We are nothing if not schizophrenic about Memphis.
A few weeks ago, we were outraged that Forbes had the audacity to call us a “miserable city,” but in a New York Times article this week, we seemed to do as much ourselves. In fact, miserable might be a benign word compared to what Memphians said about our city in the article.
If anything, the coverage was a reminder that when the economy sneezes, black people catch pneumonia, as former Urban League head John Jacob so accurately put it. If there was a thread that held together the story in the Times, it was that.
Unfortunately, it appeared that in our haste to paint Wells Fargo as the villain in our foreclosure lawsuit, we were prepared to slam the image of the entire city. We can only imagine the field day that competing Chambers of Commerce are having today emailing around the comments about Memphis.
A Prayer
No wonder the State of Mississippi finds us ripe for the picking. No one can do more damage to our city than our own people, and the New York Times article used our own quotes to make us sound like Dresden after World War II.
Lord, protect us from ourselves.
All that said, there’s little question that we should give serious weight and analysis to the research and the sources cited by the nation’s most prominent newspaper. It’s past time for us to look in the mirror rather than rejecting out of hand the frequent indictments of Memphis by outside experts and reporters.
Memphis Mayor A C Wharton’s description of a city of choice is one of the most comprehensive attacks on these and other problems that we’ve seen in cities across the U.S. As he has said, addressing the multi-generational poverty that grips 151,000 people is at the top of the priorities if Memphis is to reach his vision. That’s what was glaringly missing from the Times coverage: A sense that we already know the problems and we’re doing something bold to fix them.
Tough Times
It won’t be easy. Through our unwillingness to confront the facts and to hypnotize ourselves without our own rhetoric about how great things are, we have dug the hole for Memphis awfully deep. As we said more than three years ago, we were worried about when the hole would get so deep, we couldn’t pull ourselves out of it.
We are not there yet, and there is an awful lot working in our favor that’s missing in Detroit and Cleveland, but one thing is inarguable: Memphis has no margin for error. The New York Times was a reminder of the truth of that statement.
It’s not just about intractable African-American poverty, which is serious enough, but also about the lack of wealth that so many middle income African-Americans have. There are many who are the first in their families to reach the middle and upper middle income brackets, but because of structural racism and the lack of a reservoir of financial support in the family, bumps in the road often send the car straight into the ditch.
Back in the midst of our civic breast-beating about how wrong Forbes was about our miserableness, we urged that we spend more time finding answers to the problems rather than finding time to write cheerleading letters about Memphis. In dwelling on the lawsuit against Wells Fargo so much with national media, we act as if we think the answers to our city’s problems will be found in a courtroom.
They won’t of course. We’ll find the answers on our own Main Street today, and we’ll get them from the best experts about this city: our own people. Litigate if we must, but let the lawyers talk and worry about it. Meanwhile, we’re looking for our leaders, not lawyers, to adopt a solutions-centered approach to addressing the serious problems before us.
Getting the Focus Right
Now, we are doing what we do so often: Talking about symptoms, not causes. What we’ve liked about city of choice is that is about the latter, and we hear reports out of City Hall that the Wharton Administration already has something under way regarding poverty. It can’t come soon enough.
In Memphis, if the unemployment rate is officially reported as 10%, that means that 34% of our people are out of the job market, because almost one in four isn’t counted anymore because they haven’t looked for work for an extended period of time. It’s another reason that 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 in percentages 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 (think schools).
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
We all talk about poverty in Memphis but who’s in charge of doing something about it? Who has principle responsibility for reducing it? Who is brave enough to own the problem and look for solutions?
In other words, it’s past time for Memphis to get to work. 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, a coincidence of birth (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.
Meanwhile, 210 miles up I-40, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has unveiled “Poverty Reduction Initiative Plan,” a detailed 76-page plan to cut the poverty rolls by 50% in 10 years. It was the result of a “Poverty Symposium” attended by 500 people who were concerned about their city’s 16% poverty rate. As a point of reference, Memphis’s poverty rate is 24%.
