In June, 2006, we posted a commentary about the FedEx Forum as the controversy about its construction and financing continued even after the new arena opened.  It’s hard now, almost seven years later, as the city basks in the victories of the Memphis Grizzlies, to remember the depth of the controversy back then over almost anything connected with the project.  As WMC-TV reporting showed last night about what happened back then, it’s worth separating the facts from the mythology.  Just as there was a negative mythology back then about the recruitment of the Grizzlies and the financing of FedEx Forum, there is now now the temptation to rewrite the history of the project with a distinctly rose-colored mythology.

It’s worth noting that while the pursuit team of private sector leaders was out front, they were not responsible for negotiating the contract that guaranteed that the team would stay here for a long period of time and that Memphis (unlike Nashville) would not pick up the deficits of the arena as part of the deal to recruit a professional sports team.  While local government regularly takes a beating and many believe that it can’t do anything right, the contract with the Grizzlies was, in our humble opinion, one of its finest moments.

Here’s what we wrote in June, 2006 about the negotiations as they unfolded:

The current controversy about the FedEx Forum garage is quickly becoming about more than why plans were changed and how $6.3 million in federal funds were lost.

There are resurrected questions about the contract between Memphis and Shelby County Governments and the Grizzlies. There are renewed shots taken at owner Michael Heisley by fans made mad by some of the team’s mistakes in the care and feeding of its customers. There is the expected political distancing by elected officials who were there and voted for the contract for the new arena.

All of this smoke runs the risk of obscuring any light that can be shed on the spark that ignited the fire in the first place – $6.3 million that was not spent in compliance with the guidelines for the federal program where the money originated before being channeled through Tennessee Department of Transportation.

That said, we’ll wade in any way. When our friends at the Memphis Flyer editorialize that the contract with the NBA team was “one-sided” and a “Faustian bargain,” it just feels like mythology is replacing reality when it comes to the history of the project.

Looking Back

So let’s rewind the tape.

Back in 2001, some of Memphis’ most directly engaged, civic-minded business leaders learned that there was a chance to land a professional basketball team in Memphis, a fulfillment of this city’s long-held dream and the antidote to the beating that our civic ego had taken in pursuit of the National Football League.

They heard that the Vancouver Grizzlies was looking to move. They contacted Michael Heisley, not the other way around, to ask if Memphis could be considered. Like it is in the world of professional sports franchises, there’s no warm, fuzzy feelings that lead a team to move to a new city. It’s nothing but clear-eyed financial benefit, frequently expressed in the public commitment to provide an NBA-quality arena that can be a revenue center to help make the absurd business model of the NBA work.

There is nothing unique about this, because Memphis’ experience is consistent with what happens in almost every city. (It’s worth noting that the team and the so-called local NBA pursuit team weren’t even demanding a new arena, because they were prepared to have The Pyramid upgraded to NBA standards. That’s when it was suggested by the county mayor, not Mr. Heisley, that for slightly more, a new arena could be built.)

It’s worth remembering another often forgotten fact these days: Memphis was competing with another city for the Grizzlies, and so Memphis and Shelby County weren’t just negotiating against the Grizzlies, but negotiating against a rival city.

Negotiations

From the beginning, negotiations between city, county and the Grizzlies were testy and emotional. At their first meeting, the Grizzlies laid out their requirements to move to Memphis. Local government didn’t respond to their list and instead presented their own list of demands. The team’s negotiators left the room to talk, and quickly walked out of the building and flew out of Memphis.

No one in the halls of government panicked and got on the phone to put things back together. Lead local government negotiators – Memphis Chief Administrative Officer Rick Masson and me – had made a list of “deal breakers” that were nonnegotiable. Failure to agree on any of them would collapse the talks from the public side. So, when the Grizzlies walked out of the room, Memphis and Shelby County Governments concluded that it saved them a lot of time, because it didn’t look like the team would agree to the public conditions any way.

Through the mediation of a third party, the teams were reassembled to see if there was a way to restart the negotiations. Taking place in the offices of Storage USA with the shuttling of positions by Dean Jernigan, city and county negotiators were in one room and the Grizzlies representatives were in another.  Again, city and county negotiators listed their deal breakers, and over the next month, one by one, they were accepted, but not without the charges and countercharges that are part of any negotiation. Eventually, the big issues that had been deferred while the others were addressed were essentially all that was left: the Grizzlies paying the operating losses for the new arena and the team making a long-term commitment to stay in the arena and in Memphis.

Local government had been told by pro sports consultants and colleagues in other governments that no city of Memphis’ size would ever win these two key concessions, and frequently, it looked as if they would kill any chances for a contract.

Non-compete

It was in the context of the Grizzlies’ accepting operating losses – estimated at upwards of $5 million a year – that the non-compete clause was put on the table. No one with any business sense – much less an NBA team owner – would take on the obligation of paying the operating costs and not look to protect their downside in the form of competition from other buildings that could easily undercut rental rates for the newer, more expensive arena.

It was a lesson that city and county had learned painfully when The Pyramid opened without closing the Coliseum. That old arena – already paid for and with no official concessionaire or parking company – was adept at underbidding the newer building, accomplishing nothing so much as driving up the operating subsidy of The Pyramid year after year and putting more money in the pockets of promoters.

It was thought in 2001 and it’s still the case today that it’s in the long-term best interest of taxpayers for FedExForum to succeed, and in that vein, the non-compete clause was agreed to in return for the Grizzlies taking on the operating losses. In other words, the option was for taxpayers to pay more than $5 million a year for the operating deficit of the building, and it would probably have been higher. After all, sponsorships and advertising agreements are skills that government doesn’t possess and or ill-equipped to perform or oversee.

So, the minimum cost of eliminating the non-compete clause would have been more than $5 million for the Forum, about $2 million for the operating deficit at The Pyramid and the $1 million deficit at the Coliseum. In other words, local government could have taken on a total of $8 million in operating deficits and all just so promoters could make more money from their events.

That said, negotiators on all sides understood that the non-compete clause was not intended to block events from coming to Memphis, only to give the Forum first option to make them work there. That the Grizzlies took the position most advantageous to them in interpreting the contract should surprise no one, but over time, the application of the non-compete provisions are settling into the philosophy of the negotiations.

Debating The Merits

While it’s never out of bounds for people to question the public benefits of the arena project, or whether this is the best use of $250 million or whether research proves that professional sports underdeliver as an economic engine, the malignant notion that city and county governments simply agreed to whatever the Grizzlies demanded is just wrong.

As for the financing of the arena – which the Grizzlies had no part in developing (like the garage funding, they didn’t care where it came from, as long as they got the facilities built), in retrospect, it seems clear that the financing would have been better if it had not included PILOT payments from MLGW.

That said, lost in the fog of opinions is this fact: the preponderance of the financing on the arena come from user-related fees like the sales tax rebate from NBA events and the arena’s seat use fee and from sources like the Tourism Development Zone (a rebate by the State of Tennessee of the sales taxes collected in a district that essentially is all of downtown) that only could have been spent on an arena or convention center.

In other words, it’s a fair discussion to debate whether the political and civic leadership should have spent their energies pursuing the team and building a new arena, but keep in mind that the vast majority of the revenues paying for FedExForum could not be spent on anything else.

Looking back, a number of letter writers seem to believe this project was rammed through the public process with little public support for it. It’s worth remembering that the publicly-funded poll demanded by arena opponent Commissioner Walter Bailey, to his dismay, showed that a majority of people in this county supported the arena financing plan.

The Power Of Rhetoric

As we say, there is room to debate the facts, and there is the obligation to get the answers about how the Forum garage plans were changed without federal approval and in violation of the federal regulations.

But hopefully, we can keep in mind that if the Mud Island experience taught us anything, it is that we have the power to make FedExForum a failure. It happened to Mud Island on the day long ago when the Memphis City Council, putting distance from the project they had approved, called it a failure. From that day on, it was.

Let’s investigate the garage controversy until full accountability is reached. Let’s debate the public value of professional sports. Let’s discuss whether local government has its priorities wrong.

Let’s just try to remember that we won. We got the professional sports team that we had sought for more than 20 years, we got a long-term commitment from it to this city, we got it to pay the considerable operating losses of the new arena and we did it with no larger percentage of property taxes in the Forum project than city and county governments put into AutoZone Park.

The data behind this map is based on every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 – April 2013 containing one of the ‘hate words’. This equated to over 150,000 tweets and was drawn from the DOLLY project based at the University of Kentucky. Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing ‘hate words’ as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To produce the map all tweets containing each ‘hate word’ were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county. Counties were reduced to their centroids and assigned a weight derived from this normalization process. This was used to generate a heat map that demonstrates the variability in the frequency of hateful tweets relative to all tweets over space. Where there is a larger proportion of negative tweets referencing a particular ‘hate word’ the region appears red on the map, where the proportion is moderate, the word was used less (although still more than the national average) and appears a pale blue on the map. Areas without shading indicate places that have a lower proportion of negative tweets relative to the national average.

Read more about the research and methods behind this project at www.FloatingSheep.org.

Funding was provided by the University Research and Creative Activities Fellowship at Humboldt State University. Twitter data was obtained from the DOLLY project at University of Kentucky.

The numbers that appear in the map during a mouse hover indicate the total number of hateful tweets and number of unique users sending them in each county.

Take it down to the county level to get a really good view of things.   Click here.

John Willingham died a few hours ago at the beginning of what was the equivalent of barbecue’s holy week in downtown Memphis.   It seemed like an appropriate to bid farewell to a man as unique and authentic as the city he passionately loved.

Adding to the irony, Corky’s founder Don Pelts also died yesterday.  It was the equivalent in the barbecue world of when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the Fourth of July in 1826.

A familiar competitor at Memphis in May International Barbecue Context, Mr. Willingham was a former world grand  champion, and just last year, he was inducted into the National Barbecue Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Missouri, for his lifetime of contributions to the barbecue subculture.  It was a journey that began in earnest four decades ago when he reinvented the way barbecue was cooked with his revolutionary Turbo Cooker, ushering in the era of offset, or indirect, of barbecuing.

Meanwhile, he won other barbecue contests, opened two restaurants, authored a book of secret barbecue recipes spiced up by his legendary stories, and created an online business selling his marinades, rubs, and sauces.  He dearly loved barbecuing but more than the food, he loved the camaraderie of it, and he was a veritable encyclopedia of information about barbecue and barbecuers.

When he was inducted into the Barbecue Hall of Fame, a fellow inductee summed it up well: “John Willingham has forgotten more about barbecue than most of us knew to begin with.”

But, while I knew Mr. Willingham as a barbecue giant, I knew him even more as a friend.  I met him when he was a Shelby County Commissioner, where he was engendering the enmity of many Republicans because of his failure to adhere to party orthodoxy.  In particular, this stemmed from his proposal for a privilege tax for people employed in Shelby County, although University of Memphis economists had validated his calculations that it would eliminate the local option sales tax, the wheel tax, and dramatically reduce the local property tax.

For me, it was that level of ingenuity and inventiveness that defined him as much as barbecue ever did.  Because of the media narrative of him as a gadfly, few people knew that he held about 17 patents – from the barbecue cooker to construction breakthroughs to his latest venture – a barge-mounted electric power plant – an idea already given the stamp of approval by the head of the University of Memphis’ engineering school.

All in all, Mr. Willingham’s life was the stuff of fiction, embracing semi-pro baseball, his stint in a band, his work in the Middle East, his time as a Nixon appointee to HUD, his barbecue career, and his foray into politics.

I remember him today for an incredibly rich life, but I remember him most for his random acts of kindness.  In fact, that’s how I met him.  It was during  a difficult time in my life, and out of the blue, Mr. Willingham telephoned to ask how he could help.  I had never met him.  I had never spoken to him.  We became fast friends, and when I was once asked to describe him, I said he was the kind of person that you want to take into the foxhole with you, because you never had to wonder if he was still there.

There were several previous times in his life when his family was told to come to his hospital bedside to say good-bye, but each time, he managed to recover and return to yet another big idea and pet project.  During his trip to Kansas City for his induction into the hall of fame, he was injured and this time, recovery put his body to its ultimate test.  I visited him a few months ago, and for the first time, he looked frail, but as usual, he was vowing another comeback, and I had learned not to bet against him.

We spent the morning together, a morning in which I was reminded of his relentless campaign for the truth, his pride and love of his beloved daughters, and his feelings for the love of his life, his wife Marge.  Sitting there that morning, I thought how I envied his family, which had gathered that morning, because he was a man who loved life and who constantly sought a new hill to climb, but always kept his family at the center of all that he did.

If you were his friend, you were his friend through thick and thin, and the thicker things got, the more you knew that he would step up to help.  I will miss him.

Memphis will miss him as well.  He was a contrarian, a gadfly, a maverick, the asker of impertinent questions, and a person who refused to go along to get along.  We need more people like him.

A year ago, we wrote about Mr. Willingham’s latest project and we post it here as a reminder of this remarkable man:

It sounds for some people like the beginning of a story that ends in a punch line: John Willingham and Buckminster Fuller were on a panel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yes, it was that John Willingham – political gadfly, professional baseball player, bass player, inventor, and barbecue king.

