Hopefully, now that we’ve all worked through the catharsis brought on by hitting the list of miserable U.S. cities by Forbes magazine, maybe we can now follow it up with an epiphany.
Most urbanists and public policy types have long ago discredited these meaningless lists of the smartest cities, wired cities, successful cities and happiest cities. So many of these lists spring from Bert Sperling’s indefatigable obsession with city listings. That Forbes relied on Mr. Sperling for its rankings tells us that the miserable cities listing would naturally feature some of his regular incongruities, such as crime rate and professional sports team records.
It would be laughable except for the fact that so many reputable bastions of journalism these days are drawn to these lists, especially Forbes which touts itself as “The Capitalist’s Tool.”
The Miserables
We know something about capitalists in Memphis. There’s the one who’s been invited to meet President Barack Obama for a conversation – Fred Smith. There’s Pitt Hyde, the youngest CEO listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and others who have shaped Memphis’s entrepreneurial history.
Memphis is also world headquarters for FedEx (which has one of the 10 most positive brands in the world), Autozone, International Paper and Servicemaster.
If we were actually inclined to write a letter to Forbes, we’d focus on our business history and ask this question: Does it really make any sense that these entrepreneurs and world-class companies – who could locate anywhere – would choose a city as miserable as Forbes suggests?
The Best
We’re proud of so much about our city, but most of them – music, art, grassroots creativity, funkiness, coolness and neighborhoods – aren’t directly responsive to the unemployment rate, tax rate, commuting times, violent crime rate and corruption cases cited in the miserable rankings. Because of this, we know that the mass of letters from Memphis are probably stuck in the same bag as the letters from Cleveland, Stockton, St. Louis, Miami and Buffalo.
As for us, the I Love Memphis blog reminds us every day how special this city is; however, that doesn’t mean that we should delude ourselves that there isn’t serious work for us if we are to improve a trajectory that is now headed definitely in the wrong direction.
Now that all of us have defended our city’s honor, we hope that the energy spent on letters to Forbes will be channeled into vigorously attacking some of the problems listed in the Forbes article, particularly the seedbed of so many of them – poverty. While our unemployment rate was factored into the miserable index, it actually was the iceberg whose mass is below the surface.
Breaking the Link
In Memphis, if the unemployment rate is officially listed as 10%, that means that 34% of our people are out of the job market, because almost one in four aren’t counted anymore because they haven’t looked for work for an extended period of time. And it’s time to talk bluntly about how to break the inextricable link in Memphis between race and poverty.
The lack of more workers and the presence of 20% more children than our peer cities conspire to keep the Memphis tax rate high. For example, in Nashville, there are three workers for every child, but in Memphis, there are only two, which means that those two have to pay more to produce the revenues needed for public services here.
In the past seven years, Shelby County became a majority African-American county and the Memphis region is soon to follow (if it hasn’t already done it), so no city in the U.S. has more incentive to quit talking about how bad poverty is and finally do something about it.
Poor Choices
This was on our mind as the Forbes article was published, because CEOs for Cities was having a national conference in Detroit on “The Opportunity Dividend,” which calls for reducing the poverty rate 1% in U.S. cities. No one from Memphis attended, which was discouraging, but it made us ask the questions: We all talk about poverty in Memphis but who’s in charge? Who has principle responsibility for reducing it?
In other words, it’s past time for Memphis to quit the speeches and get to work. While we were talking, the poverty rate in Memphis has risen 27.2% since 2000, and the poverty rate for adolescents has risen 45%. Now about one out of two children in Memphis live in poverty, and child poverty is twice the national rate and the highest in the South.
In other words, where a Memphian is born is the single largest determinant for his future. If he is born into the geography of poverty that grips 160,000 people, there is a greater likelihood that he’ll end up in jail than in the line to graduate from University of Memphis.
I Am A Man
That’s why Memphis City Schools Superintendent Kriner Cash’s summoning up of the greatest heroes in Memphis history – the sanitation workers who led our civil rights movement – touched a nerve with us. It may have been a bit clumsy mixing up the sanitation workers with an overzealous advocacy of his school police force, but all in all, we got the bigger idea.
In recent weeks, Superintendent Cash viewed the Memphis Tourism Foundation-produced documentary, I Am A Man, and met a sanitation worker who was a leader in the 1968 strike. Clearly, it had an impact on him.
Holding up an “I Am a Man” sign during his speech to local ministers, Superintendent Cash compared the struggle to save Memphis’ children with the sanitation workers struggle to gain respect, dignity and basic civil rights. He’s right. The greatest civil rights issue of our day is the future of the 105,000 children in Memphis City Schools.
The Right Fight
“We have children going from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse,” said Superintendent Cash. “That path is grooved better than two lanes in a bowling alley.” There’s no argument, because as he said, juveniles in the urban core get few options to the ride to Juvenile Court.
