Editor’s Note: This piece is presented exactly as author Bill Dorian wrote it — an unedited, firsthand account of how gentrification pushed him from Nashville to northern Maine. His story, from selling his longtime condo to navigating rising housing costs across Tennessee. The price of buying a house anywhere in Tennessee had continued to skyrocket and ultimately settling in Madawaska, reflects the personal impact of a decades‑long pattern of displacement. We have preserved his original voice and narrative to honor the authenticity of his experience.

I’m a Nashville boy, born and raised. So how did I end up staring out my living room picture window, looking at a couple of mountains in  Canada—with the St. John River flowing not 200 yards away between our home in Madawaska, Maine and Edmundson, New Brunswick?

Gentrification rearranged my life—just as it has for thousands in the Nashville area since the ’50s. It’s a funny word for a situation that lacks all humor. It’s rooted in the word ‘gentry,’ i.e., ‘upper class.’ Often poorer residential neighborhoods become attractive to more wealthy buyers (the gentry) because an area is suddenly growing financially by leaps and bounds. Long time residents get booted out—or maybe leave voluntarily because they have been offered an amount of money too scintillating to turn down.

Gentrification sent me packing about five years ago. I had owned/occupied a condo in Metro Nashville for 24 years. I raised my kids there; graded papers in my role as a theatre and speech professor at Cumberland University there; wrote theatre reviews for The Nashville PRIDE; wrote 12 plays; and even wrote a book there. I used to tell people that “when St. Peter calls, they’ll have to take me out of here in a pine box .”

But by early 2020 credit card debt was piling up, and the financial grim reaper was knocking on the door of my small condo. A friend of mine suggested I sell it and pay off my debts with the equity. Equity? What equity? I only gave about $40,000 for my home in 1993. It couldn’t be worth much (plus, I had re-financed it twice). But after talking to a realtor, I learned my little two-bedroom ‘estate’ had more than doubled in value over the years.

So I sold it, and paid off all my debt—but now had to move. But to my great surprise and alarm, my condo wasn’t the only property in Metro Nashville that had doubled or tripled in value. After scouring all the houses/condos on <realtor.com> within Nashville, I realized I could no longer afford to live in the area I had called home for most of my life.

After broadening my ‘search,’ I finally found a small A-framed house in the woods near Crossville, Tennessee. But it was 130 miles from Nashville. Ouch!!  But that was about the closest thing to ‘home’ I could find. Plus, it sort of looked like a little ‘fairy house’ with that A-framed roof. I adored my little A-frame cabin, but it meant I had to move too far from the Nashville theatre community Iloved so much. But my daughter Britt, 35 and divorced, moved in with me so I wasn’t alone.

However, we experienced ‘paranormal problems’ in the little cabin in the forrest. No fairies, but Casper the Friendly Ghost was there and he wasn’t so friendly. The story about the ‘paranormal beasties’ we encountered is a totally different tale from my gentrification observations—but if, perchance, you are interested in the paranormal you can go online and look up one of the October, 2023, episodes of the History Channel’s The Dead Files. They came out and did an episode featuring Britt and me about our personal haunting in Crossville. It’s called ‘Isolated.’

The show’s psychic told us we needed to get out of there FAST before the paranormal incidents got any worse. So I hired another realtor. Luckily (or unluckily for us as it turned out), gentrification came back into our lives. The price of buying a house anywhere in Tennessee (including Crossville) had continued to skyrocket. After living in our little cabin for three years (in the company of many paranormal ‘non-friends’), we sold it for a decent profit.   

But again I discovered we couldn’t afford to buy a house in the area where we lived—in fact, nowhere in the state of Tennessee. I couldn’t believe we were going to have to leave the state to find a house we could afford. Back to the online realty drawing board.

So after another search of <realtor.com>, I discovered houses up north tend to be much cheaper than in Tennessee—due to 50 years of a depressed economy in the northern states, characterized by factory closures and a significant migration of the American population to the South and out West.

The sale of the A-frame happened rather unexpectedly. After only four months on the market, we had to scramble to find another house somewhere up north. In fact, our buyers were in such a frantic frenzy to take over occupancy (they’d been living in a hotel), we didn’t have much time to hunt for just the right house—just needed something quick.

To make a long story short we found a three story, 138 year old Victorian house in Jamestown, New York. We bought it online, sight unseen. It was super cheap, but looked pretty darned good on the computer screen. The exact same house would have cost twice as much in Nashville. So we jumped on it. The seller admitted the house “needed some work,” but it still looked great on the outside. And even though we’d only lived three years in Crossville, the great god ‘Gentrification’ decreed that people from out of town could hardly wait to give us just a bit of profit on that cabin. So, with a little money in our pockets, we headed north to southwestern New York state.