Yes, it was that Buckminster Fuller – Renaissance man, systems theorist, philosopher, futurist, and inventor of the geodesic dome.

They were on the panel in the early 1970s when Willingham was a Nixon appointee overseeing a new program for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Already, he had received a patent for the “T Mobile Pre-Cast Concrete Molding Machine and Sub-systems,” a new building construction process.

During the MIT panel discussion, Willingham was asked about it.  As he explained the new construction method, Fuller scribbled the calculations, and when Willingham was through, Fuller said: “Johnnie, you’re not an engineer, are you?  If you had been an engineer, you would have known that you couldn’t do that.”

It’s an apt description of Willingham’s work in and outside of the political system.  When you don’t know something’s not supposed to work, it’s surprising what you can come up with.  As a Republican Shelby County commissioner, he was willing to touch the third rail of Republican dogma when he pushed for a new tax – a payroll tax – to reduce the overall tax burden for Shelby Countians.

Although his intent was to reduce the overall tax burden on Shelby Countians, his refusal to tow the line on Republican anti-tax dogma, not to mention his inherent independence, put a target on his back and truncated his political career.  The 10-year privilege tax would have been paid by every worker in Shelby County, but its real targets were the about 85,000 people drive into this county and earn approximately $3 billion a year.

His tax plan would have eliminated the county wheel tax, lowered the county property tax by 50-80 percent, and eliminated the local option sales tax (reducing the rate to 7 percent). Most taxpayers in Shelby County would have paid less as a result of the overhaul of the tax structure.  And yet, the political pushback on the idea was so persistent that few people in power every heard that the assumptions and projections were validated by economists at the University of Memphis.

Willingham is largely a footnote in local political history these days, but the out-of-the-box thinking continues, and once again, it challenges the conventional wisdom, not to mention science.

This time, he’s invented the Barge-mounted Portable Power Plant, and despite engineering formulas that said it wouldn’t work, it is now undergoing tests and in the process, it is rewriting the possible.  University of Memphis Department of Mechanical Engineer Chair John Hochstein, writing in his capacity as an individual researcher, said he plans to publish new research generated by the project.

“The research continues in the expectation that even higher levels of performance can be obtained from better understanding of the deceptively complicated physical interactions occurring within this seemingly simple machine,” he wrote.

His prediction is that each of the barges, with 48-foot diameter paddlewheels that harness the power of flowing water, will produce “more than 2.5 megawatts of power when moored in a flow with a velocity of 7.2 miles per hour, the measured water speed past the Memphis riverbluff in early spring, 2011.”  The estimated cost of a barge is $2.6 million.

“The river is free so there is no cost of fuel,” Willingham said.  “The carbon footprint is zero, and there is zero pollution.  It uses hydrokinetic, wind, and solar energies.”

While he thinks barge-mounted power plant production could be an emerging green industry for Memphis, what most propels his passion for the project is its potential impact in the Third World.  “Villages in Africa where children are living in really difficult situations could get electricity and it could change their whole lives,” he said.  “Also, it gives us a way to respond to natural disasters when electricity networks are down.”

So far, Willingham has received a lot of positive reactions about the project and now he’s looking for the political or business clout to move the tests from a scale model barge to a full-size barge and onto the local economic development agenda.

It’s hard to read the test results and the concepts without thinking of Fuller: It is amazing what you can do when you don’t know you’re not supposed to be able to do it.

 Previously published as Memphis magazine’s City Journal column.

Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement.

Is there such a thing as a “right business climate” to draw offices, industries, jobs – and in their wake, prosperity – to a state?

Judging by the number of organizations that add up and then score and compare taxes, regulations and labor costs for each of the states, one would have to think so.

These studies seem to measure anything purportedly relevant – levels of business and personal taxes, minimum wage levels, tight or loose safety and environmental rules, labor costs, “right-to-work” statutes, inheritance taxes. Then they add still more to create their dizzying areas of weightings to then rank and compare the 50 states.

The consumers are intended to be either state legislatures, as they decide how to shift their taxes and regulations to promote more economic activity, or corporations already on the hunt for sites to base their operations.

Highly skeptical of the whole array of studies, the Washington-based Good Jobs First organization has just published “Grading Places” – a look at the rating industry.

“If there’s one thing people need to take away from our study,” says Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, “is that there’s no such thing as a state business climate. Businesses’ needs for various kinds of services and facilities vary too much.”

Plus, LeRoy adds, states aren’t the important entity that businesses should be looking at anyway. The real theater of action is the metro area. Metro areas in a state differ, he notes, and sometimes differ dramatically – in local property tax levels, in skilled labor, quality of infrastructure, schools and colleges, transportation linkages, and proximity to customers and suppliers. Tally those real-world conditions, he suggests, and one sees more of the truly significant factors that qualified site-selection experts advising companies actually look for, but which the raw state rankings mix.

But the big rating game focuses exclusively on states. And almost all the organizations whose rating systems are evaluated in “Grading Places” have a “clear agenda” driving them, asserts Peter Fisher, lead author of the report and research director of the Iowa Policy Project. It’s an agenda that too often can be boiled down, he contends, to “tax avoidance and wage suppression.”

Plus, Fisher insists, all the studies have major technical faults. The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, for example, has a scale that gives states better scores for such features as low progressive tax rates, no state minimum wage, absence of family leave, fewer government employees, less government spending and no renewable energy mandates.

But as Fisher notes, the same scoring omits (and clearly fails to value) what’s likely to matter a lot more – the quality of public school and university programs, state investment in infrastructure, business incubators or entrepreneurship programs at public universities and state venture capital funding.

Another major rating system that Good Jobs First takes on is the annual report, “Rich States, Poor States,” written by supply-side economist Arthur Laffer. It’s issued by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is supported by major corporations and such major right-wing players as Charles and David Koch. Laffer’s chosen index items all favor lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, reduced public revenues, and holding down workers’ earning power by restraining minimum wages levels and weakening the bargaining power of unions.

But Fisher’s study checked the five-year performance of states by Laffer’s 2007 ranking and found, in terms of actual economic growth, no tendency for better-ranked states to do any better or worse than lower-ranked states.

Most widely cited in the group is the Tax Foundation’s State Business Climate Index, which combines 118 individual tax features. They’re merged into a single score in what Fisher terms a “completely arbitrary” way. Independent evaluations, he reports, show no discernible difference in the growth of state economies between those rated high or low by the Tax Foundation.

The bigger problem in the studies, beyond their blindness to metropolitan differences, does seem to be a significant tilt toward pared-down, low-cost, minimal state government – an incentive to states to reduce or even drop major tax systems. The direction seems perilous when states, still struggling to restore pre-recession spending levels, face escalating Medicaid obligations plus massive needs for enhanced systems ranging from transportation to K-12 and higher education.

LeRoy identifies a smarter direction – first, building tax systems that are fair to small as well as large businesses. And even more essential, building systems developed for societies that work for all groups, focused on “equity, innovation and resilience.”

From Ohio State University Research News:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – How much do white Americans think it “costs” to be black in our society, given the problems associated with racial bias and prejudice?

The answer, it appears, is not much.

When white Americans were asked to imagine how much they would have to be paid to live the rest of their lives as a black person, most requested relatively low amounts, generally less than $10,000.

Philip Mazzocco

In contrast, study participants said they would have to be paid about $1 million to give up television for the rest of their lives.

The results suggest most white Americans don’t truly comprehend the persisting racial disparities in our country, said Philip Mazzocco, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus.

“The costs of being black in our society are very well documented,” Mazzocco said. “Blacks have significantly lower income and wealth, higher levels of poverty, and even shorter life spans, among many other disparities, compared to whites.”

For example, white households average about $150,000 more wealth than the typical black family. Overall, total wealth for white families is about five times greater than that of black families, a gap that has persisted for years.

“When whites say they would need $1 million to give up TV, but less than $10,000 to become black, that suggests they don’t really understand the extent to which African Americans, as a group, are disadvantaged,” Mazzocco said.

These results also offer insight as to why more than 9 out of 10 white Americans reject proposals to give reparations to the descendants of slaves, said study co-author Mahzarin Banaji, the Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University.

“Our data suggest that such resistance is not because white Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt, or ethically flawed,” Banaji said.

“White Americans suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a black American.”

The study appears in the current issue of Harvard’s Du Bois Review.

The researchers did a series of studies in which a total of 958 whites of different ages and from different parts of the country were asked variations of the same question: “How much should you be paid to continue to live the rest of your life as a black person?”

In most cases, the participants were told to imagine they were actually black, but had always passed for white. The imagined race change required no physical transformation, just a change in public status.

They were also asked how much they should be paid for giving up television, and how much they should be given to change their officially listed state residency (without having to move). These questions were asked, Mazzocco said, to compare what people requested for relatively trivial changes, like a new listed state residency, as compared to a more life-changing request, like giving up television.

Results suggest white people considered a race change as relatively trivial, along the lines of a change in official state residency, as opposed to the seemingly big sacrifice of giving up television.

In some of the studies, the researchers changed the scenario in order to learn more about what white Americans thought about the costs of racial disparities.

One issue with the previous scenario is that participants may minimize the disparities they would face as a black person, because they had always passed as white. So in one study, whites were told to imagine that they were about to be born as a random white person in America, but they were being offered a cash gift to be born as a random black person. Once again, white participants requested relatively small sums to make a life-long race-change. In addition, some were given a list of some of the costs of being black in America, such as the racial wealth disparity. The result was that whites in this latter scenario requested significantly higher amounts than those in the previous studies – about $500,000.

Finally, some participants were given a similar scenario except all references to blacks, whites and America were taken out. They were asked to imagine they were born into the fictional country of Atria, and were born either into the “majority” or “minority” population. They were given a list of the disadvantages that the minority population faced in Atria (which were identical to the real disadvantages faced by blacks in America). In this case, white participants in the study said they should be paid an average of $1 million to be born as a minority member in Atria.

“When you take it out of the black-white context, white Americans seem to fully appreciate the costs associated with the kinds of disparities that African Americans actually face in the United States,” Mazzocco said. “In this case, they asked for a million dollars, similar to what they want for giving up television.”

Mazzocco said blatant prejudice was not the reason for the findings. Results showed that whites who scored higher on a measure of racial prejudice did not answer significantly differently than others in the study.

The researchers are conducting new studies to examine more closely why whites do underestimate the costs of being black. Mazzocco believes many white Americans have a perception that race bias in the United States has been virtually eliminated, and that blacks are no longer disadvantaged.

“While there has been progress in making racial conditions in American more equal, there’s clearly a lot more work to be done,” he said. “Blacks and whites are not experiencing the same America.”

When whites do understand the extent of racial disparities in the United States, they are more likely to support reparations. The findings showed that whites who wanted more money to be publicly recognized as black – suggesting they understood the true costs of racial disparity – were more likely than others to say they would support reparations.

But there are many reasons why nearly all whites oppose reparations. Mazzocco said some whites may believe slavery happened so long ago that slave descendants today don’t deserve to be compensated. The researchers examined the “too long ago” rationale in another study.

The researchers asked participants to imagine that their great, great grandfather, a wealthy shipping magnate, had been kidnapped about 150 years ago. The kidnappers demanded and received a large ransom that bankrupted the shipping magnate. That ransom was used to start a successful company that still survives today and is worth $100 million. Participants were asked whether they would be willing to be a part of a large suit against the present-day company that could net them each about $5,000.

In this scenario, 61 percent agreed to have their names listed on the lawsuit. The researchers noted that this is about the percentage of blacks today who support reparations for slave descendants.

“When white Americans find it within themselves to say ‘I must be compensated for a past injustice done to me’ but the same logic evaporates when the injustice concerns black Americans, they are staring straight at bias,” Banaji said.

Mazzocco said the results of this research have implications for the fledgling reparations movement in America. “Surveys show that 90 to 96 percent of white Americans are against slave descendant reparations. It is nearly impossible to get that many people to agree on anything, so it is an issue that really deserves attention to see why that is. We wanted to take a heated and emotional issue and look at it through a scientific lens,” he said.

The research was facilitated by a postdoctoral fellowship to Mazzocco from Ohio State’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

Other co-authors of the study included Timothy Brock of Ohio State, Gregory Brock of Georgia Southern University and Kristina Olson of Harvard.

#

Contact: Phil Mazzocco, (419) 755-4352; Mazzocco.6@osu.edu

Amy Lavoie, Office of Communications, Harvard University, (617) 496-9982; amy_lavoie@harvard.edu

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!!

Bike Art, Bike Films, Bike Games, Bike Merch – The event is back and it’s bigger and better than ever!

This year Bikesploitation has partnered with many local artists and advocates to bring Memphis an awesome-packed weekend that’s all about bicycles!

