “our draw down on unemployment insurance is quite low compared to where we were last year.”
Sen. Frank Nicely (R-Strawberry Plains) said many “snowflake millennials” are now just living off the wealth of their dying parents.
“I was reading the other day that us war babies and Baby Boomers are dying off and there’s been a huge transfer of wealth to snowflake millennials — one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history — and a lot of them don’t have to work,” Nicely said. “They inherited a house and they got money in the bank. A lot of them are in pretty good shape. What impact does that have on people not working?”
In response, Wanamaker said, without unemployment insurance, people are financing non-work in other ways. She said the labor market is experiencing weakness at all education levels, but remarked vaguely on the recent increases in the stock market and housing valuations in Knoxville.
Wanamaker focused on the fact that an economy cannot grow without people, and that’s a challenge for Tennessee at the moment. Deaths exceeded births in the state by 7 percent in 2020, she said. Even without Covid deaths, Wanamaker predicted that deaths would have exceeded births here by 2024.
(Credit: University of Tennessee)
The only population growth for the state that year came from people arriving from other states. Without that, she said, Tennessee’s population would be shrinking and dragging economic growth. Those migrations did not happen uniformly across the state. In fact, Memphis was — far and away — the biggest loser.
To track migration, Wanamaker used U.S. Postal Service data from change-of-address cards. Someone moving gives the Post Office the address they’re moving from and the address they’re moving to. Each change of address card is considered one household, and each household is conservatively considered to be about two people. From this information, migration trends can be calculated.
Knoxville, the state’s biggest population winner, gained 8,202 households (or 16,404 people) in 2020 and 2021. Bristol gained 3,446 households (or 6,892 people), while Johnson City gained 1,484 households (or 2,968 people).
(Credit: University of Tennessee)
At the same time, Memphis lost 8,555 households (or 17,110 people), in those two years, losing “as many households as Knoxville has gained,” Wanamaker said. U.S. Census Bureau data show that Shelby County’s population rose by only 2,100 people between 2010 and 2020 (from 927,644 to 929,744), or 0.2 percent.
“I believe population and labor force dynamics are the major policy challenges of the next 5 to 10 years,” Wanamaker said. “Supply chain snarls will abate. … It remains very possible that the [Federal Reserve Bank] will find a soft landing on inflation that will keep us out of a double-dip recession.
“Meanwhile, the labor shortage and lack of population growth is going to be a challenge with 100-percent certainty.”
As for a remedy, Wanamaker said “recruiting migrants [from other states and legal immigrants form other countries] to the state will determine the rate of economic growth over the short and medium term.”
A U.S. Census report out Thursday says Memphis is the 20th largest city in the country and its population has grown by more than 7500 people since 2010 when the school merger talk began.
The report says the population of Memphis grew from 647,612 in 2010 to 655,155 in July, 2012. The population of Shelby County increased from 928,792 to 940,764 during the same period.
“It appears we are seeing a leveling off of movement from the city as we approach the merger of the school systems,” said Maura Black Sullivan, assistant chief administrative officer for the city of Memphis.
She said annexations did not account for the increase. The Southwind residential annexation takes place this year, and the South Cordova annexation came after July of 2012.
The news is cold comfort. Both Mayor A C Wharton and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell say the taxable property base is down and the property tax rate will have to rise to yield the same amount of money as last year. The schools merger takes place this year, and there could be a Big Churn when the suburbs start their own systems.
But a gain is a gain. Discount it all you want. Explain it away if you will. Knock yourself out. They’re not downplaying the numbers in Nashville. To see how one newspaper handled the report of the growth in Middle Tennessee, see this story from The Tennessean.
Some other numbers from around Tennessee and DeSoto County, Mississippi:
Davidson County (Nashville), 628,021 to 648,295. Nashville is the 25th largest city in the U.S.
Southaven passed with the 50,000 mark. It’s population is 50,374.
Fayette County, east of Shelby County, 38,413 to 38,659.
Rutherford County (Murfreesboro), 263,779 to 274,454.
Williamson County (Franklin and Brentwood south of Nashville), 184,063 to 192,911.
