The following blog posts were the most read in 2024:
1) City Council’s New Salary-Setting Power Calls for Clear Rules and Ethics, November 20, 2024:
So, now, Memphians will see if they have put the foxes in charge of the henhouse.
That’s because the Memphis City Council now holds the checkbook and can pay itself whatever salary it wants. The new authority and power result from passage of the recent referendum by Memphis voters, launching a new era for City of Memphis government.
The new clout appears to be part of the latest power play devised by Council Chair J.B. Smiley, aided and abetted by City Council attorney Allan Wade, to blur the lines between the executive and legislative branches of city government and tilt more power to the Council. If anything, Mr. Smiley is known for his hubris and raw ambition and Mr. Wade knows how to keep his term-limited clients happy as they come and go while he serves in his appointed position for more than 30 years. Fortified by Mr. Wade’s predictable supportive opinions, Mr. Smiley has persistently argued that City Council is an equal branch of city government although his efforts have been to make the legislative branch more equal than the executive one.
Read more here.
2) Downtown’s Dramatic Drop In Crime Is “Desperate” For A Headline, November 11, 2024:
The newspaper article didn’t so much bury the lede as miss it altogether.
Faced with a dramatic drop in crime in downtown that’s twice the citywide rate of decline – 26% to 13% – the Daily Memphian decided its lead story should be an opinion column in which Richard Smith trash talked the area.
Mr. Smith, son of FedEx founder Fred Smith and a top executive with the company his father founded, diagnosed downtown’s condition as “desperate” because of his angst about safety and the Beale Street experience for Grizzlies fans. He is apparently so certain in his opinion that he suggests if Memphis doesn’t respond, downtown could “wither and die.”
There’s no denying that the Beale Street entertainment district needs serious attention but Mr. Smith’s criticism was delivered as more of an attack on all of downtown. Some people simply shrugged their shoulders and said, “there he goes again,” but that was hard to do with the Daily Memphian making the decision to treat the opinion column as its big news story of the day.
It was after all only one man’s amplified opinion. If it had received regular news story treatment, the newspaper could have taken Mr. Smith’s comments and delved deeper to add context and voices from other people with experience and knowledge about successful downtowns. Even more, if it had been a news story, it might have pointed out the dramatic decrease in crime but also that Part 1 violent crime and Part 1 property crime downtown amounts to 1.8% of the total crime in Memphis (year-to-date compared to the same period last year).
Read more here.
3) Who Gets MLGW’s Lower Industrial Rates? Questions Arise, December 1, 2024:
Elon Musk’s supercomputer project and 86 other MLGW industrial customers pay a discounted rate for electricity that is about half of what we pay for power to our homes but the list of these “industries” raises questions about how some got on it.
MLGW’s 87 industrial customers – who pay $62 for a megawatt hour while most of us pay the $116 residential rate – include huge international corporations like FedEx, a bitcoin location, and manufacturing companies, one Shelby County municipality, a landfill, a brewery, and salvage and scrap metal yards.
Curiously, the lower industrial rate is also approved for a church, a ballet school, moving companies, a charter school, and a tourist attraction – much of which seem to defy MLGW’s definition of industrial users as having steady demands for electricity at a specific delivery point that justify the lower rates. Among the customers receiving the special rate is Velsicol although it has not been operational since 2012 when it was closed as a chemical polluter and was declared a Superfund site.
But there are other current industrial customers that are even more perplexing and whose approval for the special rate appears to contradict MLGW’s own descriptions of what makes for one.
Read more here.
4) Report: Memphis and Shelby County Gave $344 Million in Tax Breaks in 6 years, October 16, 2024:
Only one county in the United States gave away more tax money in the form of business incentives than Shelby County – $239.2 million between 2017-2022 – and that doesn’t include $105 million in PILOTs by City of Memphis.
Taken together, it means that over six years, Memphis and Shelby County Governments gave corporations and real estate developers $344 million in tax breaks.