In addition to past staples such as the popular bicycle-themed film screenings, the Mobile Music Machine, and live bike art, we’ve added to the entertainment roster a Bike Art Gallery, Bike Blender, Roller Races, and so much more!  Plus, the event is 3 days this year – that’s 3x the fun

Bikesploitation III Schedule

FRIDAY, May 24th 5:00p – Midnight

5:00p –

Bike Art Gallery opening – posters, photography, sculptures, and more by local artists

Live Bike Sculpture by Yvonne Bobo

Mobile Music Machine

Jamie Harmon’s “Bike” Amurica – Photo booth with a Bicycle twist

Bike Blender – pedal-powered smoothies

Paint Me! Bike Car

7:00p

Film Screenings – Curated by Edward Valibus

This year’s film screening features movies not only from across the US, but all over the world!  Films range from using bicycles for social good to showing off amazing tricks.  There’s something for every type of bike-lover at the screening.

10:00p

Roller Racing – hosted by Dave Thienel of Nashville’s Rush Bicycle Messengers and Music City Cycling

Mobile Music Machine

SATURDAY, May 25th 12:00 – 5:00p

12:00p

Bike Art Gallery – screen printed posters, photography, and sculptures by local artists

Live Bike Sculpture by Eli Gold

Film Screenings continued

Family bike-art activities hosted by Sallie Sabbatini

Paint Me! Bike Car

SUNDAY, May 26th 12:00 – 5:00p

12:00p

Bike Art Gallery – last chance to see the awesome artwork!

Vintage Bike Show – hosted by Main St. Bike Rentals

2:00p

Mini-bike Races!  Presented by Revolutions Bike co-op and betterbikesandgardens.com

In addition to all the awesomeness listed above, Stickem Food truck will be on hand to provide you with much needed nourishment, we’ll have beverages for sale, and there will also be a handful of organized bike rides to and from the event – in fact, if you’d like to organize your own ride that’d be great! – Just let us know when and where and we’ll be happy to post your info to our site.

Major support for this event provided by Shelby County Health Services.

Event Contact:                                  Film Screening Contact:

Christopher Reyes                              Edward Valibus

901.523.9763                                      901.412.4928

hello@bikesploitation.com                  valibus@gmail.com

Exceptional leaders differentiate themselves by doing a few things better.  Here are six things you can learn from them.

What makes an exceptional leader exceptional?

This was the topic I had the fortunate opportunity to discuss recently with a class of graduating university seniors. Many of the students believed that future business leaders needed a new set of leadership skills that recognized the new global economy that continues to be molded and shaped by rapidly changing technology and globalization.

They aren’t wrong.

They were overlooking, however, the fact that fundamental leadership skills are characteristic of all great leaders, past and future. What differentiated exceptional leaders from great leaders, however, was not necessarily how to amend these characteristics but rather how to execute them better.

Here are six things exceptional leaders do better:

1. Great leaders are exceptional communicators and orators. Exceptional leaders are better at knowing when to shut it and listen.

Being able to motivate and influence others is an incredibly important skill for a leader.  The most exceptional leaders, however, are often those who ask more questions than they answer. Not coincidentally, they also know the right questions to ask. Typically, the reason exceptional leaders are great communicators is not because they orate well but rather that they are better at understanding with whom they are speaking.

2. Great leaders are exceptionally idealistic vision setters. Exceptional leaders are better at admitting when they are wrong.

Great leaders operate innovative companies that often challenge a business or cultural paradigm. Exceptional leaders are no different, except that their companies endure. Think about it.

3. Great leaders are exceptionally organized and analytical. Exceptional leaders are better at delegating.

I do believe that great leaders need to possess a high degree of organizational skill and be able to apply analytical thinking to understand complex business situations. Indeed, the age of Big Data is making these skills even more necessary. Exceptional leaders, however, understand the importance of and how to surround themselves with exceptional talent and delegate tasks and responsibility to them.

4. Great leaders are exceptional problem identifiers. Exceptional leaders are better problem solvers.

One trait that separates great leaders from the field is the ability to delve into a problem, ask the right questions, and understand the root cause of an issue. This is not as easy as many believe. Exceptional leaders, however, not only intuitively understand how to do this but also how to construct and assess the problem in terms of a solution. It’s a fine line that exceptional leaders understand.

5. Great leaders are exceptionally confident decision makers. Exceptional leaders are better at dishing credit. 

A great leader is really adept at running a great company. An exceptional leader, however, does not necessarily run an exceptional company. The rest of the company does. Think about it.

6. Great leaders are exceptionally smart. Exceptional leaders are better at not being stupid.

Not being stupid is one of the most undervalued skills today. This goes beyond bad business miscalculations to include remarkably stupid personal decisions leaders make that inevitably seep into and tarnish a business. Exceptional leaders instinctively know how to keep their noses clean and avoid precarious situations.

The debate will assuredly continue about what exactly differentiates an exceptional leader from the rest. For certain, the graduating seniors are convinced that technical skills, such as being fluent in a programming language like HTML, are key factors to becoming a great leader in the future. Again, they aren’t necessarily wrong, but I am hopeful that they will find their youthful exuberance as a much more valuable asset!

We received several emails asking for more information about Jeff Speck’s riverfront report for Memphis Mayor A C Wharton.  As a result, we’ll continue to post sections of his report here.  This week, we’ll focus on two riverfront parks:

Briefly, the key findings are as follows:

*  As the northern bookend to the Cobblestones, Jefferson Davis Park should be remade as an active waterfront park, including dramatic water features and a stair/elevator connection to the Mud Island monorail bridge.

*  Both Tom Lee Park and Beale Street Landing, receiving dozens of new parking stalls within a reconfigured Riverside Drive, should remove their surface parking lots.  Working with Memphis in May International Festival, the City should redesign Tom Lee Park as a series of grassy “rooms” separated by trees and shrubs.

Jefferson Davis Park

 Just as Beale Street Landing serves as a southern bookend to the portion of the riverfront that engages the downtown, Jefferson Davis Park is poised to play the same role to the north.  Its presence on the east-west park axis and its potential connection to Mud Island make it the proper location for the City’s next major investment in a waterfront park.  Its prime location and small size make it a place where a reasonable investment could have a transformative effect in short order.

A number of site features add promise to this proposal.  The presence of the State Visitors’ Center provides a physical anchor and an opportunity to amenitize the park with food and drink.  Its parking lot, oversized for the Visitors’ Center itself, could also serve the park.  The planned addition of parallel parking along Bass Pro Drive and Riverside drive (discussed ahead) would provide yet more parking.  The development of the Blind Spot parcel immediately north of the park would create an audience of residents within walking distance.  Indeed, an improved Jefferson Davis Park would add to the value of this proposed new housing.

Jefferson Davis Park drops about one story in elevation from the State Visitors’ Center parking lot.

Finally, the park’s one-story north-to-south drop in elevation, just south of the Visitors’ Center parking, would allow for a multi-level waterfall feature of the sort that brings life to other successful new parks, like Washington D.C.’s popular Yards Park.

Yards park in Washington, D.C., shows how a grade change can be put to good use.

Tom Lee Park

Most people feel that Tom Lee Park is a missed opportunity, a place that could offer visitors much more than it already does.  The key impediments to achieving this goal are described as “funding” and “Memphis in May.”  Presuming the former to be potentially surmountable, it is worth delving into the latter.

A number of plans have been made for beautifying Tom Lee Park, with the main strategy of using copses of trees and shrubs to divide the 4000-foot-long park into a series of “rooms.”  People complain that all of these plans have been rejected by Memphis in May as conflicting with its needs, specifically the demands of its large concerts and barbecue cook-off.  Conversations with Memphis in May suggest that such a reconfiguration of the park is not at all in conflict with its needs, but that prior design efforts have not included the organization as an active participant, which kept these from meeting the festival’s needs.  Based on these discussions, there is good reason to expect that a new design effort that acknowledged Memphis in May as a key client could produce a satisfactory “outdoor-rooms” proposal.

As a side note, some voices have suggested that one solution to this apparent conflict is to move Memphis in May from the riverfront to the Fairgrounds, where it has been located on occasion.  For a city that wants to better celebrate its relationship to its river, such an outcome would be extremely counterproductive.  Having Memphis in May on the riverfront gives the festival an unmatched setting, gives a boost to downtown businesses and hotels, and is also a great convenience to festival visitors, many of whom are liberated from the risk of drinking and driving by the festival’s current location.

As a redesign moves forward, it is worth noting is that, having been constructed of fill, Tom Lee Park has soil that needs amendment and or replacement to properly support plant life.  Any plans to add trees to the park must include a soil plan, and also a temporary fencing plan to protect landscape from trampling—and human “watering”—during Memphis in May.

A conservative approach to improving Tom Lee Park would use areas of trees and shrubs (in amended soil) to shape “outdoor rooms” of grass.

A more elaborate plan is not recommended, for several reasons.  First, Memphis in May still requires that most of the land remain grass, which is not out of keeping with an “outdoor-rooms” scheme.  Second, Tom Lee Park is so very large that any commitment to change it dramatically will necessarily be very expensive.  Third, while the park is a missed opportunity, it isn’t broken.  It still presents an attractive edge to the Mississippi, and it serves many users in its current state.  Finally, Tom Lee Park sits below the bluff, away from the area where downtown Memphis reaches toward the riverfront.  There are no cross streets approaching it from the east, unlike north of Beale Street.  For all of the above reasons, Jefferson Davis Park is seen as a much better place to invest in the interest of attracting waterfront activity.

Still, while not being the highest priority, Tom Lee Park warrants a limited investment in beautification in conjunction with the reconfiguration of Riverside Drive, which will attract more potential users to its edge.  The creation of a continuous parking lane on

Riverside will create more parking spaces than the 120 spots located within the park.  This parking lot, which even Memphis in May doesn’t like, should be removed, as no truly urban American park includes a parking lot.  Also slated for removal should be the parking lot serving Beale Street Landing, which—added during the value engineering phase—betrays that project’s design conception of a grass field rising to become a roof.

Accomplishing this integration requires paying special attention to a number of initiatives already mentioned, as follows:

1.   The Beale Street Axis needs to be reinforced as a walkable corridor from 2^nd Street to the Beale Street Landing.

2.   Jefferson Davis Park needs to be remade as a destination, and its connections eastward enhanced.

3.   Both Jefferson Davis Park and Beale Street Landing need to establish direct, quick, connections to Mud Island, likely in the form of a stair/elevator tower for the former and a two-point water taxi for the latter.

4.   Mud Island needs to be remade along the lines envisioned by its recent Land Use study, and not only beautified from its tip to beyond the monorail landing, but enlivened with amenities that keep it active from dawn to after dark.

5.   Finally, the Cobblestones need to receive an armature of additional “temporary” construction that allows it to be used in a more active way than is currently contemplated.

A reconceptualized riverfront has two coasts and reaches into downtown where it connects to a revitalized Mud Island.

There are additional long-term interventions that will also have a profound positive impact, such as the replacement of the two City parking garages with bluff structures that line Riverside drive with active building fronts.  But the diagram above emphasizes the key aspect of the riverfront’s reconceptualization, which is as a two-coast loop that reaches into downtown at its two river crossings.

This drawing is intentionally a diagram and not a plan, because it could be accomplished in a wide variety of ways.  But the best plans are reflective of simple underlying diagrams that show what a site “wants to be.”  In this case, the location of Mud Island a short distance from the very heart of downtown, and the presence of Beale Street Landing and Jefferson-Davis Park as bookends to the underutilized Cobblestones, all suggest the integration of these features into a continuous circuit that will allow the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts.

PRIORITIES

The remaking of Mud Island and the activation of the Cobblestones are the sort of long-term transformations that will allow the Memphis riverfront to reach its full potential.  However, by focusing short-term efforts on those few centrally-located places where immediate change is possible, we can fundamentally alter the riverfront in a way that achieves dramatic outcomes at limited cost.

These interventions should be selected from the long list already presented based on the combined criteria of visibility, affordability, and connectedness:

*   The goal of visibility acknowledges that the most impactful investments are those that can be seen and visited the most easily by the greatest number of people.  This goal suggests that areas along Riverside Drive have more immediate potential than areas elsewhere.

*   The goal of affordability acknowledges that high cost/acre investments should be focused in relatively small areas (like Jefferson Davis Park), while low cost/acre investments can be spread over larger areas (like Tom Lee Park).  It also acknowledges that it is cheaper to ask for modifications to other people’s investments (like Bass Pro) than to fund new investments.

*   The goal of connectedness acknowledges that investments are much more likely to achieve critical mass if located adjacent to one another, and also that those investments which connect other things together are likely to have disproportionally large impacts.

Based on these criteria, it is strongly recommended that the City of Memphis immediately move forward on simultaneously accomplishing the following six interrelated initiatives:

1.  Making Riverside Drive a complete street

2.  Making Bass Pro Drive a complete street

3.  Encouraging development along Bass Pro Drive

4.  Remaking Jefferson Davis Park

5.  Completing the central Riverwalk; and

6.  Improving Tom Lee Park.

Each of these initiatives is described briefly below, while also referencing the larger discussion that has already occurred in the body of this report.

