“Everybody Loves Raymond” alum Patricia Heaton has explained her decision to move her family from Los Angeles to Nashville, TN, citing the California metro’s elevated crime and homelessness rates, along with the decline of local film studios.
Heaton, 67, opened up about the relocation on a recent episode of “The Rubin Report” podcast released Sunday, telling conservative talk show host and comedian Dave Rubin that the idea to leave L.A. behind for good came to her while she was working on the 2023 film “Unexpected” in Oklahoma and on other locations outside of L.A.
“And we just thought that the taxes are high, the crime is high, the homelessness is high, and we’re not working in L.A. as much as we’re working outside of L.A., so why don’t we leave?” Heaton, a pro-life activist and devout Catholic, told Rubin, who said he himself had “fled” Los Angeles not long before.
Heaton joked that she and her husband, actor and director David Hunt, decided to “abandon” their grown children and head south.
“And so we just said, ‘Let’s go to Nashville,’ because we were familiar with it, we had friends there and, you know, we really haven’t looked back,” Heaton recounted.
While it’s unclear when exactly Heaton and Hunt settled in Music City, the star of “The Middle” sitcom shared in a January 2024 Instagram post with her nearly 500,000 followers that she had invited a pastor from a Catholic church in Columbia, TN, to bless her newly renovated Nashville home.
Nashville becomes a powerhouse metro
Heaton is not alone. Over the last two decades, a host of A-listers have decamped to Nashville, according to published news reports, among them White Stripes frontman Jack White, Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon, and “The Hills” star Kristin Cavallari.
In the post-pandemic era, Nashville has emerged as a bona fide boomtown, boasting a thriving economy, a strong job market, attractive lifestyle amenities, and a world-famous music scene.
Wealthy homebuyers from across the U.S. have flocked to Nashville, putting upward pressure on home prices and fueling growth in the city’s luxury real estate sector.
But despite Nashville’s meteoric rise, its housing market is still relatively affordable compared with Los Angeles.
According to the November 2025 monthly housing market trends report from Realtor.com®, the median list price for a home in Nashville was just under $532,000—less than half of the median list price in L.A.
L.A.’s film industry is shrinking
Heaton, who most recently appeared in the direct-to-streaming romantic comedy “Merv,” starring Zoey Deschanel, said that whenever she visits L.A. now, she is left wondering whether the the city feels different because she no longer works there on a regular basis, or because it has actually changed.
“And I think there is a little bit of a sadness about it that, I think, is real and it’s not just because of my experience.”
The veteran TV and film actress said she has heard from many writers on her previous jobs, including “Everybody Loves Raymond“ and “The Middle” who also had left Los Angeles and moved back to their hometowns with their families in tow.
“We just got an email from a writer saying, ‘You got out at the right time,'” Heaton said.
Heaton lamented during the interview that in the wake of the pandemic and the recent writers’ strike, many soundstages in L.A. have been left empty, including the site that once housed Warner Bros. Ranch—a historic filming location for shows like “The Waltons,” “Bewitched,” and more recently “The Middle.”
This is part of a wider shift in which Los Angeles has gradually lost its status as the capital of the global film industry amid sweeping changes in the entertainment industry driven by the rise of streaming services.
A July report from Vulture compared L.A. to a “Rust Belt crater” and “a sad company town where the mill is closing.”
The majority of films are now shot far away from Los Angeles’ once-bustling backlots, with many productions lured by tax credits to places like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque, NM, or ever farther afield, including Canada and the U.K.
Seeking to stem the bleeding, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a $7.5 billion federal tax incentive to prop up domestic film production, Variety reported.
But it seems highly unlikely that President Donald Trump will adopt Newsom’s initiative considering that the two have been locked in an escalating war of words.
Trump has blamed Newsom for the deteriorating state of the American film industry, calling his political opponent “a grossly incompetent man” in May.
“He’s just allowed it to be taken away from, you know, Hollywood,” the president said at the time. “Hollywood doesn’t do very much of that business.”