Those are the conservative conclusions of the recent analysis by Good Jobs First, which promotes corporate and government accountability in economic development with a particular focus on the use of public subsidies.
According to its report, only Hudson County, New Jersey, in the shadow of New York City, gives more tax incentives at $309.1 million than Shelby County.
Shelby County gave out 50% more than Knox (Knoxville), Nashville/Davidson, and Hamilton County (Chattanooga) combined – more than four times more in tax abatements than Hamilton County (Chattanooga) and Nashville/Davidson and six times more than Knox County (Knoxville).
Hamilton County granted $60.1 million in PILOTs, Nashville/Davidson gave out $56.9 million in PILOTs, and Knox County $39.8 million in PILOTs. All three of them together still gave away $82.4 million less than Shelby County’s $239.2 million.
Read more here.
5) Mid-South Coliseum: How We Got Here – Part 1, April 1, 2024:
There has never been an arena built in Memphis with the same quality, better acoustics, TLC, and comfort as the Mid-South Coliseum.
It was the culmination of a dream that began in the late 1950s for a new, all-purpose, “blue chip” public arena, and when the doors were thrown open in 1964, the building produced a burst of civic pride (building on the momentum created by the opening of the Roy Harrover-designed Memphis International Airport a year earlier) not seen again until the opening of AutoZone Park and FedExForum roughly four decades later.
Anyone who bought a ticket for an event in the Coliseum’s early years remembers the terrazzo, the brick, the glazed ceramic tiles, the symmetry, easy access, lack of obstructions, and its overall comfort. It was impossible to imagine that another arena in the South could compete with it.
Although the building was similar to the coliseum arenas opened in 1960 in Jacksonville and in Mobile in 1965, it was markedly different in one respect: it was not planned as a segregated facility. Considering that Henry Loeb was serving his first term as mayor, and would later be immortalized for his infamous resistance to the unionization of Memphis’ sanitation workers which brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city, it is a historical irony that plans for the building were developed by the Loeb Administration and apparently always envisioned integrated audiences.
Read more here.
6) Can A New Alignment Produce Results That Increase African American Wealth, February 29, 2024:
There is a discernable level of cynicism built into Memphis’ character as a defense against disappointment, but for now, some level of optimism is not out of the question.
There’s new thinking by a new mayor in City Hall, there’s new rhetoric from Greater Memphis Chamber, and there’s a new well-funded coalition bringing new ideas to address the city’s most intractable challenges dealing with economic mobility.
The question now: it’s encouraging that for the first time in memory, the rhetoric is right, but the real test is whether priorities can be aligned to produce actual progress and whether this alignment can supercharge the trajectory of the city and improve critical economic measurements.
What’s most encouraging is that the reticence to talk about the importance of creating Black wealth is gone. Today, there’s a common theme – if Memphis is to reach its potential, African Americans must reach theirs.
In the 19 years that this blog has existed, there have been 4,414 posts but no subject has received more attention than the need to create better jobs and more wealth for African Americans for Memphis to achieve its potential. Major themes here have been that it is in everyone’s enlightened self-interest to increase African American wealth, to become a hub of African American talent, and to set the closing of the racial income gap as the #1 economic development opportunity.
As I have written often, if the Memphis region can close the racial income gap, it would increase our GDP by $24.7 billion, an increase of roughly 25%. That’s an economic impact that’s roughly more than five times greater than the much-touted Ford Blue Oval project.
Read more here.
7) A Tale of Two Cities: Boxtown and xAI, November 25, 2024:
The 3,000 residents of Boxtown on the east side of the Horn Lake Cutoff in southwest Memphis know something big is happening on the 522 acres on the west side of the Cutoff at the site of Elon Musk’s massive xAI supercomputer.
What the residents of the long-struggling, low-income neighborhood likely don’t know is the rate they pay for electricity is much higher – 85% – than the richest man in the world’s AI project.
But it’s not just Boxtown. Although the imbalance in electricity rates there brings the issue into stark relief, there are 89 other industries in Shelby County besides xAI that also pay a rate lower than residential customers.
