by Bruce VanWyngarden
t's become a
given: Downtown is booming. New restaurants are opening every week, with
more to come. Peabody Place now looms large on the Memphis skyline, and
there's more development in the wings. Movie theatres, a ballpark, a new
train station, the Gibson guitar plant, the Grammy Museum, Elvis Presley's,
all hover on the near horizon. Though downtown still has some abandoned
buildings, few would argue that the tide of disintegration that began with
Martin Luther King's murder has been thoroughly turned. Downtown's future
looks bright.
But it's not just downtown that's booming. Collierville, already the fastest-growing town in Tennessee, will get another boost from FedEx's new facilities. The Wolfchase mall is supercharging retail and housing growth in Bartlett and Cordova. Southaven, spurred by its hot-button location between Tunica and Memphis, has become the fastest-growing community in Mississippi. While across the river, new upscale housing developments are popping up in, yes, Marion and West Memphis, Arkansas.
So what's the problem? All things considered, growth is good. Certainly, it is better than stagnation. But growth brings its own set of problems. And the sad truth is, if you make a lot of new "good" neighborhoods, you'll also make some new "bad" neighborhoods.
Drive around the outer reaches of Memphis and parts of the inner ring of suburbia and you'll see once-booming retail areas and malls, now blighted, half-vacant, home to small pet-grooming businesses, the odd barbershop or tanning parlor, or worse. You'll see large tracts of housing block after block of neat ranches, neo-Californias, neo-Cape Cods, the Cordovas of their day. Except today they're no longer stylish. They're home to working-class families, both black and white. Their driveways hold pickups and bass boats and basketball hoops. They are not by any stretch "bad" neighborhoods, they're just no longer fashionable. They are neighborhoods caught in the middle, adrift without an anchor. They will either stabilize and mature at their current level, or deteriorate. Without someone to champion their cause, the latter scenario is more likely.
Downtown, of course, has its champions. City government, and the major banks, hotels, and developers who've put their money downtown, have no intention of letting it slide away. Their investment is too great. Midtown similarly has its anchors the hospitals, museums, colleges, and private schools all are institutions with vested interests in preserving the viability of the neighborhood. To the east, suburbs such as Germantown, Collierville, and Bartlett each have strong municipal governments and chambers of commerce working to improve the quality of life in their towns, and thereby stabilize their communities.
But who will champion Hickory Hill? What institution will anchor Raleigh? Or Whitehaven? Or, for that matter, Cordova? It's becoming increasingly clear that a mall is not a permanent anchor. Neither is new housing, which soon becomes old and unfashionable, as newer homes are built with bigger Jacuzzis, or arched ceilings, or whatever this year's architectural geegaw may be. Suburban developers are only champions of a neighborhood until the last piece of developable land is developed, then they're off to build new houses elsewhere.
And so the problem falls by default to our city and county leaders. Mayor Rout, who has apparently never seen a housing development, or developer, he didn't like, is unlikely to worry about the fate of outer reaches of the city of Memphis. Mayor Herenton's priorities, on the other hand, seem to lie downtown, where many of his major supporters have invested so heavily. But these outer "ring" neighborhoods are not going to go away. To the contrary, if they deteriorate and there are signs that some of them are moving in that direction the very urban problems of crime and poverty will inevitably move out into the county with them. It's further proof that you can run from city problems, but you can't hide. It's the kind of development no one wants to see coming soon to a neighborhood near you. (Bruce VanWyngarden is associate publisher/editorial for Contemporary Media, Inc., this paper's parent company.)