by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Economic Development, Poverty | March 11th, 2013 12:01am CDT | Comments Off
Suburban conventional wisdom about Memphis is that it is full of poor people, but the times, they are a-changin’. It’s the suburbs’ poverty rates that produce headlines like, “Memphis #1 in poverty.” Actually, Memphis isn’t topping the list. It’s not even in the top 10. Among large cities, it’s #14, and among all cities, it’s [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty | January 14th, 2013 12:25am CDT | 2 Comments
After reading recent coverage by The Commercial Appeal about poverty in Memphis, we were left with the feeling that it touched on the surface issue but that complex forces were teeming below. As a result, we asked George Lord for his insights. We are deeply grateful to him for taking the time to respond to [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Neighborhoods, Poverty | January 3rd, 2013 12:18am CDT | 1 Comment
The poster child for the blight that dogs Memphis stands at Winchester Road and Cazassa Drive in Whitehaven. There, three apartment complexes are emblematic of how hard it is to attack urban blight. Just this one location involves real estate speculation, a Ponzi scheme, New York investors, an Israeli company, a flip scam, a tax [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty | November 28th, 2012 12:15am CDT | 13 Comments
City of Memphis has a well-earned national reputation for reinventing public housing, and because of it, it’s perplexing to watch the campaign to preserve Foote Homes, the last public housing project in Memphis. It’s even amazing at times to listen to the Norman Rockwell rhetoric about public housing from defenders of the status quo for [...]
by SCM (RSS) Poverty, Uncategorized | November 15th, 2012 3:17pm CDT | Comments Off
From The Atlantic: As I wrote in The Atlantic in 2003, the traditional family—one breadwinner and one homemaker—has been replaced by the “juggler family” with either two working parents or a single parent who works. Nine years later, the nation no longer clings quite so tightly to the ideal of the 1950s family, but policies [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty, Trends and Issues | November 15th, 2012 12:40am CDT | 1 Comment
Memphis Mayor A C Wharton recently talked to Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam about toxic stress, brain development, and epigenetics. The mayor may not have used those actual words, but in asking for the state’s help to fight Memphis’ intractable poverty, he was discussing them nonetheless. In the meeting in the governor’s office in Nashville, Mayor [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Education, Poverty | October 4th, 2012 12:43am CDT | 3 Comments
Memphis Mayor A C Wharton recently talked to Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam about toxic stress, brain development, and epigenetics. The mayor may not have used those actual words, but in asking for the state’s help to fight Memphis’ intractable poverty, he was discussing them nonetheless. In the meeting in the governor’s office in [...]
by SCM (RSS) Poverty | October 1st, 2012 3:12pm CDT | 4 Comments
When thousands of poor families were given federal housing subsidies in the early 1990s to move out of impoverished neighborhoods, social scientists expected the experience of living in more prosperous communities would pay off in better jobs, higher incomes and more education. That did not happen. But more than 10 years later, the families’ lives [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Education, Poverty, Talent | September 13th, 2012 12:27am CDT | 2 Comments
There is much to celebrate in Memphis these days and there is a new willingness to take risks and it has produced a new momentum for change. The challenge now is to take the lessons we’ve learned and channel them to now tackle the toughest problems facing the [...]
From TruthOut: It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and “invisible” that it [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Economic Development, Education, Memphis City Schools, Poverty | March 14th, 2012 12:44am CDT | Comments Off
“We are a nation of idiots about infancy.” It was unquestionably a slap-in-the-face wake-up call, but there was no rebuttal to offer after recently listening to the convincing case laid out by Robin-Karr Morse, author of Scared Sick: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease, family therapist, [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty | December 28th, 2011 12:11am CDT | 1 Comment
What Memphis needs now is a balance of realism and optimism. We should all feel upbeat about developments that have positioned Memphis positively in the last couple of years: the convergence of important national initiatives in Memphis, the fact that our MSA in 2010 had a larger increase [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty, Uncategorized | November 9th, 2011 12:09am CDT | 29 Comments
The Brookings Institution, in a new report on the growth of extreme poverty in the U.S., wrote what we already know full well in the Memphis MSA: we’re at the top of the rankings. What’s more interesting is that it’s the trends in the suburbs that propel us there. If there’s any wake-up call for [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty | October 9th, 2011 2:43pm CDT | 1 Comment
It’s been said that when the economy sneezes, poor people catch pneumonia. It’s the same diagnosis for a city with a high poverty rate. Memphis may be doing its best to cope with a bad case of walking pneumonia but the long-term cure will take a lot of time and medicine, not to mention a [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty | September 30th, 2011 12:26am CDT | 4 Comments
What Memphis needs now is a balance of realism and optimism. We should all feel upbeat about developments that have positioned Memphis positively in the last couple of years: the convergence of important national initiatives in Memphis, the fact that our MSA in 2010 had a larger increase in GDP than the Atlanta MSA, [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty, Uncategorized | December 24th, 2010 12:23am CDT | 1 Comment
Previously posted December 24, 2009: This time of the year, it’s impossible for us to not think about Peggy Edmiston, who died seven years ago. It wasn’t the glittery Christmas sweaters, complete with blinking ornaments, that no one else had the courage to wear. It wasn’t the permanent collection of Christmas decorations and miniature villages [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty, Uncategorized | June 2nd, 2010 12:17am CDT | 6 Comments
We are nothing if not schizophrenic about Memphis. A few weeks ago, we were outraged that Forbes had the audacity to call us a “miserable city,” but in a New York Times article this week, we seemed to do as much ourselves. In fact, miserable might be a benign word compared to what Memphians said [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty, Uncategorized | March 30th, 2010 12:53am CDT | 5 Comments
Can we now turn the page – not one in Forbes magazine of course – and quit talking about the miserable cities rankings? We’re becoming like the guy who knows he’s having an affair so he continually tells his friends how happily married he is. The continuing obsession with this ranking is beginning to summon [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Memphis City Schools, Poverty | March 3rd, 2010 12:18am CDT | 12 Comments
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 [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Memphis City Schools, Poverty | January 13th, 2009 6:07pm CDT | Comments Off
Tomeka Hart is chair of the board of commissioners of Memphis City Schools and executive director of Memphis Urban League: My prayer is that Memphis leaders (elected, appointed, community, faith-based, etc.) will develop a holistic and comprehensive plan to fight the real enemy of our progress — POVERTY. I hope that all plans related to [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Poverty | November 16th, 2008 7:14pm CDT | Comments Off
It’s not just that Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin wasted $88,000 in scarce city money pursuing an obsession worthy of Moby Dick. It’s that with looming layoffs in City Hall, that money could have kept two rank-and-file city employees on the job and of the unemployment rolls in some tough economic times. We’ve been giving [...]
by Bill Day. Memphian Bill Day is two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award in Cartooning. His cartoons are syndicated internationally by Cagle Cartoons. Cartoons Archive →
Photograph by Amie Vanderford
This ongoing series of photographs is intended to show the daily lives of these single mothers in order to invoke recognition of their similarities to all mothers, along with understanding and empathy from the viewer of the strengths that these single mothers possess within the challenging situations they face. My hope is that newfound empathy with these mothers’ lives will give people some pause before they condemn single mothers when discussing issues such as welfare and other politically charged hot buttons.
