It’s hard to believe that there was a time 35 years ago that there were pundits and columnists who predicted that with the rise of technology, places would come to matter less and less.
And yet, just the opposite has happened, and today, place is a major driver of economic growth, because it is a prime influencer for where 25-34 year-old, college-educated people decide to live. As Carol Coletta and Joe Cortright have shown in their work, 64% of the men and women in this coveted demographic say they first choose the place where they want to live and then they look for a job.
There had been a foreshadowing in 1979 by MIT Professor David L. Birch who was focused on the big changes taking place in U.S. cities. He pioneered research to determine where jobs were locating and why, and he concluded (we should have been listening more closely at the time) that the key to economic success was no longer low labor and material costs, because quality matters and high-innovation firms locate in an environment that creative and highly educated people find attractive.
As a result, he predicted that high cost areas like San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, Boston, and Atlanta would prosper because their competitive advantage was brains, not land or raw material.
The Perfect Place
Prophecy has become reality. Today, people don’t follow jobs. Jobs follow people, especially college-educated workforces and the trend is accelerating so much that the country risks dividing cities into winners and losers.
So, when we talk about place in this context, what kind of place should we be talking about?
We should be talking about a place known for its high quality of life. A place where its WalkScore means more than the score of its sports teams. A place with a vibrant downtown core and flourishing close-in neighborhoods. A place with density, that’s walkable and bikable, with access to effective public transit. A place known for peak experiences and street life. A place that is mixed use and mixed income, and a place that is clean, green, safe, and receptive to different kinds of people, lifestyles, and sexual orientations and identities.
For young adults, the most important places more and more are within three miles of downtown. In fact, as Mr. Cortright’s research shows, college-educated young adults are more than twice as likely to have a preference for living in these close-in neighborhoods than other Americans. And it is a preference gaining steam.
A City’s Greatness Is About People
The good news is that progress in placemaking is all around us – Shelby Farms Park is America’s great 21st century park; Overton Square is booming again; Overton Park is renewed; Tennessee Brewery, against all odds, is converted into residential, commercial and retail space; Central Station is becoming a new hotel, apartment, and movie theater; Crosstown Concourse anchors a neighborhood reboot; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is in the midst of a $2 billion expansion hat will spark the rebirth of the Pinch Historic District; the $40 million Main to Main project added bike/ped lanes to Harahan Bridge connecting downtown to Arkansas; Graceland made a $132 million investment; Shelby Farms Greenline expanded and with the Wolf River Greenway and the Greenprinting plan, our community will have a one-of-a-kind outdoor asset; and that’s not even mentioning Bass Pro Shops, International Paper’s new tower, and University of Memphis and University of Tennessee Medical District expansions.
In other words, there is an awful lot going on that is creating momentum that we haven’t seen in 25 years. It’s making this a better place, and it couldn’t happen at a better time, because good places attract and keep good talent. Ultimately, the test will be whether we can connect the marquee high-profile projects in ways that improve the neighborhoods between them.
That said, great cities aren’t about how high the buildings are or just how much construction is under way. Great cities are about how they treat the people who live within them, and how living in those cities improve their citizens’ lives. It’s about opportunity, neighborhoods that are magnets for new residents, public services like transit that advance and open up options, quality schools that are levers for successful lives, and public spaces that bring people together and cement the spirit of community.
Opportunity Denied
Most of all, great cities are places characterized by social mobility. Among the 50 largest metro areas, we are last in social mobility, which means that too many Memphis children are born into poverty with a birthright to remain there. Here’s the bad news: a child born into the bottom fifth in income in the Memphis area has only a 2.6% chance of rising to the top fifth in income.
If we ever needed a wake-up call about this issue, we should have gotten it with a New York Times article which said Shelby County is “very bad” for children in poor families and suggested it would be better if they lived in DeSoto County. “Shelby County is very bad for income mobility for children in poor families,” the article said. “It is better than only 9% of (all American) counties…Every year a poor child spends in DeSoto County adds about $30 to his or her annual household income at age 26, compared with a childhood spent in the average American county…Not only that, the younger you are when you move to DeSoto, the better you will do on average. Children who move at earlier ages are less likely to become single parents, more likely to go to college, and more likely to earn more.”
This is economically – and morally – untenable. Because of it, while we have to be dead serious about getting more people to choose Memphis, we have to be equally serious about improving the circumstances for every person who lives here. They are in fact two sides of the same coin.
