Small Southern towns go to war with mass influx of wealthy Californians amid fears they are bringing lefty politics and rocketing house prices

When California native David Klein moved to the quiet city of Gallatin, Tennessee, 25 years ago, he did so to escape the chaos of West Coast urbanization.

Now, he says, it feels like it is 'chasing' him.

Since the pandemic, an influx of outsiders from the Golden State and elsewhere have turned a once tranquil community into an overcrowded 'hell'.

Meanwhile, the stream of arrivals from Democrat strongholds have sparked fears among locals their conservative values will be eroded by the incoming liberal elite.

But now they are fighting back.

A hard-right band of officials, including Klein, won a majority in 2022 and vowed to end unabated urbanization.

'We're trying to save the environment that drew people here in the first place,' the 66-year-old told DailyMail.com. 'It can become a concrete jungle in no time.'

It is an increasingly familiar tale across America, as affluent families from blue states such as California and New York have fled soaring house prices, high taxes and crime since the pandemic.

But their migration to smaller Republican enclaves has upset tight-knit neighborhoods who are fiercely protective of their communities.

Residents of Eagle, a small town in Idaho, have complained that hundreds of West Coasters were bringing 'liberal baggage' to their community.

And last month, DailyMail.com revealed that Nashville's housing boom is forcing locals to sleep on the streets while wealthy newcomers snap up luxury apartments.

But now the urban sprawl is reaching out into the state capitol's hinterlands, including Gallatin, which lies about 30 miles northeast of Music City in Sumner County.

Here, horse and cow pastures give way planned communities with bucolic names like Durham Farms and The Retreat at Norman Farm, which surround the main cities.

Klein, who is now chairman of the Sumner County planning commission, describes arriving to a 'rural community' when he moved from Los Angeles County in 1998.

'All that is going away,' he laments.

The county's population grew 22 per cent in the decade to 2020 and now stands at nearly 204,000, census figures show.

The economy grew by 8.5 per cent a year from 2020 to 2022, putting it in the top seven per cent of all U.S. counties for growth.

At the same time, the county lost 16,000 acres of farmland from 2011 to 2022, according to the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, about triple the loss of the county average in Tennessee.

Urban growth has led to a need for more government services, including schools and teachers, sparking a rise in property taxes.

Unsurprisingly, this has not gone down well.

T-shirts and bumper stickers reading 'Don't California My Tennessee' have become a common sight.

'Where I live, I live in hell,' Mary Genung, a Sumner County commissioner recently told the local planning board.

Genung, alongside Klein, is one of 14 commissioners - out of a board of 24 - who were elected in August 2022 with backing of the Sumner County Constitutional Republicans, a hard-right group that marries conservative religious beliefs with restrictive policies on growth.

Genung made her remarks at a planning board meeting in May, where a debate raged over whether to boost minimum lot sizes in rural areas to ward off developers who need more density.

'If you don't, you're going to be one big fat Nashville,' she told the board.

Indeed, although Nashville's almost 700,000-strong population dwarfs the 50,000 of Gallatin, average house prices are remarkably similar: $458,000 in Nashville and $447,000 in Gallatin, according to Realtor.com.

Property prices in the latter have jumped by two-thirds since the pandemic, but employers haven't been able to pay workers enough to lure them from Nashville.

Developers built more than 1,300 apartment units, mainly in Gallatin, from 2020 to 2022 in a bid to create a local workforce.

Klein describes the building spree as 'maniacal'.

'The number of three storey apartment blocks that are going up is ridiculous,' he adds.

'I am not anti-growth. I just want the growth to pay for itself. The infrastructure has barely changed.'

Commissioner and influential member of the Constitutional Republicans group Jeremy Mansfield told DailyMail.com that Sumner County was 'caught in a vicious cycle that enables developers to exert significant influence on the political and economic landscape, perpetuating a cycle of overdevelopment, increased taxation, and land exploitation for their own gain'.

But the rise of the hard-right has divided the community and the local Republican party itself.

Constitutional Republicans have declared any who disagree with their agenda as 'RINOs' - Republicans In Name Only - and have featured more than two dozen current and former local officials on a 'Wall of Shame' on their website.

The group's social media activity includes regular updates on what the commission is doing, along with frequent swipes against others in their party.

'We exist to smoke out these Rinocrats,' read one recent post.

Their tactics are not popular with all. Jimmy Kisner, whose family have operated a hardware store in Gallatin for 47 years, shares the concern about unfettered growth, but hit out at what he claims is 'bullying' behavior of hardliners.

Klein himself admits he doesn't support targeted social media attacks on the opposition.

As for the anti-Californian sentiment, the man born in Santa Monica believes it has been overplayed.

'I refer to the Californians coming here as refugees,' he says. 'They're coming here for a different life.

'A lot of the Constitutional Republicans are transplanted Californians. Believe it or not, most of them are more conservative than a lot of the native Tennesseans.

'Even though there is pushback, in reality the people who move here do not want to see what they left behind.'