Here’s the thing: It is not the time for another program to end poverty. It is not time for another anti-poverty project. It is time for a movement.
Memphis Mayor A C Wharton said recently that our city needs to write its own song or narrative. As for us, we vote for it to be Memphis: Fighting for Every Child.
That’s the epiphany we’re waiting on. There’s no time like the present.
Well, the problem is gangs. Neighborhoods where upwards of 75% of the teen boys are in a gang is the primary mechanism behind the deeply grooved path “from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse”. In my neighborhood (Summer and Tillman), there are only two families on my street with teens not in gangs. Both share one thing in common; they don’t let their kids have friends or go outside. Ever. Period. Prophylactic lock down. One mama experimented last summer with letting her kid (clean cut, smart, good kid, 15 years old) play basketball in their driveway, and within a week, kids were stopping by to talk to him for a moment here and there. By the end of the month, he was getting shot at with bee bee guns for refusing to go do something to piss off a blood around the corner.
How do you fix something like this? All over Memphis there are these sweet, innocent 7 year old kids destined by virtue of location to be thugs by age 16, who will then, in turn, thugify the younger kids they live around. It’s nearly impossible for the kids from *good* families to keep their kids out of gangs. What do you do for the kids who have all their older brothers, and uncles, etc involved in gangs, where the gang is basically the extended family?
I can think of ideas to help the kids from good families, but I’m completely at a loss on what to do for the kids from “bad families”. Like JJ (not his real name) who lives around the block from us, who, by the time he was 8, was stealing bikes in the neighborhood at the behest of his older brothers and cousins, and pushes around the neighborhood 4 year olds, calling them “b**** a** mother*******”.
What do you do for them?
“Does it really make any sense that these entrepreneurs and world-class companies – who could locate anywhere – would choose a city as miserable as Forbes suggests?”
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Yes, labor is cheaper and thus more miserable in the local tax situation in Memphis. We have been sold to companies as the place to be on cheap labor, slaves.
If you go to the local blogs reporting this story, you will see an almost 100% agreement that not only is Forbes right for the majority of Memphians, but, the local people could and would (if given the chance) add a few stats to the listing to paint it even darker.
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Is it news that politicians ignore the misery of their people?
Apparently it is in Memphis if it isn’t convenient or expedient to acknowledge it. Rebutting facts only looks even more dunder-headed to the outside world and any fully functioning adults locally.
Memphis is a great city with many great people in it and that’s all it has to be, patting ourselves on the back for what the rest of the country would call a pretty lousy job of running this city is not helping one damn bit. In fact, it’s a sellout.
This is one great post, and I agree 125%, It is time for a movement!
Jupiter, I can relate to the story of those parents,I live in Memphis, I have three kids, and they don’t play with ANYONE from Memphis and have NOBODY inside the house.
Your age for indoctrination is too high, they start them as young as six if their parents leave them outside long enough.
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Why you can’t think of what to do for those already indoctrinated into the gang:
You aren’t trained to.
If I tell you what to do to get trained, if you are like most Memphians, you will argue and do nothing. That’s right, I’ve told thousands an they have all done exactly that, NOTHING.
Moving into their gang neighborhood and being their friend isn’t going to help.
Most Memphians think they have to think up a solution by themselves and don’t accept coaching from anyone. Even if they have had success. People here just want to shoot down everyone and be right about it being impossible to do anything, a thick headed, stubborn, self-righteous lot. It doesn’t start at what you think, it starts at their CORE VALUES, which you will only get by listening to them, finding out who is and what is informing that, understanding and creating a different set with them that is designed by them to work better for them into the future.
Literally, it takes four days. 90% success rate. 90%, you got ANYTHING that approaches that stat?
You can’t teach a person to create their own opportunities until you first teach them how to BE the type of person who can do that. That requires being able to have a focused and directed honest conversation with their permission. Now before you think you have permission to do that even if you asked them and got a positive response, you DON’T.
So, you have to teach the value of truly giving another person full permission to speak honestly, brutally so, with out attacking them for it. You have to teach them how to be “coachable”.
What would most employers give to have open, coachable employees who could consistently exceed quotas without outside stimulation, who could resolve conflicts effectively without violence or need for mediation, who are self actualizing to the point of continually coming up with efficient innovations that work for everyone, have a strong ability to think on their feet, come up with appropriate solutions to problems, rarely make stupid mistakes, and whose drive was not solely for a paycheck or themselves? A true value!
Anyone can be that person, a workforce full of them can make a company succeed and a top performer in any economy. The only thing is, the type of training that brings that about is not available here. Something much more sinister has taken its place.
Zippy,
Yes, I don’t doubt that some get indoctrinated as young as six. “JJ”, for example, was probable doing all kinds of bad stuff before he was upgraded to theft around age 8.
