We welcome any contributions to this weekly suggestion box feature and hope you will feel free to send in your ideas for improving Memphis to tjones@smartcityconsulting.com
In the meantime, here’s our question for the week:
If you had the power to take definitive actions to fight the abandonment and decline of Whitehaven, what would you do?
This question is inspired by an email a couple of weeks ago from Second Strangeness, who rightly (in our opinion at least) called Whitehaven “the sleeping giant of Memphis.” We agree with his interest in this part of the city, because despite its wounded image, Whitehaven is filled with great housing stock on rolling terrain. Fatally flawed city policy on housing and urban redevelopment are part of the problem, but so is white flight.
Now, the new owner of Elvis’ immortal remains claims that he is going to turn the area into Las Vegas east, and based on our history of people on white horses promising us the moon, the verdict is still out. But with the anchor of our city’s tourism industry in Whitehaven at Graceland and with the aerotropolis notion just getting into the air, what’s would you do to turn around this critically important section of Memphis?
