This region must stop fighting over scraps, get moving on something meaningful and decide what is really important to our future.
Southern cities are in an awkward point in history. Our populations have grown in a time as the economy moved away from the agriculture that established us, through the industrial revolution that built some of us and on into an auto-dependant, single-family-home-loan driven economy that has failed us. We have never really been cities in the traditional sense. Towns, occasionally. Villages, sometimes. Squares, perhaps. But never really cities.
Anyone who has followed my posts knows that I am on a quest for benchmarks, simple starting points and solutions to our Economic Development, Urban Design and Social Interaction dilemmas. Returning from Dallas, I’d hoped to write another top-10 list of best practices like I did with Denver and DC. I could point out Fort Worth’s parking lot screening and Dallas’s free trolley. I’d love to explore the urban residential explosion in both towns or the demolition of the old Cowboy’s Stadium less than one year after the last game there. I tend to get very excited about this stuff and can’t wait to share.
But… three depressing things have stuck in my mind sullying my mood for a couple of weeks.
Fighting over scraps
Most southern cities are fighting like dogs over scraps. Whenever I come back from Texas, I can’t help but wonder why Memphis, Louisville and Birmingham even exist. Why are we still here? How do we compete?
We keep building infrastructure like I-269 for businesses that never come. We move a company from one part of our own town to another part of our own town and call that growth.
Driving around Dallas at times feels like flying around with Astro on the Jetsons. Huge, majestic office buildings are everywhere, downtown and miles from it. The Dallas CBD office submarket is almost twice as large as our entire metro regional office market. The Dallas area has about six other submarkets as large or larger than our entire metro market. The Dallas area has almost 175 MILLION square feet of space filled with smart people not even including the Fort Worth area.
Taking our time
Most southern cities do not commit. We drag our feet, hoping things will work out if we just think about it long enough. Texans react fast! We spend years planning with no true implementation. Texans have a hair-brained idea and then run with it for years.
About ten years ago we opened the Madison Avenue trolley line. In that time we have successfully developed nothing that depends on or was inspired by that massive investment. We didn’t change any zoning, recruit any developers, assemble any property, attract any businesses or anything else that encompasses transit oriented development.
In the same ten years since, Uptown Dallas has turned McKinney Street into a residential showpiece along their trolley line just outside of downtown. Three, four and five story apartment buildings fill in between one story restaurants. Townhouses take the place of old parking lots. High-end retailers are a short walk from trolley stops. While we have been fighting over CVS locations and spending seven years trying to adopt the Unified Development Code, Dallas has reinvented an entire area as a true mixed use neighborhood that acts as a city within the city.
Valuing the wrong things
Most southern cities do not value the right things. Often it is difficult to tell if we value anything at all. We abandon neighborhoods, office buildings, roads and sewer systems. But more than anything else we abandon schools and clearly have little value for education beyond saying someone should do something about it.
Every time I have been to Dallas there have been prominent education stories in the Sunday paper. These are huge spreads on the performance of dozens of area school districts. How are we really doing on math? How are we really doing in reading? How does this position us for the economy of the future? Dallas knows the answer. They show what they value by tracking it, reporting on it, talking about it and participating in it.
Improve or Move
So, a business goes downtown, out-east or Olive Branch? It is really hard to keep up the fight when you see the scale of a Texas sized real estate market.
So, an apartment building goes along the trolley line, near the University of Memphis or in Bartlett? It is really hard to keep up the fight when you have seen the answer in person and walked down a street that someone has fully committed to restoring.
So, some of our kids will go to college, trade school or drop out? It is really hard to keep up the fight when you have met people who do not have this conversation because most people just expect their kids to go get degrees.
Economic Development is really just real estate development. We can commit to improving what we have, where it is located and the people who will use it over time. Or we can keep moving the pieces around, where we can, when we can for the few people we can hold onto.
People today are incredibly mobile. They see improvement or they move to another place that has what they want.