That’s why when we talk about talent and quality of place, we can’t be talking about certain people who live in a certain part of the city and region. We have to be talking about every person in every neighborhood, because personal opportunity denied is regional potential squandered.
Rising To The Occasion
Our region’s leaders proved in the Greenprinting planning process that we can work together. Now, the task is to pivot with the same depth of regional cooperation to deal with the inequality that is the single greatest barrier to our economic future.
Just think, if the income disparity in this region could be closed, it would produce a $21 billion boost to our metro gross domestic product. In other words, breaking the link between race and poverty matters to every major region in the U.S., but it especially matters here.
For the past three years, a majority of all babies born in the U.S. were children of color, and 14 years from now, a majority of the workforce will be as well. By 2044, the U.S. population will be majority of people of color, and by 2040, the Memphis region will be 66.1%.
Clearly, no place has more reason to honestly face these disparity issues and embrace fully the opportunity to become the laboratory for America’s urban future than our region. After all, while other regions have been moving toward the diversity that will define the entire nation in 25 years, our region has been there for years.
Getting On The Hot List
Real, sustained progress takes courage, collaboration, and commitment, and most of all, it takes a willingness to treat our diversity as a strategic asset and leverage it to our advantage. It requires an ability to see the future as more than a mere extension of the present or economic growth as merely an amplification of what has gone before. It also requires doing things differently and pursuing a clear, ambitious vision backed by new ideas and new resolve to achieve it. Most of all, it is about ending the bragging about being a low-cost community, because in the end, you get what you pay for and it’s generally not a more skilled workforce.
The indicators for success would be in greater opportunity for our children and a larger percentage of our population that is college-educated millennials and gen x’ers. They are the gold standard for fast-growing companies and the dream team for cities looking to attract new jobs and growth.
If perception is reality, the Memphis region doesn’t exist for many of the young adults we covet. We lack a national perception of vibrancy and a high quality of life that gets us on the list of “hot” cities to be considered for relocation. Polling suggests that our strengths for millennials and gen x’ers are individuality, community, creativity, authenticity, affordability, generosity, energy, and accessibility, and experience suggests that once we get people here, we have a good chance of them staying.
That said, our economy’s reliance on blue-collar jobs and its image as a distribution center does little to attract and keep the kinds of workers we need to compete for jobs of the future. Jobs that attract millennials and gen x’ers are high-tech and high-status and entrepreneurial. All of this is why the branding initiative is so important to our future as well as Russ Williams’ concept for a compact downtown creative district, startup work by EPIcenter and Start Co. as well as the work of ZeroTo510, Creative Works, undercurrent, and more.
These are two’fers, because they not only create jobs but they reposition Memphis nationally in new, vital ways.
Yes, They Do Matter That Much
Today, all of the people in the 25-34 year-old demographic group today are millennials and that will remain the case for the next 10 years. In other words, they are about to drive everything in their path in a way not seen since Baby Boomers. Some people may already be tired of hearing about them, but Memphis has a window to attract and retain them and whether we are successful will prove crucial to our competitiveness.
That’s why our obsessive competition within the region is distracting and self-destructive. The barriers to economic progress are structural and they demand serious, determined, and comprehensive responses. As we have written before, regionalism has not served Memphis well in the past. Memphis routinely gave more than it got. But the fact remains: challenges facing Memphis are the same facing the region, and fighting with each other only diverts our attention from the factors that matter most: talent, place, and opportunity.
To quote the dictum, we need to think regionally and act locally. That especially means that Memphis needs to capitalize on its own distinctiveness and to invest in it to grow a skilled workforce and attract and create higher paying and higher skilled jobs.
While most major economic indicators for the Memphis region languish toward the bottom, it’s worth remembering that the GDP of the Memphis MSA is larger than 11 states and at least 21 countries. As long as we are competing with each other or see the region as “we versus they,” we are taking our eyes off the ball. The battle is not between Shelby County and North Mississippi. It is between the Memphis MSA and regions around the world.
Admitting Defeat?
The essence of our challenge is to make sure the reality of Memphis matches up with its resonance. All of this underscores the importance of a strong, prominent, appealing brand, one anchored more on green and growth than on grit and grind.
If we are not up to the challenge, we need to wring our hands and admit that we are prepared to live in a community that is perpetually struggling for jobs and growth, or worse, we are prepared to manage a region in decline.
Here’s the thing: no future of any city is written in stone, and that includes Memphis. But there is much to do and so little time to do it.