1. Making Riverside Drive a Complete Street

Nothing separates downtown Memphis from its riverfront as powerfully as the current pedestrian-unfriendly condition of Riverside Drive.  The experience of Memphis in May demonstrates that the city can function properly with this road reduced from four lanes to two.  Effecting this narrowing without rebuilding any of the street’s curbs makes room for the addition of a protected bicycling facility and a full flank of parallel parking, which would protect sidewalk edges while also allowing for the removal of unattractive parking lots in Tom Lee Park and at Beale Street Landing.  This dramatic change could be accomplished for little more than the cost of a new top coat, although we encourage a concurrent investment in shade trees where they are missing along the street’s length.  Thus transformed from a highway to an urban boulevard, Riverside Drive would bring the city back in touch with its river.

2. Making Bass Pro Drive a Complete Street

Bass Pro, with some help from the City, is about to make a major investment turning Poplar Avenue / Fulton Street into a road that, unfortunately, will not encourage walking or biking along it, nor enhance the value of its adjacent real estate.  Unnecessarily sized at four lanes, this road will encourage speeding, and lacks parallel parking protecting the sidewalk to its west.  This sidewalk enfronts the State Visitors’ Center as well as a prime developable parcel that would benefit from a safer and more comfortable eastern edge.  Properly resized to two lanes to include ample sidewalks and cycle facilities, and ideally shifted slightly east within its current right of way, this street can both provide an appealing route to the Bass Pro Pyramid and contribute to the size and value of abutting property.  Indeed, by including parallel parking, this street can allow for the removal of the bus parking lot at the State Visitor’s Center, further enlarging the area available for redevelopment.

3. Encouraging Development along Bass Pro Drive

As just discussed, the removal of the concrete plant has resulted in a large city-owned property being made available for redevelopment alongside Bass Pro Drive.  Bounded to the west by the Riverwalk (against the Wolf River Harbor), this site is well located and amenitized to receive a significant quantity of medium-density housing with a limited mixed-use component.  If it is properly planned prior to its sale, the City can both control its quality and raise funds for the transformation of Jefferson Davis Park, which could potentially be redeveloped as part of a developer RFP for the two parcels together.  In fact, the City may want to consider creating a master plan for this area that also includes the State Visitors’ Center and its parking lots.

4. Remaking Jefferson Davis Park

Because it is not large, Jefferson Davis Park can be remade dramatically for a relatively small cost.  Doing so is not essential, but makes sense in the context of its role as the northern bookend to the Cobblestones, opposite Beale Street Landing, and its location along an east-west park axis that connects Court Square through Confederate Park to Mud Island.  This Mud Island connection should be enhanced by a stair/elevator tower that allows Riverwalk users to access the monorail bridge without first doubling back uphill to Front Street (See Section II.7).  As suggested just above, the improvement of this park would further amenitize the City-owned parcel just north of the Visitors’ Center, and should perhaps be redeveloped in conjunction with that site.

5. Completing the Central Riverwalk

Memphis downtown now includes a nice Bluff Walk south of Union, a short Promenade Walk from Monroe to Jefferson, and a Riverwalk growing north from the State Visitors Center.  These three brief experiences can be combined into a single worthy stroll for the slight cost of one staircase (at Union), two speed tables (crossing Union at Riverside and Riverside at Jefferson) one block of boardwalk (from Union to Monroe), and a very limited amount of additional walkway and wayfinding.  Thus connected to itself, the Memphis Riverwalk will provide a delightful multi-mile meander from Ashburn-Coppock Park to the Bass Pro Pyramid.  This effort can be supplemented, in conjunction with the calming of Riverside Drive, with a path down the hillside that allows bluff walkers to directly access Tom Lee Park rather than all being diverted into the South Bluffs neighborhood. (See Section II.17.)  Given its small price tag and great connective potential, there is every reason to make this proposal a high priority.

6. Improving Tom Lee Park

If there is a single initiative among these six that can be delayed, it is this one, the improvement of Tom Lee Park to include “outdoor living rooms” of grass separated by copses of trees and shrubs in a manner that supports the activities of Memphis in May.  However, this proposal makes the A-List for a number of reasons, including its tremendous visibility from Riverside Drive and beyond; its adjacency to the almost-complete Beale Street Landing; and the fact that adding parallel parking along Riverside Drive will allow both Beale Street Landing and Tom Lee Park to eliminate their unattractive parking lots.  Tom Lee Park covers half of the downtown Memphis riverfront.  Making it beautiful at limited cost seems a promising path towards transforming the city’s relationship to the Mississippi.

The above six initiatives have been put forward for immediate action because they all seem affordable, quickly achievable, and mutually supporting.  That does not mean that none of the dozen other proposals above merit short-term attention.  Indeed, some of these are only considered long-term because, even if initiated right away, they will not be achieved for years.  There is no reason to delay any of them, with the possible caveat that certain tasks, such as the redevelopment of Mud Island, will be easier to achieve once the higher-priority items have been accomplished.  That said, we must always be wary of casting our gaze too wide, lest we lose our focus and distract attention from the easy wins that we can chalk up first.

For that reason, it is recommended that the six items discussed above be specifically identified for short-term promotion.  Some must be begun immediately—such as the modification of Bass Pro Drive—while those that require additional study should be consolidated into a single planning effort to be undertaken this Spring.

by Todd Litman

In Washington State there is a proposal to tax bicycles so that bicyclists help pay for the roads they use. On the other hand, there is considerable political resistence to increasing fuel taxes to offset inflation, or to charging road tolls or parking fees to cover facility costs. These are part of a larger debate concerning what is the most equitable way to finance transportation infrastructure.

During most of the twentieth century, motor vehicle travel, and therefore fuel consumption, grew steadily so fuel tax revenue tended to increase from year to year. However, during the last decade, vehicle travel has peaked, vehicles have started to become more fuel efficient, and as a unit rather than a percentage tax, inflation reduces the value of fuel tax revenue, so real (inflation adjusted) fuel tax revenue is now declining. The portion of roadway expenses paid by user fees (special fuel and tire taxes, and road tolls) has declined in recent years, to less than half of roadway expenditures.

According to the study, Do Roads Pay For Themselves?, only about half of total roadway costs are financed by user fees.

According to the U.S. Government Transportation Financial Statistics 2012, Table 3.35, in 2009 (the most recent year reported), federal, state and local governments allocated $160 billion for roadway spending, about $533 per capita, of which about half is funded through user fees.

As a result,  people who drive less than average tend to subsidize their neighbors who drive more than average. Somebody who never drives pays, on average, about $267 in annual general taxes to fund roadways. Highway cost allocation studies have estimated the roadway costs imposed by various types of vehicles. Although these studies focus on motor vehicle costs, this research indicates that these costs increase exponentially with vehicle size and weight, which indicates that cycling imposes very small costs, and since cyclists tend to travel fewer annual miles than motorists, bicyclists impose minimal roadway costs per capita.

These economic transfers are far greater if we also account for vehicle parking subsidies. A typical urban parking space has an annualized costs of $500 to $1,500, and there are an estimated two to six off-street parking spaces per motor vehicle. These costs mostly borne indirectly through rents and taxes. A typical motorist recieves hundreds or thousands of dollars in annual parking subsidies. This only accounts for infrastructure costs. Motor vehicle travel also imposes delay (called the “barrier effect“), accident risk, and air pollution and noise impacts that motor vehicles impose on pedestrians and cyclists, external costs that can be considered a subsidy to driving.

Such subsidies are unfair and inefficient. Since vehicle ownership and use tend to increase with income, they are regressive, resulting in cross-subsidies from lower- to higher-income people, and they encourage travelers to drive more than is economically optimal, which increases traffic congestion, accidents, pollution emissions and spawl.

There is a lot of hypocracy on this issue. Highway advocates argue that “diverting” fuel tax revenue to supporting other modes, such as non-motorized and public transportation, based on horizontal equity, which implies that consumers should “get what they pay for and pay for what they get.” But this principle also implies that motorists should pay all of the costs they impose, including all road and parking facilities, and other economic and environmental costs they impose on others. Highway advocates generaly ignore this point.

The root of the problem is that automobile transportation is costly – more costly in total than other modes. Motorists spend, on average, about 18% of their income on their vehicles and fuel, and about 10% of their housing costs for residential parking. This heavy cost burden makes motorists selfish; they often argue that somebody else should bear the costs of road and parking facilities in order to make driving affordable, and that no transportation funds should be “diverted” to support other modes. As a result, alternatives are underfunded: although 10-15% of urban trips are made by walking and cycling, non-motorized modes only receive 1-3% of total transportation funding, and far less if parking facility costs are also considered. A better solution than increasing subsidies for driving is to invest more in affordable modes, particularly walking and cycling facilities, in order to reduce total transport costs.

From Better Cities and Towns:

By Robert Steuteville

Recently I criticized the design of a supposedly nonpolluting, “net zero” Walgreens in Evanston, Illinois. Aside from the raft of solar panels on the roof, the store looks like it could be located by any Interstate interchange. The store is, in fact, in a walkable neighborhood, one block from a Chicago Transit Authority station. The claim of “net zero” strikes me as flimsy — note the SUVs in the parking lot and that much of the merchandise will be shipped from Asia — but mostly I object to the parking in front. The store design diminishes the walkability of the neighborhood, which cancels out the energy savings of the building itself.

An urban designer and architect whom I respect implied I was making too big a deal of this issue. While he agreed that the city and Walgreens should do better, he wrote on a professional listserv that “in the world of fish to fry, I think we can find bigger ones.”

Note: This article is in the April-May 2013 of Better! Cities & Towns. Subscribe and get all of the reports packaged in a convenient, tactile format    delivered to a special box on your doorstep. Some of our reports are for     paid subscribers only.

Here’s why I don’t think this issue should be diminished. The world of retail is changing, fast. The business model that national retailers followed in recent decades was turned upside down by the housing crash. The retailers, which must build stores each year to increase revenues, have long developed at the suburban fringe — confident that growth will bring new customers to their stores.

Now that sprawl has slowed considerably, retailers are faced with a lot of underperforming, low-value stores in the suburbs. These stores were built cheaply and they get old, fast. They must be refurbished periodically to remain viable. While some retailers will choose to maintain suburban stores, many will not if the investment value is low.

It appears that Memphis police officers are nearing success in their crusade to get their 4.6% pay cut restored by Memphis City Council.

Now, with some help by the Council, perhaps, Memphis taxpayers might find success in the right-sizing of Memphis Police Department budget.  In fact, it seems even more essential now if the money for restoring the pay cut is to be found.

The tawdry campaign by the Memphis Police Association reflected the worst excesses of organized labor’s tendency toward siege mentality.  Its overheated rhetoric about Memphis being unsafe has eroded the officers’ professional standing and no one is willing to defend the Association’s infamous billboards outside of its rank and file.

As a result, for months, Association members have not looked so much like dedicated public servants as a special interest group pursuing a win at all costs attitude.  All of the talk about how unsafe Memphis has only made us wonder: if they are right, aren’t they admitting that they have been unsuccessful in their jobs?

Then again, with so many Memphis police officers living outside of the city limits, perhaps it’s easy to lob grenades into the public square rather than present a factual basis for their point of view.

Out of Control

But all of this is merely theater.  The most serious challenge facing City of Memphis isn’t management-labor relations with the Police Association.  Rather, it is the need for city government to take control of a police budget that is by almost any definition out of control.

Because all city services have been sacrificed on the altar of public safety, they are languishing while the police payroll and budget continue to swell.  In the past five years, the number of workers in City of Memphis has remained at 6,200, but what’s really happening under that number is seen in the fact that in that period of time, Memphis Police Department has added roughly 400 people, meaning that the rest of city government has lost that same amount.

Today, public safety – Memphis Police Department and Memphis Fire Department – accounts for 60% of the City of Memphis budget (to the fire division’s credit, it has reduced its workforce by 45 people while MPD added 400).  In Nashville, public safety accounts for about 40% of its budget and its reductions in violent and property crimes surpassed Memphis from 2006-2010.  The same is true in Atlanta, where violent crime dropped 24% while public safety amounted to about half of its budget.

Drops in Crime

Meanwhile, here, the city property tax rate dropped in that same period of time from $3.43 to $3.11, placing even more stress on the budgets of Memphis’ non-public safety services.  That stress continues in the Wharton Administration’s 2014 budget proposal which has an increase of 54 people and $4.5 million, bringing the net expenditures in the proposed police budget to $237.6 million even as other services limp along.  The proposed budget for 2014 is $48.1 million more than the 2008 budget.

New York Times editorialized Saturday that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” policy can’t be given credit for the Big Apple’s historically low crime rates because there have been major drops in crime in most U.S. cities. The same can be said for Memphis, where drops in the crime rate are just slightly better than the average for the 50 largest cities in the U.S.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t all be grateful for the policies and police work that contributed to Memphis’ crime drop and thrilled by declines in crime rates for both violent or property crimes, but it’s not to say that we should ignore the fact that similar drops were taking place across the country.

Stubborn

Today’s crime rate in the U.S. is roughly half what it was just two decades ago.  In 2006 to 2010 alone, the violent crime rate for the 50 largest cities dropped approximately 16% while the Memphis crime rate fell roughly 19% (population here dropped 5%).  It’s the drop in property crime rate that really distinguishes Memphis, where it fell 22% compared to the average for the top 50 cities of 12%.