On Smart City Memphi,s we discuss the problems and pitch solutions. But we must start committing to moving fast. We have to stop fighting with each other over scraps and focus on improving what’s here. We have to start thinking about what we value and what we are really willing to do to prove it.
Or we can forget ever being considered a real city worthy of being included in the same conversation with Dallas or Houston or San Antonio or Austin. Texans do it big and make no excuses. Memphis and other southern cities have to improve or risk losing everything.
And if you think we are competing in any way today, you are fooling yourself. We are cutting our own throats, while the momentum in some other cities may never slow down long enough for us to catch up.
Frankly, I think it’s because we have so many people who moved into Memphis not from other urban areas, but from small towns. There are a lot of people who live in this metro area that despise cities, and despise that they have to live in or near one in order to have a career; therefore, they don’t want to do anything to make the area more urban.
Yes, it’s cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, but these are the kind of people who don’t mind starving to death as long as they can look at their neighbor and see that they have even less.
I know, depressing, isn’t it?
I see the point the of the article. But I wouldn’t brag about Houston and Dallas though. Certainly they have incredible business communities, but both cities are incredibly sprawled out. I’ve only been to Dallas 2 times, so I haven’t been able to explore their neighborhoods and all that good stuff. But I have been to Houston multiple times b/c my brother lives there and other family members as well. Houston is one of the worst cities of urban sprawl I have ever seen. Traffic is horrible, downtown is a wasteland after work hours, and ridership of the light rail there is pathetic. They just opened 24 lane highway from Houston to Katy, TX, which is a new suburb of Hosuton where everyone is moving. Much like Arlington. I like their business models but their sprawl is what we can do without.
no zoning controls in Houston.
not that there’s much ‘control’ in shelby county-excepting the small municipalities.
IO, that is true to a point concerning Houston and its lack of formal zoning, but there are restrictions concerning land use. Research Quarterly summarizes the Houston precedent better than I can:
“Developers employ widespread private covenants and deed restrictions, which serve a comparable role as zoning. These privately prescribed land use controls are effective because they have a legal precedence and local government has chosen to assist in enforcing them.
Some investors are understandably apprehensive about the lack of clearly defined rules. Houston developers have long recognized these concerns and have responded, particularly in suburban markets, by producing planned business and industrial parks that have rigorous covenants and deed restrictions. Not surprisingly, the sites receiving the attention of institutional investors, especially in suburban markets, tend to be in planned parks.”
Houston also maintains strict regulations dictating such design aspects as minimum parking regulations, minimum lot sizes as well as street widths and block sizes.
All the above aside, I think this article raises a good question: how realistic is it for Memphis, its leaders and certain citizens to believe this city will ever be able to be considered in the same conversation as the cities mentioned (I would include Atlanta and Charlotte on that list)? At some point, are we wasting our breath on unachievable goals and unrealistic expectations? This is not a defeatist attitude, but rather one that realizes our resources are limited and thus our goals should be as well. Even if Memphis were to suddenly accelerate its pace, we still have to face the question regarding why a company would locate here when so many goals are already being achieved in other nearby communities.
I was thinking the same thing Urbanut. Maybe we don’t keep chasing “the next big company.” Memphis does well with the home grown motif.
I won’t even argue the point, and yes Dallas had oil money for years which turned into all kinds of other money while we depended on Elvis.
My ex-wife said it best:
“Success doesn’t just happen to you, you have to go get it”.
Why don’t we put our money where our mouth is?
We could build special smokestacks that remove all pollution from emissions simply, make a deal with the feds to fund 1/2 the installation costs and go around the country installing them for profit.
We could build generators.
I’ve said this out loud for years, and now mitsubishi and some chinese company have move their operations to do just that to Forest City AR, Fayatteville area, and Missisippi.
You said it. We don’t commit, we stand for nothing, and we will fade away, very soon, because there is no place for that in the present or future, it’s an affront to GOD.
Houston: you’re at someone’s home, you admire a painting. they say “thank you” and tell about how they acquired it, the provenance, what they like about it, etc.
Dallas: same scenario, they say “I paid $85,000 for it and it’s worth $200K!!”