Nashville Does It Again
The Nashville plan covers seven problem categories: child care, economic opportunity, food, health care, housing, neighborhood development and work force development. It also proposes a variety of solutions, from connecting the right agencies to establishing a fully funded Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Some cost money; others need only time and effort.
“I think this is the first time that we have had an organized effort that is being led both publicly and privately, and I believe that this will again start a greater effort in turning those numbers around as it relates to poverty in Nashville,” said Howard Gentry, president of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce’s Public Benefit Foundation.
No one needs the U.S. Census Bureau to confirm that job losses over the past two years have led to a dramatic increase in poverty rates across the country (although the bureau has), just as most know intuitively that people already living under the poverty line — $21,834 annually for a family of four — aren’t likely to gain much ground when the economy is in a hole. And many economists predict that the jobs that have been lost will never return.
“For private interests, civic groups and public-minded businesses, now is the most important time to address poverty,” Malcolm Getz, an associate professor of economics at Vanderbilt University, emailed the Nashville City Paper. “Recessions are hardest on the poor, and more of us are aware of the fragility of our economic circumstances. That probably increases our empathy. Of course, ability to provide financial support is compromised in a recession.”
“The poverty issue, I think, its importance is underscored by the recession,” Mayor Dean said. “You can’t use the economy as an excuse for doing nothing.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
“… we hear reports out of City Hall that the Wharton Administration already has something under way regarding poverty.”
What have you heard. It has to be something really big so I’m surprised that we haven’t seen anything about his plans.
The root cause is incentivization of bastardy. Any “solution” that does not change this is nothing but a band-aid and a display of cowardice by “leaders.”
Wintermute:
Since half of the families live on less than $20K, what’s the incentives for bastardy?
Mary:
We got emails from City Hall today indicating that there will be some announcements soon.
How about we all stop wasting time on blaming NASHVILLE for Memphis problems?
It rings very very hollow in my ears.
They give almost $1billion a year to the schools system here and WE do not oversee the spending AT ALL.
Compare it to the amount LA CA gets for nearly TEN TIMES as many students and they get better results. Seems like a WHOLE LOT of excuses for NO ACTION in Memphis.
Let’s be perfectly clear here, the problem IS EDUCATION, the lack of it in Memphis for anyone in public schools and the wonderful pastime of sabotaging all efforts to get it right.
Bussing, you should bus poor kids to better schools, BUT, you should not bus rich kids to poor schools. The object is to bring poor kids up, not rich kids down. BUT here we did both and of course it was just a veiled tactic to undermine it. That’s how it goes here.
If you think for one second that Fixing MCS is last or not the VERY MOST IMPORTANT thing we should be doing, then you are seriously deluded. You can’t generate any wealth without a decent education, and the very best way to create slaves has always been to ensure that the majority could not read, write, and do math and keep them regulated through the penal system.
Mission accomplished, Memphis, Happy?
Now, before you go all doom and gloom, how do you make a firm and solid foundation for a very tall skyscraper?
You have to dig deep.
So let’s relabel the hole. It’s a foundation now.
Now, we’ve made a mess, it’s called creating a culture of crime. It’s called creating a very large criminal social class in Memphis.
Time to clean that up, because they are psychologically traumatized by what we’ve done to them first, we need to put in a TON of support for that condition.
Since they have turned to crime thinking they are worth nothing and have no future, fueled by their substandard education, they need effective rehabilitation and re-education.
Since they can’t find jobs that pay enough money to support their families without creating an undue and cruel amount of stress and poverty because of their criminal records and behavior, we need to create an industry and manufacturing plant for them to make solid goods with their hands for money and have it distributed everywhere
via our stellar distribution genius, FEDEX and our rail line.
PROBLEM SOLVED.
You can hem and haw all day and night all you want and you will still end up right where I put you.
Get to work.
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