Here’s the tale of the tape for Technicolor Inc., the latest company to get a tax freeze from Memphis and Shelby County: Annual revenues for Technicolor Inc: $3 billion Median salary for new Memphis jobs: $26,000 Poverty level for family of five: $25,790 Here’s a recent email from Robert Bain to us that seems relevant: [...]

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The grand experiment that began 32 years ago to reinvent Shelby County Government as an urban government is coming to a close. It began with such promise on a clear, unseasonably warm New Year’s Day in 1976 when Shelby County’s first mayor, Roy Nixon, took office and sent the clear message that he was intent [...]

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There are times when it just seems that Memphis can’t get its economic development strategies into the 21st century. It’s as if we just don’t want to compete in a knowledge economy in a global marketplace.  Our economic development strategies are caught in the commodity trap, stemming from our background as an agricultural center and [...]

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In my last post, I helped guide you on a tour (real or virtual) of South Parkway from the southwest corner of the Memphis parkway system at Martin Luther King-Riverside Park to its southeast corner at Airways.  Now, buckle up your seatbelts because we’re ready to turn left onto what is undoubtedly the most traveled [...]

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Sometimes, something takes on so much symbolic power that it comes to define something much broader. For Memphis city government, that something is auto inspection. The unconscionable waste of the only thing that really matters – time – and the silliness of a system that has no data to justify the monumental inconvenience in the [...]

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“Green Shakespeare?” When my Rhodes College students mention to their friends and family that they are taking a seminar in this topic, they are often met with incredulity: what on earth does the Bard have to do with environmental studies? The incredulity sometimes reveals a skepticism towards any apparently trendy topic in literary studies, but [...]

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Nothing is quite as confusing as government financing, and that’s never been truer than now. There seems to be big numbers every where – the $30 million or so for The Pyramid, there’s the idea of a new convention center likely to cost about $500 million, there’s the payments for $250 million in bonds for [...]

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Thanks to Ms. Dorsey of Echoing Green, I finally have a name for what ails me: a “wonderful obsession” with building Memphis into a City of Choice via talent retention, entrepreneurialism, and creativity. Although obsession normally implies a need for behavioral therapy, an effective cure in this case is simple support, encouragement, and money.  (Yes, [...]

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Hopefully, now that we’ve all worked through the catharsis brought on by hitting the list of miserable U.S. cities by Forbes magazine, maybe we can now follow it up with an epiphany. Most urbanists and public policy types have long ago discredited these meaningless lists of the smartest cities, wired cities, successful cities and happiest [...]

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On Smart City Memphis, many of us make things sound easy.  Let’s just build dense, walkable neighborhoods.  Let’s just remove bus fares and make the routes go here or there.  Let’s tear down the rest of the public housing and humanly integrate “those people” into “normal neighborhoods”.  We know why things are messed up, how [...]

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A Forbes rebuttal: Mapping the healthy trends in Memphis is also part of the regional story. There’s more going right than meets the eye.

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John Elkington played his trump card last week, and after several years of innuendoes, rumors and charges, it’s hard to conclude anything except that he’s won the high-stakes game of money and reputation that characterized the $6.4 million argument about Beale Street management. Memphis’s most respected accounting firm, Watkins and Uiberall, shredded a $750,000 “forensic [...]

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