Despite crime rate reductions in recent years, Memphis ranks #2 in overall crime rate, but it’s the violent crime rate that is the toughest challenge.  The violent crime rate in 2011 was 1583.5 and in 1986, it was 1,586.8.  As The Economist wrote in an article about America’s safer streets:  “Moreover, the good news hardly extends to every corner of the country.  Violent crime remains extremely high in some troubled cities such as Memphis and Detroit, and in small places like Oakland, California, and Camden, New Jersey.”

It will take years of research to understand what’s caused the national nature of the reductions in crime, and already, there is vigorous debate about the reasons, which include increased incarceration, improved law enforcement strategies (particularly using technology), the public’s use of technology, the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic, graying of America, and even abortion.

Perhaps, as much as anything, crime is a young man’s game, and Memphis continues to have a bulge in youths at a time when other cities are seeing decreases in their population under 18 years of age.  For most offenses, arrests peak in the late teen years and early twenties, generally tapering off thereafter, but all in all, it makes the case for how Memphis’ anomalous percentage in youths presents either Memphis’ greatest opportunity or greatest obstacle to the future.

But, one fact is indisputable: there is no correlation between the size of a city’s police force and its crime rate.   If we’ve proven anything in Memphis, it is this.  Despite a much larger police force and a significantly larger crime-fighting budget, Memphis’ crime rates remain stubbornly high, and because most cities’ crime rates are dropping, Memphis is running in place at the top of the major cities’ crime rate rankings.  In fact, some cities have actually reduced the size of its police department and its crime rate dropped as much as twice as much as Memphis.

The Cost of Full Service

What all of this means to us is that we can’t keep doing the same and expecting different results.  Rather than continuing to plow more and more money into police budgets, it seems an appropriate time to broaden our attack on crime to include more interventions and prevention strategies.

That seems to be the secret to New York City’s success.  It has achieved record low crime rates while reducing the size of its police force.  Instead of adding more police, the Bloomberg Administration has focused on interventions.

Regardless, City of Memphis is paying a premium for a “full service” police department and for a department without the technology that can reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong told Leadership Memphis recently that roughly 30% of calls to MPD are unrelated to public safety.  There are calls about dogs barking and about yards rolled with toilet paper, there are calls asking for a police officer to check locks, and there are hundreds more. Because a police car responds to every call, MPD is much larger than it needs to be if it were concentrating strictly on public safety calls.

Efficiency Needed

In addition, because MPD has not kept pace with technology, it also does not operate at maximum efficiency.  For example, Mr. Armstrong said that because police cars do not have GPS on them, dispatchers have to poll cars to see which ones are nearest to the location of a crime.  He points out that dispatchers have sent police cars from Frayser to answer a call downtown near the Shelby County Jail because they were unaware that there was a police car there dropping off a prisoner.

With GPS, dispatchers would know where every car in Memphis at all times.  It’s more than passing strange that MATA dispatchers use GPS to keep track of every bus is in Memphis, but the same can’t be said for patrol cars.

In addition, Mr. Armstrong said that because of antiquated technology, there are needless duplications in taking and following up citizen calls that increase costs and reduce efficiency.

Rather than more money for more people, MPD could make better use of funds to upgrade its technology which ultimately could help to accomplish what needs to be done: to right size the city’s police budget.

Postscript

In budget hearings this morning, Memphis City Council today raised the question of reducing the police budget so that other starving city services can receive much-needed funding.  It’s hard for the legislative members to raise questions about the budget without being accused of being soft on crime, but to bring balance to the City of Memphis budget, the first step is to address the police budget.

Director Armstrong unfortunately took the position in this morning’s budget hearing that the size of the force cannot be reduced without having an impact on public safety.  It puts the Council in a difficult political position, but hopefully, there is enough momentum to take a clear-eyed look at what a balanced crime-fighting plan look like, one that acknowledges that there is more to reducing crime than simply hiring more and more policemen.

The early history of the Christian church is primarily an urban history, and this makes sense: Want to spread the word of a new religion? Your best chances likely lie in those places where would-be believers already densely congregate together. The Apostle Paul made this strategic decision in the First Century A.D., as he traveled through the Roman Empire planting churches.

“Paul is going to Athens, he’s going to Rome, he’s going to Philippi, to Thessaloniki,” says Justin Buzzard, the founder of a year-and-a-half old nondenominational church in Silicon Valley. Much of the New Testament is made up of the letters Paul wrote to congregations in some of these cities. “This was a movement,” Buzzard says, “that swept the great cities of the ancient world.”

Stephen Um, a Presbyterian pastor in Boston and co-author with Buzzard of a new book about cities and God, pushes the argument even further, referencing the work of sociologist Rodney Stark. As plagues regularly swept through these cities in the First and Second Centuries, Christians were often the ones who stayed behind to care for the ill while others fled to the countryside.

“The term ‘Christian,’” Um says, “was synonymous with an urbanist at that particular time.”

There are also, of course, the contents of the Bible itself: Jesus ministered to people in cities. The story of his crucifixion and resurrection takes place in one, Jerusalem. Psalm 48, from the Old Testament, is an ode to God’s citadels. Defining moments from Christianity’s later development are inseparable from cities as well. Theologians have called the Protestant Reformation a “uniquely urban event,” one dependent on the invention of the printing press and the subsequent spread of the gospels through densely clustered neighbors.

Today, this narrative of Christianity as a religion with urban roots is notable for an abrupt turn in the story over the last half-century, particularly in America: Now, cities are commonly described as the epicenter of secularism, with Christians and their mega-churches retreating outside the citadel.

Um frames it this way: “We believe there is an anti-urban bias within the Christian community.”

He and Buzzard have written their book – Why Cities Matter: To God, the Culture, and the Church – as a counter-argument, calling on Christians to re-approach the city (and the religion’s urban story), lest Christianity become irrelevant in the age of global urbanization.

“Oftentimes, it’s been Christians who’ve been the slowest to see new cultural trends in what’s going on,” Buzzard says. And if more Christians don’t heed this call? “The consequences would be great. You’d have an increasingly marginalized Christian community in America, really not incredibly relevant to where the bulk of our population is living.”

Buzzard’s young congregation of about 300, Garden City Church, meets inside another church in Silicon Valley for Sunday afternoon services. Um’s 12-year-old Presbyterian Citylife Church meets on the convention floor of a boutique Boston hotel near the Theater District. The two pastors situate themselves within the “larger evangelical community,” somewhere in between fundamentalists and more liberal churches so all-encompassing Um suggests you can’t tell what they stand for.

In their book, they address and describe Christians as a singular group, and undoubtedly some longstanding urban churches would argue with the broad idea that Christianity in America has taken on an anti-urban bias. Yet the authors intend the book for a like-minded generation of Christians who fled to the suburbs (alongside plenty of non-Christians) but who now may be open to returning. The point, though, isn’t to treat the city as a problem to be solved, or a wicked place in need of salvation. Buzzard and Um aren’t calling for sympathy and soup kitchens for the urban poor. Rather, they argue for the need for more Christians to understand cities, to become invested in them, to work to help them flourish.

In the midst of their argument, they make an interesting point about people who consider themselves urbanists but not Christians. So many people now talk about the promise of cities with a kind of religious faith, they argue. Take Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City, whose title is matched in near-religious fervor only by its subhead: “How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.”

“It’s kind of like, come on, Ed! Yeah, cities are great, but you make it sound as if cities don’t have problems,” Um says. “We’re not saying, as Christians, that cities are our ultimate hope. We’re saying the God of our cities is our ultimate hope.”

Perhaps cities have become associated with secularism because there’s so much else to worship there: either the promise of cities themselves, or the prospects for good jobs or other forms of success.

“I’ve got a lot of people in my church who move to Silicon Valley thinking once they had their big job at Apple or Google or Facebook or Twitter, or once they came up with their big startup idea, then they’d be ultimately, completely happy and satisfied,” Buzzard says. “A lot of what I deal with there is peoples’ disillusion with the city.”

This is the point where Buzzard and Um offer up their alternative: an introduction to God’s grace. By making a credible, relevant impact on cities around them, Buzzard and Um hope that people will take this message more seriously.

It is here, though, that the skeptic chimes in: Buzzard and Um may believe that we would all be better off if we received this message. But what makes cities great is their diversity, including the diversity of religions (or of people who hold no religion at all). A city full of Christians would seem to defeat the point, depending on your perspective.

Buzzard and Um respond, though, that their hoped-for goals fall far shy of that.

“My hope would be that if my church shut down tomorrow, my city would notice,” Buzzard says. “There would be people in our city going, ‘Woah, our city is worse off because this church is gone.’

A couple of months ago, the city of San Mateo, Calif., finished a small experiment. Planning to renovate the playground at one of its most popular community parks, it put a set of proposed designs online for a month and invited public comments. Some 130 people from around the city batted ideas back and forth, remarked on what they liked and didn’t like in the designs, and made suggestions. The playground needed shade, they agreed, and water fountains reachable by little kids.

The city’s Parks and Recreation Department was thrilled. Before trying the online approach, it had convened a public meeting to solicit feedback. Eight people had bothered to show up.

What stood out most in the online forum was who the participants turned out to be. Almost 60 percent of them were between the ages of 35 and 45. The average age was just shy of 42 — noticeably younger than the demographic typically drawn by public hearings in San Mateo. “This was the target audience we’d been trying to get but were not getting” through conventional hearings, says Abby Veeser, a senior management analyst in the parks department.

In other words, Generation X was checking in.

And not just in San Mateo. In Phoenix, the city’s Planning and Development Department has logged thousands of responses to its online request for citizens to contribute their thoughts to a new master plan. The average age of respondents? Again, 42.

Read the May issue of Governing magazine.

Meanwhile, for nearly a year the city of Palo Alto, Calif., has been making its trove of data available online. It began with budget and financial data, expanded to salaries and benefits for all city employees, and is pushing on to specific program data. The idea is to make information that was always public — but for which residents had to ask — much more easily available. The initiative has been pushed by a cohort of younger managers who consider transparency vital to citizen engagement. “Nothing against the [baby] boomers,” says Assistant City Manager Pamela Antil, “but I think Gen Xers are way more comfortable with transparency and open data initiatives. We’re learning in government that people are interested in this information and that they’re willing to put it into a meaningful, useful format that benefits other people in the community.”

Local governments are in the midst of a sea change when it comes to public participation and citizen engagement. Forced by the recession and recovery of the last five years to make dramatic cuts to their budgets, they’ve reached out to try to understand better what their residents value most. Presented with a new and ever-evolving array of technological tools — Facebook, Twitter, text messaging and public-participation sites like MindMixer, Peak Democracy and Nextdoor — they’re using them to publicize their own concerns and, increasingly, to draw out public sentiment. They’ve discovered the “civic technology” movement, with its groups like Code for America and events like next month’s National Day of Civic Hacking, which encourage citizens with tech skills to use government data to build apps useful to residents, neighborhoods and cities.

What may be most interesting about all this, however, is that it’s occurring precisely as another momentous shift is taking place: As they go through their 30s and 40s, members of Generation X are moving into more active roles as citizens and into upper management ranks in local government. While it’s too much to say that this generational change is the force driving local governments’ more expansive view of public engagement, the blending of the two trends is no coincidence. It shouldn’t be surprising that this generation, which long ago shook off its disengaged-slacker stereotype to become known for its entrepreneurialism, DIY ethic, skepticism about bureaucracy and comfort with collaborating over far-flung networks, would now be pressing local government to think in new ways about the work of democracy.

“A lot of people in their 30s and 40s now are focused on families and schools and parks and public amenities,” says Matt Bronson, San Mateo’s assistant city manager, who at 38 falls squarely into the demographic. “They want to play a role and not just a one-time listening role. As a generation, they want to have a chance to provide ongoing feedback, and when the time and opportunity are right, to help make collaborative decisions on the direction of their communities.”

For the last two-and-a-half years, ever since the first baby boomers started to hit 65 — which they will continue to do at a rate of 10,000 a day for another 16 years or so — media attention on generational change has tended to focus either on them or on the socially tolerant, liberal-leaning politics of 20-somethings, or millennials. Generation X has been an afterthought. Which pretty much figures, given how its members have always viewed their inattentive treatment by society at large. Yet it is members of Generation X who are coming into full maturity and thus leaving their stamp on community life.

Just who makes up Generation X is open to some debate. The typical starting point, based on the commonly agreed-upon end of the baby boom, is 1965. But using cultural markers, renowned generational thinkers Neil Howe and William Strauss put the start date at 1961; so does the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the University of Michigan, which for more than two decades has been studying a cohort of Gen Xers. Ending points vary, too, from 1978 to 1982.