I don’t doubt that an honest conversation would be useful for gangsters from “good families”. (most gangsters, in my experience, come from good families, around here. And additionally, most gangsters aren’t horrible, evil people. A LOT are nice folks, as weird as that sounds).
But does that really work for the terrorists from “bad families”? The older folks (20-30 years old) don’t, in my experience, communicate with people outside of their group. The run scams, and play games, but that’s it. They know a lot about people like me, and see us as some cross between a threat and a target. And we’re mutually better off not interacting with one another whatsoever.
The little kids being brought up in those “terrorist cell families” (and they are a minority around here, even though most kids join a gang at some point…most gang members are coming from good families, and are not psyco sociopaths..here, the gangsters are nice folks for the most part)…but the kids coming from “bad families”, where they’re encouraged to be up to no good from a very young age, you’re claiming to be able to get through to them? Really? Evidence? I guess it’s not completely impossible, since they get lots of positive messaging at school, but still…color me skeptical.
Tell me more about this “method” you’ve found so effective.
“We have children going from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse,” said Superintendent Cash. “That path is grooved better than two lanes in a bowling alley.”
If Kriner is so passionate about kids in MCS why the push for the internal police force? Start talking about the preventative programs that are working NOW like G.R.A.S.S.Y.
At least let us see their job descriptions so that we are convinced that their jobs will more about mentoring and less about duplicating the roles of the MPD.
It’s not just Memphis but the entire country must have a brutally honest conversation with itself. Why would any major corporation set up shop in any major U.S. city when it has a low-cost highly skilled global workforce to chose from? Memphis can leap frog other cities if decides to tackle that one. Based my research, Detroit and Cleveland ( Forbes #1 miserable city-whatever that means) have asked this question and are making some headway.
It appears that I am not allowed to comment and tell you what you need to know.
Zippy, seeing as you are so willing to “punch people in the face” until they see the world as you do, why don’t you start your own blog so you can better translate life according to Zippy.
Is there something wrong with your mind?
I didn’t say I was going to punch anyone in the face to convince anyone of anything, you are what’s known as “a troll” and what you’re doing by following my posts only to post an uninformed nonsensical weird remarks is called “stalking”.
If you don’t like what you read, don’t do it, if you see my name on it, don’t read it. Maybe you’re not in control of your own self.
The point was, when it’s time to do or be something you’d rather not do or be, you need to be prepared to do it 100% and commit, or else you’re just spitting hot air and will be victimized again.
Get a cup of coffee man.
Yeah pull out the troll- you just don’t like it when someone disagrees with you. Interestingly enough I could call you out by the same name based on the same standard. You stated in another post you “have to punch someone in the face” until they see the problem. I know you didn’t mean it literally so give me some credit there and try to slow you knee-jerk reactions. Stop making up information and calling people names simply because you can’t defend your viewpoint.
Don’t worry from here out I plan to do what most others here apparently do- ignore you.
Now chill Zippy and go find some more ways Memphis is failing miserably- at least according to you.
“Anonymous says:
March 5, 2010 at 8:53 am
Yeah pull out the troll- you just don’t like it when someone disagrees with you.”
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You didn’t disagree, you purposefully took comments out of context to suit your own agenda..
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Interestingly enough I could call you out by the same name based on the same standard. You stated in another post you “have to punch someone in the face” until they see the problem.
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No, I did not, that is a lie, that is also a misquote taken out of context, you’re really pushing the boundaries of slander and libel.
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I know you didn’t mean it literally so give me some credit there and try to slow you knee-jerk reactions. Stop making up information and calling people names simply because you can’t defend your viewpoint.
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Stop misquoting out of context.
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Don’t worry from here out I plan to do what most others here apparently do- ignore you.
Now chill Zippy and go find some more ways Memphis is failing miserably- at least according to you.
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I guess you couldn’t find context if it did hit you in the nose.
Zippy, take your own advise and stop trolling. Anyone , including yourself, can go back and read your posts and see they were not taken out of context. I am simply using the information and posts you provided. If you don’t like it, don’t write such absurd remarks in the future.
You’re just scared this city will improve and your lil niche will die off. I understand. Lots of people are in that space today.
That isn’t what’s going to happen. You don’t have to worry about it.
I suggest you re-read my posts ( I took your advice and I did, no changes) with the filter of “in support of Memphis” instead of “attacking Memphis” and I bet you see something different. Seriously, it’s an acquired skill called “active listening” (not taught in school) where no matter what the other guy says or writes, you listen through the filter of “in support of your idea” and then you get to collaborate instead of attack. Trust me, no personal hard feelings toward you at all, just try it and see what happens, you WILL be surprised.
I’ll forgive all the personal attacks if you stop them too.