We are encouraged today by men and women between 20 and 40 who are making so much happen in Memphis today. What we like most is that they ask no one for permission, they don’t wait for approval, they express their opinions honestly, and they offer others the opportunity to join them.
This is the most exciting story line in the Memphis region today, but more to the point, it is also the most important place-making development in recent history. In a sentence, these young adults have set out to create the place in which you want to live. The outstanding question for the rest of us is how can we help them succeed.
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This piece sounds like more of the cheerleading our local officials always talk about. The truth is that for most younger people this “place” called Memphis doesn’t really matter so much because they are stuck here with no real pride in their city and no way out. Poor education, even worse job opportunities, crime and poverty are a vicious circle and trap. For youth especially Memphis offers few opportunities and the misery index for everyone living here simply keeps getting worse.
This piece is 100% right on the money, which is why my family recently relocated elsewhere.
Good analysis, granted the region has its problems but there’s been a lot of good things happening, and these examples like these haven’t necessarily been the case in the past 40 years. Point being, you have to start somewhere to build anything. I was waiting to see if the first comment was the typical old-school Memphis negativity… luckily the city does have attractive qualities to educated millennials and that’s who is going to determine things in the future.
i offer a different take on Memphis. I moved here for a job in 2003 and retired not too long ago. People asked me where I was headed for retirement and I said “I am not leaving Memphis.” I love it here. I do not have the day to day struggles of crime, poverty or educational shortcomings but I have a myriad of outdoor activities and downtown urban amenities at my downtown doorstep. Fun-loving people around the country ought to retire here!!!
Anon 2: we often wonder why anon 1 stays here if it is so horrible.
Some good things have been happening in Memphis, but not nearly enough. When you look at other cities, Memphis is still really sleepy. There never seems to be much momentum to anything here and what’s started is small potatoes and nothing else comes along.
Great points about improving quality of life, having a thriving (downtown) core with great close neighborhoods, and improving education for all. Improving all those things will help Memphis improve quickly.
But… then what? I don’t necessarily buy the idea that if Memphis somehow reverses racism and poverty to create a bunch of safe, well designed spaces that we will be anything near to SF, Denver, Dallas, Boston, or Atlanta especially in terms of attracting yuppies. That is, we went from being let’s say a B- city in the 35th percentile of US cities in 1979 to being a C- city still in the 35th percentile today. If we bump up to the 50th percentile, that might still just be a C+ in today’s world of huge regional inequality. To become an A city, we might have to reach the 90th percentile especially if we’re talking about building a tech industry.
According to the Federal Reserve, the 4 main industries of our region are agriculture, transportation/logistics, medicine, and real estate. What do you propose to add as a fifth? You seem to be saying that we should go for tech. But I don’t see how we get there without some other intermediary industries. Is there something like healthcare IT that we could use as a bridge?
Long as we stay stuck in 1968, nothing will change.
I seriously can’t think of any new industries that might be lured to invest here in Memphis. Our work force, educational institutions and employees talent are sub par. Because of that Tech is out of the question. The Memphis economy is anchored by basic industries like transportation/logistics, agriculture and not much else. I would have to exclude medical because we only have St Jude which is limited by its specialized nature and the lack of a major university. Sorry but UT just is not top-tier. If the spark for something creative was here it would have developed by now. I think we still are a C-minus city overall. Things just don’t change much in the midsouth.
One of the brightest Memphians I know, Roshun Austin, recently said, “Why do we keep talking about remaking Memphis to attract others? Why don’t we make this the best possible place for the people who already live here and want to stay?”
To me, that seemed to be the correct question. If we create the city we want to live in, we will have created the city others may choose to live in. We already know how to make Memphis a truly livable place. We’re on the way to achieving that. One good step that we all can take is to remember that to get the city we want, we must start by using the city we have. That is where vibrancy begins.
We can’t even come close to being “brilliant at the basics” as our lackluster mayor promises.
This city is falling apart. Literally.
Maybe a tad better than Detroit, but it’s more like Port au Prince.
No wonder we can’t get people moving here.
Most Memphians lack any incentive or desire to improve the city and its problems. Most are apathetic Judy barely getting by and are not motivated to do much of anything (including a work ethic). I say the same thing about our politicians and business leaders.
Ray: We agree about Roshun Austin completely. As you and I have discussed, it’s not about making Memphis a great place for those of us who can afford to enjoy it, but making it a great place for every Memphian, regardless of which neighborhood they live in and their economic status. As JFK said, a great city is not about the height of its buildings or the width of its roads; it is how it cares about its people, all of them.