Several years ago, Kerry Hayes - former mayoral chief of staff, founder of Coeo Media and old friend to Food as a Verb - was at a local town hall meeting.

This was the time of great Chattanooga growth: Outdoor City, the Gig, headlines near and far.

An older woman approached. Kerry and City Hall had been proud of all the 'Chattanooga's-growing-move-here' news.

Not her.

“We don’t want anymore of this ‘Boulder-of-the-South’ stuff'," she said.

This story - and Kerry's response that follows - are a good microcosm for the tension within development and conservation which, in years since, has only increased.

Food as a Verb continues to report on the agarian crisis of regional farmland loss, yet, never with our heads in the soil. People will continue to move here. Developers will continue to build. Hammers, dozers, new townhomes - they aren't going anywhere, nor should they.

But, we can proceed in reckless ways, ruining the one treasure we can never get back. (Read: Farmland.)

Or, we could develop our region in thoughtful ways based on respect and wisdom. (Read: Stewardship.)

Thankfully, Kerry has some ideas. His guest essay is at the heart of today's column.

But first?

We want to say thanks.

For you.

We are grateful - thankful, appreciative, abundantly, hug your neck tight - for all of you, our Food as a Verb community.

Your kindness. Handshakes and hugs. Story ideas, suggestions, laughter, nudges and the way we're showing up at places together. (Like Little Coyote with Brooks Lamb. Wasn't that wonderful?)

We're also grateful for our partners. This season, remember them.

We're also delighted to announce our newest partner:

The incomparable Sujata Singh and Spice Trail.

Spice Trail is now open for both lunch and dinner, perfectly located in the heart of downtown. Took some friends yesterday who'd never been before.

This is incredible, one said.

Sujata creates a menu that is original and inventive - Indian food like you've never had before. A new bar and restaurant design make this feel like one of the most memorable places in Chattanooga right now.

We'll follow up with another Spice Trail story in early 2025.

• We're also thankful for the outstandingly helpful and brilliant Haley Richardson Treadway, the UT Ag-Agent for Hamilton County.

Haley's teaching the 2025 Master Gardener program, one of the county's treasures.

The four-month course runs from 6:30 – 8:30 pm beginning in Feb. No pre-requisites needed besides an application. Deadline is Jan. 5. Learn more here.

• This Sunday, we'll give thanks for one of our very favorite moments of the year.

The annual Gratefull lunch.

But first?

A very happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Now, here's Kerry.

How to Build and Develop to Protect Farmland

By Kerry Hayes

In 2018, I was working for the Mayor’s office, and one evening at a townhall meeting in Lupton City, an older lady walked up to me and said, “We don’t want anymore of this ‘Boulder-of-the-South’ stuff.”

The last word sounded like a epithet.

I blinked at her; she made her point more clearly for me: “We don’t want any more people moving here.” 

“Ok,” I said to her. I have some very bad news for you, I thought to myself.

What this lady could not have known is that I was part of the problem: I had moved to Chattanooga less than a year before and was renting a friend’s accessory-dwelling unit near downtown.

Within a couple of years, I would buy a house in Highland Park and then another in Hill City. 

I was part of a steady wave of young professionals who have been arriving in Chattanooga for years now - steady, but not overwhelming.

According to the U.S. Census, the population of the greater Chattanooga metro area has increased by a percent or less since 2010.

This puts our growth on pace to match the national average, and well behind other Tennessee cities like Knoxville, Murfreesboro and Clarksville.

We will soon slip from being the state’s fourth biggest city to its fifth or sixth.

Nevertheless, many lifelong Chattanoogans are concerned about population growth and its second and third-order effects on, well, everything: schools overcrowding, more traffic, and rents and home prices, both of which have surged in the last several years. 

It is of no comfort whatsoever to make this point, but I will do so anyway: this is not a Chattanooga problem, a Tennessee problem, or a southern problem; this is nationwide crisis.

As the National Low Income Housing Coalition has been telling us for years, there is no county in the entire country where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest two-bedroom rental home, and in more than 92% of U.S. counties, they can’t afford a one-bedroom rental.” 

A reasonable solution to high home prices is, of course, to build more homes. The clear laws of supply and demand would indicate that if too many people are looking for too few dwellings, getting more units on the market will cause prices to naturally sag.

That’s one of the reasons why it feels like you see cranes and construction fencing everywhere.

What does this have to do with food systems and nutrition? As Food as a Verb has capably pointed out more than once, Hamilton County’s farmable land is being developed to the point of extinction. Family farms - multi-generational businesses, really - are being lost, as is something vitally precious about an agrarian culture which has nourished this region in more ways than one for millennia. 

The solution to this crisis is not to discourage development.

To the contrary, if we want to protect our farmland and forests, we should be doing everything we can to encourage more building where it's wanted.

This includes more building along transit corridors near downtown and other employment centers. 

Reforming our zoning code is part of this solution. The Kelly administration and the Chattanooga City Council deserve commendation for making the first major overhaul to our local zoning code in decades.

Zoning is essentially the “operating system” for a city, in that it dictates what can be legally built on any given parcel of land, with a shrewd eye on your building’s impact to your neighbors.

The updated zoning code is meant to allow a greater variety of units in those parts of town that want and need them. 

To be clear: when families can’t afford the home they want, they’ll opt for the home they can afford. If that means they have to move farther and farther away from the city, developers will build homes for them wherever they can.

This is what accelerates the cannibalizing sprawl of our farms and forests.

You can certainly hope that developers simply stop building new buildings. You can ask newcomers to just stop moving here.

Neither are likely to be productive, but allowing better options for housing more people in places they can afford might be.

Better zoning alone won’t save us, however. Banks and other sources of capital will need to finance these kinds of projects -- mixed use, often with smaller floor plans -- at a much higher rate than they have in the past.

We've known for a long time that builders want smarter regulations and easier sources of capital.

What we also must now reckon with is an incoming presidential administration whose economic policies will remove extraordinary numbers of workers and impose punishing tariffs on American businesses.

These will conspire to drive labor and materials costs through the roof, retarding new construction at the exact moment we need thousands of new housing starts. 

And yet - people will continue to come into the Tennessee Valley.

In fact, as inflationary pressures push housing prices in Nashville and Atlanta even higher, my expectation is that our population gains are only going to accelerate.

If we can't find a way to build - at a variety of price points - in urban centers where services, amenities, and infrastructure already exist, developers will have no choice but to keep chewing up our farmland faster and faster.

Kerry can be reached at kerry.hayes@gmail.com and @kerrycoeo.bsky.social.

Story ideas, questions, feedback? Interested in partnering with us? Email: david@foodasaverb.com

This story is 100% human generated; no AI chatbot was used in the creation of this content.