Category: Move To Kingsport
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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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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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Strong Neighborhoods. Smart Growth.
It is a term coined by John Campbell, former Kingsport city manager, to describe the city’s core strength. He grew up in the Model City with an intimate understanding of its history and design, but spent much of his professional life away from home, measuring his memories of Kingsport against communities across the state. His…
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Leading From the Back
This week, community members gathered to cut the ribbon on the new BlueCross Healthy Place at Riverwalk Park. But ribbon-cutting is only the visible moment. It is the latest public expression of a vision that began decades ago. One thing stood out to me in the photo of dignitaries cutting the ribbon: City Manager Chris…
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Established Neighborhoods Are Carrying Kingsport’s Out-of-Region Growth
MOVE TO KINGSPORT MONTHLY REPORT – MARCH 2026 The past month shows that Kingsport’s out-of-region draw remains impressively wide. March’s moves came from 25 states, which is a broad footprint for a single month. The biggest monthly sources were Tennessee, Florida, and Texas, with additional moves from states such as New York and Virginia (outside…
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Tennessee’s Emerging and Mature Places Tell Two Very Different Housing Stories
Third-party rankings are constantly scanning and ranking communities based on “best of” or “worst of”. Frankly, it can be exhausting to keep up with. Some use a city name when they really mean a metropolitan or combined statistical area, leaving neighboring towns to wonder what they missed and the named city to take a bow…
Kingsport Spirit 