There is little disagreement, however, on the forces that helped shape members of the generation. The short version, says Howe, is that the “first wave” of Xers spent their childhoods watching the country fall apart and their adolescence and early adulthood in the “Morning in America” glow of the Reagan years. “They have no memory of anything before everything started going crazy: long, hot summers and riots and peace movements and the family going to hell and the Me Decade,” he says. “At the same time, they were there at the ground zero of the deregulation, tax-cut, free-agent rebellion against the system, only for them it was in the economy as opposed to the culture. That economic liberation was defining for first-wave Xers.”

So, too, were a variety of social trends. They watched their parents’ marriages struggle and sometimes fall apart — the divorce rate hit its high in 1981. Their mothers joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, which meant that many of them had no one waiting at home when they returned from school. “They were latchkey kids, and institutions were crumbling as they came of age,” says Rebecca Ryan, a generational consultant who often works with local governments. “They had to be fighters and learn to speak for themselves.”

And they developed an overwhelming skepticism about large institutions. They sat in the back seat while their parents waited in long gas lines, watched the Challenger shuttle explode and followed the American hostage crisis in Iran. They hit the schools as public education began to fall apart, a fact confirmed for them, as Howe points out, by the 1983 “A Nation At Risk” report and its memorably scorching preamble: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

In the private sector, the savings and loan crisis began in 1985, just as Gen Xers would have been turning to banks as young adults. The recession of the early 1990s, the dot-com bust, the stuttering engine of lower- and middle-class advancement, the Great Recession — all have left their mark. A 2007 study by the Economic Mobility Project, spearheaded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that people in their 30s in 2004 had a median income on average 12 percent lower than their fathers’ three decades before. “This suggests the up escalator that has historically ensured that each generation would do better than the last may not be working very well,” the report commented. The Census Bureau, measuring the effects of the recession on householders, found that the largest decrease in median net worth between 2005 and 2010 belonged to those 35 to 44. Their net worth dropped by 59 percent, compared to 37 percent for those under 35 and 13 percent for those 65 and older.

So it’s probably no surprise that there is a widespread sense within Generation X that the government structures that worked for earlier generations do not work for them. As with any generational description, it is easy to oversimplify. But it’s notable that some of the most nationally prominent members of the generation — U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who is 43, and Govs. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, 41, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, 45, Nikki Haley of South Carolina, 41, and, if you use Howe’s definition of who’s in Gen X, 50-year-old Chris Christie of New Jersey — are Republicans who have built their careers on pledges to rewrite how government works. “There is a Reaganite bent to this generation, the idea that government and its rules are often a problem,” Howe says.

In truth, Xers as a whole are divided politically. Exit polls showed those in their 30s going decidedly for President Obama in the 2012 elections, while those born before 1973 leaned toward Republican challenger Mitt Romney. A 2011 Pew Center study found that about 47 percent of Gen Xers favored smaller government, while 45 percent preferred a bigger government. Meanwhile, a study by Florida State University sociologist Elwood Carlson for the Population Reference Bureau found a healthy plurality of Gen Xers — 43 percent — identifying as independents, more than any generation before them.

The streak of self-reliance that marks many Xers has been amplified by a key belief that government won’t always be there to help. “One thing that was really hammered into our heads, going back to the late ’80s and on into today, is that the celebrated, major government programs like Social Security and Medicare would not be around for us,” says Pete Peterson, who runs the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership at Pepperdine University. “So there’s a feeling that you’d better get this done on your own, that you’re going to have to take care of this yourself.”

That go-it-alone attitude may help explain why Xers have for so long been characterized as disengaged from and cynical about public life. But that is ending, Peterson argues, as they build families and settle into neighborhoods. “If you’ve never believed that government was that important,” he says, “when you have kids is the time you reconnect — and as you sink in roots and pay taxes and care about things that happen on a more local basis, you become more civically aware.” But the same forces that have pushed Generation X toward self-reliance and questioning the institutions around them, he says, will also produce a younger citizenry filled with “people who believe, ‘I don’t have to put up with this bureaucracy. There’s got to be a better way to do this.’”

In particular, localities have come to understand that if they hope to reflect the concerns and priorities of the public they claim to represent, they have to rethink their entire approach to public participation, says Karen Thoreson, president of the Alliance for Innovation, a joint project of the International City/County Management Association and Arizona State University. “Folks have finally admitted out loud that the ways local governments have traditionally engaged the public don’t work, are broken and are unpleasant for everybody.”

Or as Anne Ambrose, the 43-year-old director of public safety and community relations for Palmdale, Calif., puts it, “The expectation that public life occurs in front of the council dais is a dying concept.”

To get a sense of what might replace it, it’s worth remembering that the hyperconnected, technologically adept, just-do-it world that moves at lightning speed to meet consumers’ needs took shape as Generation Xers were growing up. It has molded their expectations not just of the private sector, but of government, both in their roles as citizens and among those who’ve become government officials. In a society in which you can amass Twitter followers and run your own blog and opine on Facebook and become a YouTube sensation overnight, it stands to reason that Gen Xers don’t have much patience for showing up to a public meeting on a Thursday night where they might get two minutes during a perfunctory “public comments” period — and that Gen X city officials would be sympathetic. But as the online experience of cities like San Mateo and Phoenix has shown, they’re ready to participate if they’re offered a meaningful way to do so. “It’s part of how Generation X is wired,” Bronson says. “We’re focused on practicing collaborative decision-making.”

So the frontiers of public participation are expanding as Gen Xers move into management roles in government. “There have been some real breakthroughs by managers of all ages, including boomers who said, ‘Let’s try something different,’” says Thoreson. “But the whole electronic side of it, and being able to engage the public through forums or crowdsourcing or whatever, has been led inside local government by 30- and 40-year-olds, been picked up by citizens in that age group and now is being picked up by citizens of all age groups.”

There are about as many different iterations as there are communities interested in exploring new forms of participation. Nadia Rubaii, an associate professor of public administration at Binghamton University in New York, believes that localities are feeling their way through the transition, as younger boomers and older Gen Xers within government find a way to bridge the old and new worlds. “There’s an affinity for Generation X, but also an appreciation for how things get done through structure and bureaucracy,” she says. “So what governments are doing and people in this ‘bridge’ stage are helping facilitate is adding layers to civic engagement, but not necessarily scrapping entirely the older ways of participation, as later members of Gen X might prefer.”

For instance, in Edina, Minn., 49-year-old city manager Scott Neal has for the last decade been writing a blog about his experiences and about the issues the Minneapolis suburb faces. He makes sure his department heads all do the same. “In my own small way I’m trying to build some trust and empathy for government again,” he says. The city still relies mostly on traditional public meetings and hearings, but the blog gives citizens another point of entry. “I’ve had a hundred instances over the years,” he says, “where people have approached me out of nowhere and said, ‘Hey, I read what you wrote about manhole covers and I’d never thought about that.’ It allows people an oblique way to approach someone they might not ordinarily approach.”

In Phoenix, the MindMixer site on the general development plan took shape after the city’s 43-year-old mayor, Greg Stanton, wondered what it would take to get residents to participate in a calm citywide conversation about its future, rather than proposing to put a freeway down the middle of a neighborhood, as he put it, just to get them to turn out. For all its success, though, “it’s just one piece of the puzzle as far as outreach,” says Joshua Bednarek, a city planner who helped create it. “For some people, the site just isn’t the best way to engage them — so we might be better off having a cup of coffee at a senior center to get feedback.”

To read more, click here.

In fact, the ugly parking lots could be moved completely out of the park if Riverside Drive went the way of Madison Avenue – a “complete street,” two lanes complete with bike lanes and parking.

With the collapse of contract negotiations with a restaurateur for Beale Street Landing, one excuse given was there wasn’t enough parking.  We suspect there was no real market survey conducted, and as a result, it’s another one of those times when suburban thinking gets applied to a highly urban landscape, and we don’t seem capable of doing the same things that are common in other cities.  Instead, we continue to treat downtown projects as if there is supposed to be large asphalt lots for parking right next door.

If the Riverfront Development Corporation and City of Memphis had started with a truly urban approach, there are innovative answers and creative ideas that could have been applied here if we could shake the problem-solving from those who bring suburban sensibilities to downtown and from unimaginative traffic engineers who are more apt at telling why cars should rule than how the experience for human beings can be maximized.

As for the restaurant, instead of taking another traditional approach, what if the RDC applied the lessons of tactical urbanism and creative placemaking to the restaurant question?

Riverside as a Drive

But, back to Riverside Drive, as urbanist Jeff Speck said in his report commissioned by Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, there is a better option than Riverside Drive as it is today.  The engineering analysis for his recommendation was done by the highly regarded Nelson-Nygaard firm.

Mr. Speck wrote: ”Riverside Drive, which is annually narrowed and closed with little negative impact on the downtown, should be converted from a four-lane speedway to a two-lane ‘complete street,’ including parallel parking and a protected bicycle track along the Mississippi River.  This change can be accomplished through a mere restriping, with no curbs reconstructed.  Canopy trees should be added where they are lacking and can be planted at limited cost.”

In addition, the full section about Riverside Drive in his final report is this:

“The potentially easiest win on the Memphis riverfront is the reconfiguration of Riverside Drive.  While a vast improvement over the interstate highway that was once planned for this corridor, it still functions much like a highway, moving four to five lanes of traffic speedily through downtown, creating a high-speed barrier that discourages pedestrian activity and river access.  Landscape improvements along Tom Lee Park have already made it more attractive, but have not changed its non-pedestrian nature.  Does Riverside Drive need to take such a strictly automotive form?

May Lessons

“The answer to this question can be found each May, when one-half of the street is closed for two weeks and the entire street is closed for three weeks.  While presenting some temporary inconvenience as people adjust their paths, it is clear that the City’s grid of alternative north-south streets contains more than adequate capacity to absorb the trips typically handled by Riverside Drive.  Such an experience has been mirrored in American Cities from coast to coast, where highway removals have repeatedly failed to cause traffic crises.  From New York’s West Side Highway to San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway, removed road capacity has not had a negative impact on travel times.

For a month each year, Memphis in May reduces the width of Riverside Drive, first by two lanes, then entirely.

“For this reason, and as further studied by transportation engineers at Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates, we have the luxury of asking ourselves what kind of street Riverside Drive wants to be.  Surely it can still hold cars, but the downtown would benefit tremendously if it were to hold cars moving a bit less speedily, alongside pedestrians and cyclists.  Additionally, the inclusion of parallel parking would both provide protection to its sidewalks while eliminating the need for parking lots within Tom Lee Park and at Beale Street Landing.

“These changes, happily, can be achieved without any reconstruction to the street or its drainage facilities; a new topcoat and restriping will be enough.  This report’s proposal is as follows:

*   Keep the two center travel lanes, as well as turn lanes at intersections, although these turn lanes should be shortened to the length of the typical queue;

*   Replace the easternmost lane with parallel parking, clearly marked, and priced to encourage proper occupancy—approaching 80% around the clock.  (During many times of day, that price will be $0.)

*   Replace the westernmost lane with an ample two-way bike lane, separated by a painted buffer.  This buffer should receive inexpensive breakaway metal posts at its center, each about 3 feet high, spaced about 20’ apart.

“This proposal is recommended for the entire stretch of Riverside Drive between Bass Pro Drive and Georgia Avenue.  An alternative, compromise solution would not place parallel parking any further south than Tom Lee Park, but that solution would require a two-lane-to-one-lane northbound merge in this location.  This transition is better handled at Georgia Avenue, where the right-hand lane can become a right-turn lane onto Georgia.

Better Options

“Before and After plans by the engineers at Nelson/Nygaard are provided on the next three pages for three different locations along Riverside Drive.  Since the street varies in width along this stretch, and we wish to limit expense by not moving any curbs, the plans necessarily vary along their length.  In all locations, however, two travel lanes are removed and replaced by a lane of parking to the east and a protected bike lane to the west.

“The parking lane receives its own buffer zone in some locations, so that the travel lanes maintain a proper width.  The bike facility is located on the western flank because that edge is uninterrupted by intersections for its entire length, close to two miles.  Such an uninterrupted path will be especially attractive to bikers, but it is essential that this route is clearly and safely connected to the larger regional biking system.

“Also in need of attention is the tree canopy over the Drive.  While prettified in front of Tom Lee Park, it is still more decorative than sheltering.  True urban boulevards are planted continuously with a single tall and broad species on both flanks and in the center.  At maturity, the top branches of the trees touch, forming a dramatic ceiling. Memphis’ North Parkway, just west of I-240, shows what this configuration is like, and how effectively it contributes to the beauty and comfort of a space.  Riverside Drive deserves no less.

“North of Beale Street, we face a different challenge, which is a paucity of both trees and places to put them.  But opportunities do exist, and a tree plan needs to be completed for this stretch, with the objective of creating as complete a canopy as possible, given the limitations.”

Along its narrowest stretches, Riverside Drive includes a generously sized cycle track against a street sized for urban travel speeds.

In the wider section south of Beale Street, but north of where it has a median, Riverside drive is here shown maintaining its right-hand turn lane onto Beale, since there is room for it.

Where it includes a median, each 22-foot roadbed is simply re-apportioned with paint.
 

A new report looks at the results of school reform in three major cities and finds that reformers’ claims about success don’t exactly match reality. Here’s a piece on it by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.

