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Kingsport: High Quality at a Lower Cost
Many people instinctively equate higher tax revenue with higher quality. They assume that if a state collects more per person, it must provide better schools, better services, better infrastructure, and better local government. Sometimes that may be true. But it is not automatic. Higher collections can also reflect higher costs, greater service demands, larger bureaucracies,…
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Kingsport’s Housing Market Is Punching Above Its Weight
People vote with their feet, but they also invest where they see value. The latest housing numbers give us a useful look at the first four months of 2026. Taken together, they show that home sales remain healthy across the Tri-Cities and the Northeast Tennessee-Southwest Virginia market. They also show something worth noting for Kingsport:…
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Kingsport Is Not Just a Place to Work. It Is a Place to Live.
For generations, Kingsport has been known as an industrial city. This is a place built by blue-collar workers, managers, supervisors, engineers, executives, and working families — people who changed clothes before and after work, carried lunch boxes, worked rotating shifts, parked at plant gates, punched time clocks, and helped make products that reached far beyond…
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Kingsport and Maryville: Two Strong Tennessee Communities
Recently, I was asked to compare Maryville and Kingsport. I gave what I believed was a fair answer, but it was worth checking the facts. Make no mistake: my job is to advocate for Kingsport. But I also want to preserve a reputation for candor, accuracy, and truth. Maryville (population 32,553) has earned its place…
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Move to Kingsport: Grounded Growth
Sullivan County Mayor-Elect Zane Vanover coined the term “grounded growth” in his campaign. To my knowledge, he didn’t specify exactly what that meant, but I think I have an idea. The April 2026 Move to Kingsport numbers show a program that has cooled from its post-pandemic peak, but is still producing steady results. For many…
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Sullivan 250 | The Holston River: From Long Island to the Future Capital
Fifth in a 12-part monthly series to commemorate Sullivan County’s role in the 250th birthday of the United States of America May 2026 | 5 of 12 Rivers functioned much like an early version of our modern interstate system, especially when they were navigable. Long Island (later King’s Port) in Sullivan County was considered the head…
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The Tri-Cities: Inside the Perimeter
Sometimes a map can say what a thousand words cannot. For example, I recently created a map superimposing Atlanta onto the Tri-Cities, TN+VA region. It takes the familiar geography of Johnson City, Kingsport, Bristol, Greeneville, Elizabethton, Abingdon, Blountville, Jonesborough, and the surrounding communities and places it over a region most people already understand as a…
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Blair Court
“Blair Court” is one of the new streets in Kingsport’s Brickyard Village, named after Blair & Company. But who were they? To answer that, we have to begin not in Kingsport, but in New York City — in the world of late 19th- and early 20th-century finance, when Wall Street banking houses helped build railroads,…
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The Model City Rewind
Former Mayor Pat Shull has been after me for years to write a follow-up to Margaret Ripley Wolfe’s 1994 book, Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City. That book was not a “Chamber of Commerce” piece that simply celebrated the good points. In many ways, it was a warning. Wolfe captured Kingsport at a turning point.…
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The Children Behind The Numbers
Sometimes we get desensitized to the noise. We are bombarded from every direction with snippets, tweets, posts, shares, headlines, and half-truths. So many people I know have either tuned out or turned it all off at the very time we most need to be paying attention. I understand that. It is a defense mechanism. But…
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Kingsport Spirit 