Living in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Those two city personas are not mutually exclusive and Chattanooga is living proof why. With its reasonable-ish cost of living and southern staples like the annual Tennessee Whiskey Festival, Chattanooga might seem like many other small southern cities. But with more and more startups and tech companies moving in every month, this feels less like the Tennessee/Georgia border and more like Silicon Valley. Chattanooga was even the first city in the country to roll out a citywide gigabyte network for residents. You truly get the best of both worlds here.

Chattanooga was already on the rise before COVID, but since March of 2020, things have gone crazy. The explosion is causing some cultural, and structural challenges for locals. Chattanooga is the perfect storm for contemporary and pandemic growth: it’s in the south in a state with low taxes, it’s a college town, it’s a smaller city that helps big city folks feel like they can spread out more, and then for the newly minted work-from-homers it has that gigabit network. Holy moly all these things add up to a storm of northeasterners and northwesterners to flock down here.

There’s a lot to do in Chattanooga for a relatively small city with a nice mix of cool city options and amazing outdoor lifestyle options. The downtown area is filled with local boutiques for groovy shopping and foodies get a food scene thriving as much as its tech scene, with way more than just the southern classics. Chattanooga also has great access to outdoor recreation opportunities, with rivers and parks in town for daily play, and tons of forest trails, river rapids, rock formations, and waterfalls close by for more intense excursions.

To see what locals get up to for fun in Chattanooga check out the calendar of events.

We highly recommend visiting Chattanooga and staying in the community in a VRBO rather than a hotel to get a feel for living among the locals. You can also receive discounted travel fares via our partnership with Expedia.

Tech and healthcare are two of the hottest industries in Chattanooga’s growing economy. In an emerging COVID world, many tech companies and startups view it as a cheaper but still solid alternative to SF and NYC, and remote workers have viewed the city in the same light. Healthcare has always been big in the area with some of the best hospitals in Tennessee, but the overall work climate is on the rise as well.