It’s a fact of life built into the preferential treatment that Tennessee Valley Authority gives to industrial customers, a disparity that a former board chairman called a betrayal of the federal utility’s founding principles.
It’s also a reality glossed over in TVA’s public statements and news releases which for decades have stressed it treats every customer the same. In its public statements, TVA regularly side steps questions about its industrial rate altogether, subtly shifting the responsibility to local utilities like Memphis Light, Gas and Water.
Read more here.
8) Memphis Losing Population Is Nothing New, February 8, 2024:
Some business leaders recently expressed their concern about Memphis’ population loss.
Better late than never.
The truth is that Memphis’ population has been dropping since 1970, and by 2009, I wrote a blog post concluding that Memphis is a “shrinking city.”
Many people like these businesspeople believe that population growth is and of itself a proxy for economic growth. And yet, research has found no connection between the prosperity of cities and either their size or their population loss. More about this in a future blog post.
Back to this blog post’s point, take the 1970 city limits of Memphis. The population at the time was 619,757.
Here’s the population within those 1970 borders over time:
619,757 – 1970
568,677 – 1980
528,064 – 1990
500,370 – 2000
445,841 – 2010
449,930 – 2013
Using the 1960 city limits of Memphis as context, the decline in population by 2013 was 41%.
Read more here.
9) Density Matters: A Prime Driver of City of Memphis Budgets and Services, September 12, 2024:
Density matters.
All you need to understand this is to examine how its impact ripples through City of Memphis budgets since the 1970s. As 170,000 Memphians moved out of the 1970 
city limits of Memphis over 30 years, city government embarked on an era of aggressive annexations as it chased its former taxpayers as they moved eastward.
Before it ended, the footprint of Memphis had increased by 60% but it had about the same population as when the annexations began. The end result was that the density of the city had been cut in half from the 1960 level and the land area had grown to the size of New York City.
It is this combination of reduced density and the dramatic increase in the size of Memphis’s service area that stretched city resources and created services like public transit that could not keep pace over the ensuing years. To compound the problem, budget priorities were to meet services required in the annexation areas which required core neighborhoods in essence to fund their own decline.
As every entry level planner knows, as densities decrease, it becomes more costly for cities to provide services, as measured per capita. In fact, when Memphis identified Rocky Point, South Cordova, Eads, Riverbottoms, and Southwind/Windyke, it cited low densities and challenges to deliver municipal services as reasons for the removing the areas from the city borders.
Read more here.
10) Our Upside-Down Tax Systems Asks The Most of Those With the Least, June 24, 2024:
Tennessee’s tax system is farcical, and because it is, so is Memphis and Shelby County’s.
But there is no humor in this farce.
In truth, the Tennessee tax system should not be called a system at all, that is, if you think fairness should be an element of it.
One fact says it all: Tennessee’s third most regressive tax system in the U.S. means that the lowest income families pay three times as much of their incomes in taxes as the wealthiest 1%.
All in all, it means Tennessee is a case study of a regressive tax structure, and in a city where 42% of Memphians are the working poor or living in poverty, its impact is profound.
It means that because of deliberate decisions made about the state’s tax structure and public policy, lower-income Memphians are deprived of disposable income that could be spent on family needs, enhancement programs for children, and more, and could help mitigate the expense of buying and maintaining a car because public transit is poor.
But simply, Tennessee’s tax system is upside down, or regressive. By definition, it requires lower income families to pay a greater share of income than wealthy ones.
RUNNERS-UP:
Danny Thomas’ Dream For A Hospital Becomes The Memphis Miracle, December 12, 2024
“Don’t let traffic engineers determine your quality of life.”, December 2, 2024.
PILOT Tax Break’s Missing Piece – Equity, April 18, 2024.
White State Legislators Force Ideology on Majority Black Memphis, February 12, 2024.
The Chamber’s Letter Feeds Partisan Answers, January 13, 2024.
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