By Elaine Weiss

Across the country, a wave of school reform based on market principles has taken hold, championed by leaders like former District of Columbia Public Schools and New York City Public Schools Chancellors Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein. Dozens of states fulfilling grant requirements under Race to the Top, or implementing those plans even in the absence of a grant, are, essentially, trying to replicate the purported success of then-Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Arne Duncan’s signature Renaissance 2010 initiative. But school administrators and city leaders rushing to mimic Rhee, Klein and Duncan should take a step back and reconsider. A new report from the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education finds their real-life prospects, in the best of circumstances, to be pretty poor.

Since the onset of their respective reform agendas, all three districts – New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. — have participated in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), which provides district-level scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). All of the TUDA districts, 10 in 2003 and now are 21, are large, high-poverty and heavily minority, so the study enables apples-to-apples comparisons of growth over time using a reliable, consistent measure of learning.

The lack of a solid evidentiary basis for these reforms made us suspect that the results would be less rosy than what reformers publicly touted. As we explored the NAEP data, however, we were surprised by how bad the outcomes were. Test score growth in math and reading at both the fourth and eighth grade levels tended to be lower in these “reform” districts than in their “non-reform” counterparts.

That pattern of poor performance was compounded by the fact that what little growth school districts enjoyed accrued heavily to higher-income and white students, not to the low-income and minority students who were supposed to benefit. Closing schools neither improved student outcomes nor saved districts money, and even the strong charters in these three cities delivered more mixed benefits than commonly reported. This is a critical story that, despite the public data, will come as a surprise to many: these supposedly successful reforms are doing little good and more than a little harm.

In Washington, D.C., test scores among most student groups had been rising prior to Rhee and Fenty’s arrival, some of them rapidly. After 2007, however, test scores largely stagnated or declined, and those that had not been rising fell still more. Moreover, D.C. schools stands out among the three districts studied for the most disproportionate accrual of gains to high-income, non-minority students.

This was particularly true for fourth grade reading scores, a key indicator of subsequent student engagement and success. 2003-2007 gains, especially among low-income and minority students, suddenly reversed course after 2007. White students lost a three-point gain. Hispanic students, too, lost three points, but had gained so much prior to Rhee that they still came out ahead. Black students managed to hang on to a six-point 2003-2007 gain, but saw no further improvement at all. Assessment based on income level reveals a similar pattern.

Perhaps most troubling, in some cases, no students really gained ground; rather, increases were due simply to changes in the composition of the student body. Disaggregation of the data showed this to be the case with respect to both reading and math scores among fourth graders.

Chicago Public School students of all groups made smaller gains in reading than their peers in other urban districts during Duncan’s tenure, and higher-than average math gains were driven by high-income and white students, patterns initially identified not by BBA, but by that city’s most respected education research institution, the Consortium for Chicago School Research.

Fourth grade reading was, again, a particularly troubling spot. Among all urban cities, white fourth graders gained 6 points in reading between 2003 and 2011, and black fourth graders gained 9; in Chicago, in contrast, white students gained 2/3 as much as their peers – 4 points – but black students gained just 1/3 as much as their peers – 3 points.

The only exception to this trend is in eighth-grade math, where, as we note in the report, CPS students of all races made larger-than-average gains. Even there, however, white students’ 20-point gains far outpaced those of black (15) and Hispanic students (13), so the gap widened.

We knew that Mayor Bloomberg’s claim to have cut the race-based achievement gap in half between 2005 and 2011 was greatly exaggerated but, again, did not understand the extent of the hyperbole until we dug into the data. When Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas averaged math and reading scores across fourth and eighth grades, he found that, rather than cutting the gap by 50 percent, the mayor had cut it by 1 percent. (Substituting NAEP for state test scores actually widened the gap by a couple of percentage points.)

White fourth graders made three times the gains of their black counterparts in reading (9 versus 3 points), with a similar divide based on income. And the gap between white and Latino students (who comprise 40% of the district’s student body) widened in all instances but fourth grade math, in contrast to narrowing gaps in other cities.

Gains in New York City were more evenly distributed across racial and income groups than in the other two districts. However, New York City public schools students’ gains averaged across both subjects and grades were less than half the study average; only than Cleveland’s students gained less – one point. As such, both minority and non-minority students in New York City gained less ground than their peers in other urban districts.

These outcomes are understandably disappointing to those who promote policies that focus on student test scores as a means of holding teachers and schools accountable. That disappointment might explain critiques from groups like EdTrust, which points to one exception in each city to distract from the clear pattern and try to paint the findings as mixed or “complex.”

As we note, however, these “reforms” are quickly becoming the new status quo; defending them, especially in the face of increasingly solid evidence of their failure, is thus hardly reform-minded. The intent is not to suggest that reformers do not feel an urgent need to improve the odds for minority or low-income children. Rather, we hope both to call attention to what is not working, and to shift investment to what does.

The report also highlights policies that have helped disadvantaged students in particular but have gotten little attention, such as Bloomberg’s new small schools, Duncan’s smart teacher recruitment and retention initiative and his multifaceted approach to increasing minority students’ college attendance and success, and D.C. schools’ high-quality pre-K program. These demonstrate that more holistic approaches to reform hold real promise.

Indeed, they may have contributed to high school graduation rates that increased substantially in both New York and Chicago, gains similar to those seen in other large cities over that period. A new Century Foundation book likewise represents the flip side of this report’s coin. Beyond the Education Wars showcases two low-income urban school districts that have improved by using community-wide supports, rather than failing by pitting schools and teachers against one another.

If reformers focused on raising the visibility of their true successes, and were more realistic about the limitations of narrower ones, all students, and our education system, would be on a better path.

We wrote yesterday about the wake-up call that Memphis economic development officials should be getting from recent rankings that show Memphis struggling a long way from upside of economic indicators.  Today’s post by CEOs for Cities on its blog should be another alarm for us to hear.

Here it is:

Photo by Flickr user James

A number of entities give cities in the U.S. and abroad scores for livability based on a variety of criteria. Use these resources to find out how livable your city is!

International Rankings

The Economist Inelligence Unit’s (EIU) Global Livability Report ranked Melbourne, Australia as the most livable city in the world in its most recent calculations. The EIU ranks 140 cities worldwide, based on “30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability; healthcare; culture and environment; education; and infrastructure.” No U.S. cities ranked in the top ten this year, and Pittsburgh was the highest ranking at 22. Read more!

The Mercer Quality of Living Survey ranks over 460 cities worldwide. Its rankings are based on:

Living conditions according to 39 factors, grouped in 10 categories: political and social environment (political stability, crime, law enforcement); economic environment (currency exchange regulations, banking services); socio-cultural environment (censorship, limitations on personal freedom); medical and health considerations (medical supplies and services, infectious diseases, sewage, waste disposal, air pollution, etc.); schools and education (standard and availability of international schools); public services and transportation (electricity, water, public transportation, traffic congestion, etc.); recreation (restaurants, theatres, movie theatres, sports and leisure, etc.); consumer goods (availability of food/daily consumption items, cars, etc.); housing (rental housing, household appliances, furniture, maintenance services); natural environment (climate, record of natural disasters)

Mercer’s 2012 report gave its top spot to Vienna, Austria. Honolulu, Hawaii received the highest ranking among U.S. cities at 28.

Monocle magazine’s Most Livable Cities Index named Zurich, Switzerland the most livable city in the world.  The magazine’s index takes into account some unique measures, such as number of bookshops and ‘well-maintained swimming lakes,’ as well as the usual quality of life indicators (like crime rate, infrastructure, and cost of living).” Monocle’s list also has Honolulu as the highest ranked U.S. city at 17. Read more!

US Rankings

Forbes called Pittsburgh America’s Most Livable City in 2010. Their team ranked over 200 U.S. cities based on five criteria: unemployment, crime, income growth, the cost of living, and artistic, and cultural opportunities.

Livability.com is a website that allows you to input the aspects of a city that are important to you and your lifestyle in order to find a place that will best suit your preferences and needs. The site focuses primarily on small to mid-size cities across the U.S., and allows users to search for cities by state. It regularly compiles “Top 10” lists around different themes such as “Top 10 Foodie Cities,” “Top 10 Best Winter Vacation Destinations,” “Top 10 College Towns,” and “Top 10 Cities for Book Lovers.”

Areavibes.com is another online resource that ranks a city’s livability based on amenities, cost of living, crime rates, education, employment, housing, and weather. Each city is given a score between one and one hundred. The site compiles data from a number of resources, such as the U.S. census, the Council for Community and Economic Research, and the National Weather Service– allowing users to search any U.S. city or location of any size.  The site currently ranks Plano, Texas as the best place to live in the country.

Businessweek’s America’s 50 Best Cities put San Francisco at the top of its list. The scoring of 100 of the biggest U.S. cities was based on “leisure attributes (the number of restaurants, bars, libraries, museums, professional sports teams, and park acres by population), educational attributes (public school performance, the number of colleges, and rate of graduate-degree holders), economic factors (income and unemployment), crime, and air quality.

Artplace America compiled a list of the 2013 Top 12 ArtPlaces in America using what they call “vibrancy indicators”: population density, employment rate, percentage of workers in creative occupations, number of indicator businesses, number of jobs in community, walkability, number of mixed-use blocks, cell phone activity, percentage of independent businesses, and number of creative industry jobs. The organization chooses to focus on arts because they believe in the “idea that arts-related activity plays a key role in contributing to the kind of quality of place that attracts and retains talented people and enables people to put all their talent to work.” Their top 12 cities, listed alphabetically, are: Brooklyn, NY; Dallas, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Miami Beach, FL; Milwaukee, WI; New York, NY; Oakland, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Portland, OR; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; and Washington, DC.

It’s ridiculously easy to think about the benefits of historic preservation in immensely walkable Providence, Rhode Island. I’m not sure I’ve seen a better collection of downtown historic architecture this side of New Orleans. Elsewhere there are fine smaller historic downtowns, of course, such as in Annapolis, and wonderful urban historic districts (frequently close to downtowns) such as Old Salem in North Carolina and Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati.  But in Providence, it’s the downtown itself that practically oozes with dignified charm.

I have a feeling that, as was the case with many fine older buildings in my hometown, Providence’s splendid architectural legacy remains intact because, when people were tearing down historic properties a few decades ago and putting up newer but mediocre buildings in their places, Providence’s economy simply couldn’t support the new stuff. So the splendid older buildings remain today, available to be given new life by creative-class businesses.

Providence may be a particularly fine example, but it is hardly the only city with underutilized historic assets that could become a cornerstone of future economic development. Information has largely replaced manufacturing as America’s economic engine, and young, talented workers today are seeking walkable districts with character in which to work and live. (Just ask suburban Dublin, Ohio about that.) From Pasadena to Portland, from Paducah to Providence, saving and sprucing up these assets is the way to go.

Scott Wolf is the executive director of Grow Smart Rhode Island, an organization that advocates asset-based economic development and smart land use. Scott, who is my colleague on the board of Smart Growth America, argues persuasively that his state should capitalize on its historic architecture by encouraging older buildings’ rehabilitation and use:

Let’s restore our state historic-property tax credit to once again take advantage of our vast collection of historic buildings and neighborhoods, which we know are settings with great appeal for knowledge-economy companies and workers.  It’s far from a coincidence that United Natural Foods, the largest distributor of organic food in America, relocated several years ago from Connecticut to the rehabbed ALCO site, in Providence, that Atrion Networking expanded into Hope Artiste Village, in Pawtucket, after that historic-tax-credit project opened for business, or that Moran Shipping, a technologically sophisticated, homegrown corporation with international reach, decided to forgo a move to Houston and instead relocate to a rehabbed building across from the State House.

The federal government has a limited tax credit program for investment in income-producing historic properties: in particular, owners of buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places may be eligible for a 20 percent federal income tax credit that can be applied against the cost of their rehabilitation for reuse; in effect, 20 percent of the rehab costs will be borne by the federal government for most taxpayers. This reflects the public benefits of saving infrastructure and property.

But the federal incentive can be either undermined or strengthened by state law, depending upon whether there is a corresponding benefit available against state income taxes and, if so, how it is structured.

In many states, tax credits are indeed available to reduce the real cost of rehabbing historic buildings. According to an analysis by Harry K. Schwartz for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, most programs include variations on the following:

• Criteria establishing what buildings qualify for the credit;
• Standards to ensure that the rehabilitation preserves the historic and architectural character of the building;
• A method for calculating the value of the credit awarded, reflected as a percentage of the amount expended on that portion of the rehabilitation work that is approved as a certified rehabilitation;
• A minimum amount, or threshold, required to be invested in the rehabilitation; and
• A mechanism for administering the program, generally involving the state historic preservation office and, in some cases, the state department of revenue or the state department of economic development.

According to Grow Smart Rhode Island, that state’s Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission has found that, since 2002, Rhode Island’s Historic Tax Credit Program stimulated $1.2 billion of private investment in the rehabilitation of 208 historic buildings (mainly in urban and town centers) in 15 different communities. The Commission estimates that these projects created 22,000 construction jobs and 6,000 permanent jobs, and paid $806 million in wages, during that period. But the law was allowed to sunset, with its resurrection scheduled for debate in this session of the legislature.