Jamestown, N.Y. had, at one time, been the furniture manufacturing capital of America. But the factories had all closed their doors and 40% of the population had left by the time my daughter and I moved into our 2,800-square foot Victorian there. So what could possibly go wrong, right? Well, here’s what could go wrong: It needed significantly more work than it looked like it would based on the photos. Only about 1,000 square feet were actually livable. And alas, like a total idiot (remember, our buyers were pressing us to GET OUT of the Crossville A-frame), I hadn’t asked for an inspection of that 138 year old house in New York. Big mistake.

It was about a 13 hour trip—further and further from Nashville where my job at the Nashville PRIDE, all our relatives, and friends in the theatre world were. (I could still do my work for the newspaper online). I tried to be optimistic, but almost from the beginning, we hated New York state. With a population of about 30,000, I figured Jamestown would have a friendly, small town atmosphere. So very wrong. The people were NOT friendly, with most of them acting like they wished they were living somewhere else. I loved the cold winters (I’ve always been a snowbird), but the state is highly over-regulated with laws (and taxes) governing every little move you make. The equity from the cabin in Crossville disappeared quickly, what with paying for a moving company and then having to live in various Jamestown motels for five weeks waiting for the house to ‘go through.’ In New York, there’s a 5-6 week, mandatory, waiting period after you’ve bought a house before you can move in (one of those regulatory laws I didn’t know about—don’t know what genius thought of that). They also have an auto emissions law that my 22 year old Cadillac Catera wouldn’t pass, so I couldn’t even drive my car. It just sat in the driveway for the time we lived there. Luckily, Britt’s 2009 VW Rabbit passed their tests.

Meanwhile, we burned up that equity from the cabin and never had the money to do the repairs our 138 year old house desperately needed. Motel fees are astronomical, and having to spend nearly six weeks in the cheapest motels in town left nothing to make those repairs with. We had thought we were going to be able to move right into the house in New York, not knowing about that waiting period. I would not have bought the house in the first place if I’d known. There were other northern states we could have gone to aside from New York.

And it just kept getting better and better: we found out after the fact, that we’d have to hire an attorney. I had no idea that real estate laws could vary so much from one state to another. But in New York, your attorney handles all the paperwork of the real estate transaction—work that in Tennessee is managed by the title company. Just another large expense I hadn’t counted on.

No money left for the remodeling; couldn’t drive my perfectly good car; and the people were just rude. Not a difficult decision: after two years of building a little equity in the Jamestown house, we decided to sell and get the heck out of N.Y.

Back to <realtor.com> to find another cheap house in a northern state with fewer regulations—and more lenient real estate laws. Where to go? I always thought New England sounded intriguing, but it’s a very expensive area. The Kennedy clan and the Bush family hail from there. HOWEVER, there’s the northern most part of New England’s northern most state, Maine.

Why northern Maine? Again, much cheaper houses than we could buy in Tennessee, and I had done lots of reading about Maine over the years because my Uncle Jim got me interested in the ‘Pine Tree State.’ He had spent his life as a Tennessee State Park ranger (a real outdoorsman with a love of nature). He used to say that if he couldn’t live in Tennessee, his second choice would be Maine. Why? “It’s still two-thirds wilderness,” he said. It’s sort of like the Smoky Mountains without all the people and tourist traps. Southern Maine along the coast was out of our price range, but home prices in northern Maine are still affordable. So we bought a small ’50s era ranch style house near the Canadian border in Madawaska, (Aroostook County) Maine. Madawaska is the most northeastern, incorporated town in the country—also the tenth furthest north spot in the U.S. We’d have cold, snowy winters—with scenery very much like East Tennessee. Plus, of all the New England states, Maine has the fewest laws and regulations.

Aroostook County is the third largest county in the U.S., but sparsely populated. I figured they’d have plenty of room for two more. Another major move in just two years, but Aroostook County, here we come—even though, our finances were running seriously short.

In order to save money, I planned to rent a truck and do much of the furniture lifting myself. You can hire guys to help you load the truck, then another group to help you unload when you arrive at your destination. At 74, I was still fit enough to help lift boxes and furniture.  But the Fates frowned on us again, and only a month before we were supposed to move, I fell and severely bruised my tailbone—making it impossible for me to help with anything. I had to walk with a walker. When the doctor told me it would take six to eight weeks for my ‘tushie’ to really heal up, the move seemed doomed. There went my plans of doing much of the work and driving the truck myself.

But we were blessed with kind relatives in Tennessee and Texas who stepped up to the plate and offered to pay for our move. I will always be eternally indebted.

