Author: Smart City Memphis

Some major cities, notably Portland, OR, and Minneapolis, have traced much of their competitive success to their multi-county taxation authority. In these places, rather than joint taxing being a divisive force, it is a unifying...

Forget the out-of-date notion about the three grand divisions of Tennessee – West, Middle and East. According to the University of Tennessee Center for Business and Economic Research, there are actually 10 distinct regions in...

New market tax credits, a little-known development tool for low-income areas, is making a high profile appearance in Memphis as part of the Bass Pro Shop financing package at The Pyramid.That revelation was made to the Memphis...

From the CEOs for Cities blog:Simon Anholt was a recent guest on “Smart City.” Simon, perhaps the world’s premier place branding expert, has just launched the Anholt-GMI City Brands Index, a measure of the...

To follow up the last post, Memphis has been ranked the third most dangerous of 330 metropolitan areas, following Detroit and New Orleans. In an interesting footnote, as a city, Memphis ranks 16th among 369 cities. It’s as...

We have now officially entered the political season. The attorney general’s office has expanded its “No Deals” program just in time for the election, and press conferences are being held that treat garden variety drug dealers as...

A little over a year ago, United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke at the oldest Sephardic synagogue in New York City, Shearith Israel. He noted that in Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never used the word...

In response to Tuesday’s post on the need for Tennessee Department of Transportation to change its approach to sound barriers to make them more appealing, State Commissioner Gerald Nicely emailed that he “agrees...

On the political front, there are developments that can hearten Democratic supporters – or at least those interested in the city mayor and state governor’s offices.While the anti-Herenton faction works to amass the daunting...

Sometimes, we’re so busy asking the wrong question that we never get to the real answer. For example, remember all the media coverage about unsafe day care vans. And yet, no reporter ever bothered to ask why we needed to be...