I was honored to participate last week in Providence in an Earth Day program on how cities can celebrate diversity and culture while weaving together the interrelated needs of art, education, health and housing. The session, sponsored by the University of Rhode Island, was ably moderated by Marc Levitt, host and co-executive producer of the WGBH radio program Action Speaks.

In my portion of the program, I presented Mark Holland’s :Eight Pillars of a Healing City,” one of which is green buildings.  (In a restatement of the principles by the Healing Cities Institute, this one became “restorative architecture.”) I emphasized that green buildings didn’t have to be new and that, in fact, older properties may have intrinsic green properties such as embodied energy and resources (that do not have to be spent anew as with a new building) and “original green” characteristics such as climate-specific design built before what Steve Mouzon calls “The Thermostat Age.” Older buildings also serve a less measurable, but no less important, function in constituting a shared cultural legacy. Simply put, they remind us where we – and our places – came from.

Providence is sometimes thought of as a declining city, but to me it seemed more like a promising one – poised for rebirth, fueled by the country’s emerging economy and demographics. Its chances – like those of other, similarly situated communities – will be enhanced if it recognizes the impressive assets that it has; builds upon those assets by courting the right kinds of businesses and residents that appreciate character and walkability; and preserves those assets for the future, starting with re-enacting the state’s historic property tax credit.

We are all excited about the progress that’s being seen in pockets around our community, and while we should take the time to celebrate them, we should be clear-eyed about the challenges ahead of us and double down in our ambitions and our efforts.

Despite new momentum and some modest milestones of progress, we have a hard, daunting journey ahead of us if we are to get Memphis firmly into the economic mainstream.

As we have said often, Memphis is a city worth fighting for, but we need to also acknowledge that unless we show signs of real movement toward the middle of the rankings of economic indicators that matter, we risk losing even more of the young, college-educated talent that we so desperately need to keep here at home.  And in the end, that means we lose everything.

That said, of equal concern to us are the questions being asked by people in their late 30s and early 40s as they evaluate whether it is in their best interest to stay here.  They love Memphis, and it is their home, but it is time for their careers to take off and they wonder if that can happen here.

Magnetic Personality

Atlanta became a magnet for young, talented professionals decades ago, but what Atlanta did that was impressive was that it was the Southern city that successfully uncoupled race and poverty.  While Atlanta, like Memphis, is a majority African-American city, the percentage of its population inside its city limits over 25 years of age who have college degrees is 46%.  That compares to 23% here.  At the same time, its poverty rate is 36% lower than Memphis.

Cities across the South struggle with the correlation between race and poverty, but Atlanta, in becoming intentional about developing, attracting, and keeping college-educated African-American talent has seemingly broken the code.  Unfortunately, those numbers in the Georgia capital include an awful lot of former Memphians.

Taking the glass half-full approach, there are some rankings that are showing movement that should encourage us to do even better.  We hope it isn’t an aberration, because the Memphis metro jumped from the tail-end of the Milken Institute’s Best-Performing Cities in 2011 into the middle of the 2012 ranking for the 200 largest metros in the U.S.   The challenge and the test are of course whether we can make a similar radical leap in the year ahead to put us in the top 50 cities rather than the top 100 cities.

A year ago, we were ranked #191, so the jump to #99 is reason to be pleased if it is a precursor of a similar jump in the coming year.  Milken rankings are sometimes as volatile as technology stocks on Wall Street, so it bears watching to see if this year’s ranking is an aberration or a sign of even better things to come.

Milken Rankings

What was most encouraging is that the best indicators in the Milken matrix came in some surprising categories.  In wage growth 2009-10, Memphis metro ranked #75; in short-term job growth 2006-2011, Memphis was #65; in high-tech GDP growth 2006-11, Memphis was #17; and in high-tech GDP growth 2010-11, Memphis was #52.  Memphis ranked most poorly in the number of high-tech industries – #160 – and jobs growth 2006-11 which was #153.

The Milken Institute ranking index provides a data-driven, comprehensive measure of economic strength across metropolitan areas, including job, wage, and technology metrics over a five-year period to capture structural elements.   The top 10 cities are San Jose, Austin, Raleigh, Houston, Washington, Salt Lake City, Provo, Cambridge, Charleston, and Fort Worth.

The 99^th place ranking is the highest Milken Institute ranking that Memphis metro has seen in quite awhile.  In 2005, Memphis was #159; in 2008, #144, before bottoming out at #191 last year.  In this year’s rankings, Nashville ranked #27, Knoxville ranked #25, and Chattanooga ranked #80.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) referred to Memphis as a chronically depressed city, so clearly,  breaking into the top 100 is hardly the basis for bragging rights, but there will be just cause a year from now if Memphis can make similar dramatic progress.

Talent, Human Capital, and Opportunity

It’s hard to see the glass half-full with recently released MarketWatch’s rankings of the Top 100 Cities for Business Growth.  Memphis was #74.  That low ranking should be enough to stiffen our resolve, but the real kicker is this: Detroit was four spots ahead of us.

Nashville was #12, Knoxville was #65, and Chattanooga was #67.

Austin topped the list, followed by Boston, Houston, San Jose, Portland OR, Washington DC, San Francisco, Bridgeport CT, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh.   The rankings were based on 20 measurements looking at business climate, how the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq companies performed over the past year, and how local economies performed.

Richard Florida of “creative class” fame ran correlations between the Milken rankings and factors like population, density, human capital (percent of population with college degrees, the share of professional, knowledge, and creative workers, and other measures.

His conclusion: “First off, there is a clear connection between talent, human capital, and skill and metro performance,” Mr. Florida said.  “What’s even more interesting is that when we look inside the black box of talent, human capital, and workforce skill, we find three specific clusters of occupations that matter – science and technology, management and business, and arts, culture, and media.”

He cautions mayors of slow-growing cities (think Memphis) that the long asserted belief that “eds and meds” are triggers for economic growth is misplaced.  In addition, size and density matter, but less than talent, skill, and occupations mix.

The Right Targets

Mr. Florida said: “When all is said and done, ideas, talent, skills, and density remain key factors in the growth and development of America’s metros. America’s best-performing metros, according to the our analysis of the Milken Institute’s objective accounting, tend to have larger levels of educational attainment and college grads, and higher levels of knowledge workers, especially large clusters of talent in science and technology, business and management, and arts, culture, and entertainment. Energy and resource based metros have also performed well as the U.S. economy has rebounded. The most notable of these do more than pump stuff out of the ground; they have combined their substantial resource endowments with technology to sustain their prosperity. Houston, which has one of the largest concentrations of IT workers and software engineers in the country, is a case study of how resources and ideas can go together to generate growth.

“A better way to think about growth is not ideas versus resources, but as ideas and resources. In fact, a great strength of American economy is its ability to combine resource and ideas, and to use the wealth generated from its resource endowments to underwrite more-enduring knowledge-based institutions. This can be seen in cities and regions from Pittsburgh to Denver and Houston, to name but a few. It goes beyond specific cities and metros, actually, and is a fundamental feature of what economic geographers dub America’s ‘spatial division of labor,’ or the combined economic power that its variety and system of cities brings.”

Speaking of sprawl, Brookings Institution recently recorded the impact of sprawl and employment locations, and it showed that the suburbs were the winners in a decade of devastating job losses for the Memphis metro.

Shrinking Jobs

Between 2000-2010, the Memphis region lost 56,541 jobs, or 10.3% of the MSA’s total jobs. 13,587 of the lost jobs were within three miles of the Central Business District (CBD) and 53,008 were within three to 10 miles of CBD; however, from 10 to 35 miles of CBD, there was jobs growth of 10,054.

Put another way, downtown lost 1.2% of total jobs.  Now, 12.4% of the total jobs in the MSA are within three miles of the CBD.  The area between three to 10 miles from the CBD lost 5.6% of its jobs and now has 39.2 percent of the total jobs in the Memphis region, and the area 10 to 35 miles from the CBD gained 6.8% and now holds 48.4% of the total jobs in the MSA.

We talk a lot here about the consequences of the city’s short-sighted annexation philosophy, but in this case, it pays off.  While in most cities jobs that are 10-35 miles from the CBD are usually outside of the city limits, in Memphis, that’s not the case.  A large portion of them are within the expanded city limits of the city.

Other signs are ominous.  A commercial real estate friend of ours pointed out that in the most recent 12-month period, Nashville absorbed (companies leased) a net of one million square feet of office space.  In that same period, Memphis lost a net of 12,000 square feet of office space.  “That’s a perilous sign for me,” our friend said.  “Professional job growth is virtually non-existent and heading to a negative net growth point, if not already there.”

By the way, Nashville estimates its new demand for office space at three million square feet over the next five years, or the equivalent of 10 Crescent Centers.  Most of all, it speaks to lack of opportunity.

What Selling Points?

“The operative question is what are our 21st century selling points?” our friend said.  “What concrete examples can we point to as evidence of those selling points that would motivate (someone) not just to move here, but to move and/or stay here versus those other cities.  I think it all ultimately rests with the opportunity question, followed by the quality of life factors.  Now I know that opportunity means different things to different people, but the job/ career opportunity/opportunities is a major factor.”

So, what’s all this mean to us?  It means that the people charged with the economic growth of Memphis – from City Hall to EDGE to Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce to supporting players throughout the region – need to listen to the early warning signs as our young professionals question why they are living in Memphis.  Once the question is asked, are we really prepared to live with their answers?

To us, it means that we need an innovative economic development plan that is aimed at talent, opportunity, and place.  We have essentially been pursuing the same, tired economic development strategies and using the same “race to the bottom” economic development tools  and thinking for 25 years.

The fact that we continue to languish should be reason enough to start anew, to throw out all preconceived ideas, and to begin to put together a totally new economic development plan.  But, it begins with an economic development vision, which is totally lacking now.

Business as usual in the Memphis MSA is a prescription for disaster.  The seminal question for our community these days is whether we have the courage to change course and avert what is inevitable if we don’t.

rom Governing:

 

“Memphis must focus more on redeveloping the city’s core through ‘infill’ projects, rather than pursuing annexation. A report completed for the city last year goes further: It said stretching the city’s boundaries has had ‘disastrous’ results for Memphis …” – Commercial Appeal, April 14, 2013

As Tom Charlier articulated in this article, over the last fifty years the City of Memphis has dramatically expanded its physical footprint by appropriating land farther and farther away from the city’s traditional urban core.  The problem with this reality is that we have done so while at the same time our population has dwindled.

As a result, declining public resources are spread too thin over an impossibly vast stretch of territory that results in the deterioration of parks, streets, public facilities and other crucial infrastructure to a point where they often become dirty, inefficient, and even dangerous.

The result is increasingly troublesome – local government is obligated to serve a bigger and bigger area while fewer and fewer people are left to foot the bill. This downward spiral means that even if taxes are raised, there is less and less money to invest in critical economic and community development projects that would make our citizens healthier, better educated, and more financially stable.

Simply put, density is destiny. The city of Detroit’s financial woes are well known, but even this troubled metropolis has 100,000 more people covering a territory half of Memphis’ size. This fact alone should be a call to all Memphians, and especially our local leaders, to take bold and immediate steps to revitalize and repopulate our older core city neighborhoods.

Creating strong, safe, livable neighborhoods that have the resources and amenities families and young professionals need should be a high priority of the citizens of Memphis and our elected officials – particularly as the city and county debate next year’s budget.

The Crosstown Development Project has the potential to transform one of the most historic and central locations in Memphis. The renovation of the iconic Sears Crosstown building, located between Midtown and Downtown, will be a $175 million project that will create 1,000 jobs during construction and house over 1,300 permanent jobs upon completion. Of these, 875 will be newly created jobs that will add $37 million in wages into our economy every year.

The building itself will be home to health clinics, wellness facilities, a free public high school with a strong arts and sciences curriculum, and numerous creative resources for the public. It will also house 240 apartments – 20% of which will be dedicated to low-income individuals – boosting the population of this deeply disinvested neighborhood by hundreds of residents.

The Crosstown Development Project wants to turn an abandoned, blighted structure into a vibrant village of health, education, and the arts that increases the area population, provides social services and programming, and creates hundreds of great jobs. They want to do it in precisely the kind of distressed core city neighborhood that suburban expansion has left neglected for decades. If the City of Memphis agrees to a $15 million investment – less than 10% of the total redevelopment cost – to address some crucial blight abatement, demolition and infrastructure needs, over $150 million in private capital stands ready to begin construction before the end of the year.

We appreciate what our local government has done to support our manufacturing and tourism sectors. But in light of the tens of millions of dollars the city has invested in multi-national corporations and tourist attractions over the last few years, is a local health and education project that would restore economic vibrancy to the heart of our city not most worthy of our attention and support?

It is an investment that will pay significant dividends, both social and economic, for decades to come.  If you agree, join the Crosstown Collaborative today at CrosstownCollaborative.com. Let our local leaders know what kind of Memphis you want now.