The adventure began. We rented a U-Haul truck that I drove myself, since my tushie had healed up enough by the time the house sold. It took nine grueling days to cover the 700 mile trip, because I had developed cataracts by then and had to stop every night and get a motel—another big expense I hadn’t budgeted for. But we finally arrived in Aroostook County, Maine in May, 2025, just in time to enjoy one of Maine’s very mild and brief summers. Most summer days are in the 70s, with an occasional blast all the way up to 85. I think it only got up to 90 on three different days last summer. Winter arrived in late October with a six inch snow that melted a couple of days before Halloween, but by November winter starts getting serious. We never saw the ground again after Nov. 19, with snow continuously on the ground until the middle of April. But we grew to adore Maine. Winter looks like a ‘TV Christmas’ for over four months straight. Perfect for snowbirds like Britt and me. 

Madawaska only has about 1,000 people and is at least an hour and a half from a town of any size, Caribou, which has about 7,400 hearty Mainers. Madawaska is extremely rural and isolated from anything Nashvillians would call civilization—another concession to gentrification requiring a huge adjustment. We love the ‘Mayberry RFD feel’ and the friendliness of the residents, but the medical care leaves a lot to be desired with the nearest rural hospital being 28 miles away. Also in Madawaska, there are no real doctors, just an assortment of nurse practitioners to look after your health. For any kind of specialist, you have to drive an hour and a half to Presque Isle (pop. 8,700).

We have one small super market, a hardware store and a Family Dollar and five or six gas stations. There’s a Walmart across the river in Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada, but we still don’t have our passports—so no crossing the river to visit ‘Wally World.’ Aroostook County governmental services are also in Presque Isle (55 miles away on a two-lane highway) which seems much further when there’s two feet of snow on the road.

I had carefully checked to see if Maine has an auto emission test for the cars, and was excited to see it has no testing like in New York! So my old ’01 Caddy could be licensed—and driven, if it’s in the mood to run. But I didn’t realize there is a ’safety’ test, so the VW Rabbit (the good car, the dependable car) wouldn’t pass ‘safety’ because the ABS brake ‘computer chip’ was toast—a $1,500 fix that we couldn’t afford. Grrr!!! Unable to drive the Rabbit, we had to trade it off and buy a 2018 Chevy Trax—a huge $185 monthly expense, but you have to get around.

BUT the people have been unbelievably friendly. For example, my next door neighbor always cleared our driveway of ice and snow each time another five or six inches fell, and then helped mow the grass in summer—plus put us onto the local food pantry at the Catholic Church.

Yep, we have had to use the church’s charity food pantry, plus food stamps to get by. The house itself may have been extremely cheap—but the cost of living up here is ‘through the roof.’ Even with the charitable help, we sometimes run out of food before my Social Security check, my daughter’s Disability check or my paychecks from the newspaper get here.

Most everyone burns oil in a furnace for heat in the extremely cold winters. It costs about $500 for a tank of heating fuel. Unlike the natural gas we have in Nashville paid for monthly, in Maine it’s $500 upfront for a tank of fuel. (Natural gas won’t work here, because the ground is so cold in winter the pipes would burst.)

When most of your income is from Social Security and a monthly pension check, $500 all at once really hurts, and since a tank will only last you about two months, you’ll need two to get through a Maine winter: heat will cost at least $1,000, not counting the electric bill you still have to pay.

I discovered there is a government program to help low income folks pay their heating bills. It’s called HEAP. Since we were already eligible for SNAP food assistance, it was relatively easy to qualify for HEAP.

I’m pretty sure Nashville also has a HEAP program (or something very similar) to help with huge winter heating bills. So I’d recommend contacting either your local Metro or Tennessee agencies to see if you qualify. HEAP is a wonderful benefit for low income folks to help get through the winter.

So it all gets back to gentrification. We are 1,410 miles from our relatives and our friends in Nashville because we can no longer afford to live where we both grew up and lived all our lives. Most of my friends are in the theatre community. I was still active in Nashville theatre until we left in 2020. In 2019, I had directed five plays and acted in four. I haven’t done a smidgin of theatre since because there’s no community theatre here—and I’m too old to start one. I am writing a new play, but that’s a lonely, solitary endeavor.

I miss Nashville. I miss the numerous community theatres and the many friends I made in Nashville theatre over 30 years; I miss 2nd Ave., no matter how gaudy it might be or how teaming with tourists; I miss my church, Christ Episcopal Cathedral (no Episcopal church here); I miss not being close enough to ‘home’ to go to my two families’ annual family reunions or a dear friend’s or relative’s funeral; I seriously miss the much better medical and dental care available there; I miss the ease of shopping (be it for groceries, clothes, or automobiles). Everything seems to be 55 miles away, so you just learn to do without (my dry cleaning is still waiting for me 55 miles away in Presque Isle where its been four months). If you have lots of money, I guess gentrification is just an abstract concept. But if you’re like me (or the thousands of Nashville residents in the Jefferson St. area who were forced to leave during the ’50s and ’60s) gentrification is a painful reality.