Beginning in late 2020, there was a blast of publicity regarding the possibility of a massive redevelopment of South Memphis — two different and competing redevelopments, actually. More of that anon.
This is a sprawling territory — including ZIP code 38126, statistically the most impoverished area anywhere in Memphis — that unquestionably needs an economic shot in the arm.
Besides containing large pockets of the most bleakly underserved parts of Memphis, South Memphis — “Soulsville,” in the larger generic sense — is also the home of some of the city’s most important landmarks: LeMoyne-Owen College, a pedigreed HBCU (historically Black college and university) that has produced no small share of the city’s influential movers and shakers; The Four Way, a venerable eatery and meeting place that has nurtured luminaries and grassroots politicians alike; and the Stax complex, source of so much of Memphis’ musical history and still functioning today as a museum and training ground for would-be musical avatars.
The name “Soulsville” derives mainly from the Stax legacy, and it continues to serve as a descriptor of the South Memphis area and its citizenry at large. The people who live in this domain constitute the very textbook description of an underserved population.
Milton’s Method
Reginald Milton, a member of the Shelby County Commission from the area and a community organizer for the last 22 years, has served on several boards, as commissioners tend to do. One of them was the board of the University Neighborhoods Development Corporation (UNDC), focused on the area around the University of Memphis.
Not too many years ago, that area, including the lengthy Highland Street artery that borders the university on its western side, was served by a few hit-or-miss storefronts and collegiate haunts. Nothing you could call a development as such — certainly nothing that was in sync with an educational institution that was ever upgrading and expanding from its roots as a small teachers’ college into the formidable research university that it is today.
But then the UNDC was granted a TIF (tax incremental financing) that accelerated the active recruiting of new businesses to serve the area. A TIF is one of three basic financial means by which local or state governments can incentivize investment, the others being arrangements for a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) and a TDZ (tourism development zone). Usually, it is an individual business that is granted a PILOT; the recipient is freed, during a given period, from what would be the usual property tax obligations. A TDZ allows for the state sales taxes within a project area to be rerouted, during a set number of years, into the development of the project.
A TIF functions more or less like the TDZ, except that it is granted not by the state but by local government, and the tax deferment applies to the incremental rise in property taxes collected within the project area during the TIF period (usually 15 years or less). Under legislation passed by the Tennessee General Assembly in 1998, TIFs are approved, first, by a local CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) and then by the two basic local funding authorities, in the local case, the city of Memphis and the Shelby County Commission.
If all goes well, the tax base within the project area will rise, and the additional tax revenues arising from that will be poured back into the project area, not into the general fund of city or county.
Recent TIFs have been approved in Shelby County for the Uptown area, for the Binghampton community, and, as aforementioned, for the University of Memphis area. The latter TIF, after a slow start, succeeded spectacularly, resulting in a much elongated Highland strip, replete with storefronts and upscale apartment housing from Poplar down to Southern.
Reginald Milton remembers: “I was on the UNDC board when they got the TIF. And I realized the tremendous benefit the TIF would provide. I saw how you can build up Highland around the university community. And I wondered if you could do something of that magnitude here in South Memphis.”
Before becoming a community organizer per se, Milton had developed his civic consciousness as a neighborhood specialist for the city of Memphis. “That’s what really got me into this. I realized that the city was really trying to help, but the reality was my job was to go and sit in community meetings, listen to the people, and go home and write it down. They would say, you know, there’s drugs in our neighborhood. Okay? Did not know that. Write that down and then go and file it in File 13.We weren’t bad people. It’s just, we weren’t doing anything.”
Milton left his city job and began doing hands-on work with several small community groups in South Memphis. “My task was to work with these community groups and show them that their problems came from working individually. You’ve got maybe 10 neighborhood associations. This association has 10 members; another might have 15 members,” Milton says. “Individually, you’re all trying to work with the city. You’re powerless that way.”
That effort saw the birth of the South Memphis Alliance (SMA), a grouping of such associations, which Milton founded and runs today as executive director.
“My goal, as a community organizer, was to somehow convince these nonprofits that it made sense to create a larger nonprofit, where they will sit on a board and be the voice, the face of South Memphis. And we would legitimately be so because we were from a community.”
Over the years the SMA became a functioning organization with income sources from adjuncts like a laundromat which shares a parking lot with the nonprofit’s headquarters on South Bellevue.
The component organizations of SMA range in area from Annesdale-Snowden to Longview Heights to Rozelle to the Soulsville Neighborhood Association to Shadowlawn. Says Milton: “You had all these organizations that were really doing a decent job. Alone, they weren’t doing the maximum possible job, though. Understandably, all these organizations had to be focused on their own leaky roofs.”
And, with a TIF in mind, Milton would join this conglomerate to others — to form the SoulsvilleUSA Neighborhood Development District (SNDD).
Coming together to form the district would be SCORE CDC, LeMoyne-Owen College CDC, Memphis Black Arts Alliance, Memphis Music Magnet, Soulsville Foundation, and SMA itself. Milton emphasizes that his role was that of facilitator; the district members elect their own officers.
A Tale of Two TIFs
While Milton was putting together his conglomerate, another major player was expressing interest in organizing for a TIF in South Memphis.
This was J.W. Gibson, a prominent contractor and developer, who had already been responsible for numerous building projects. Gibson, through his Southeast Regional Development Corporation, had a somewhat different and larger TIF effort in mind, extending to a few areas — the South Main complex, the Medical District, Victorian Village — that were, technically, outside South Memphis proper.
Gibson’s premise was based on the old axiom that “it takes money to make money” and that for a TIF to work properly it should contain some already operating magnet areas to attract potential new investors.
And, in December 2000, he was the first to get his application in to the CRA for its appraisal.
Milton was still involved in the process of sounding out all his community agencies on collaborating in the TIF process. Gibson’s application upped the ante for him.
“We had to ensure that our body had the broad support of the community. We couldn’t just arbitrarily say we represented the community. We held numerous town hall meetings to get their approval to go speak on their behalf,” Milton says.
“Our reasoning for not turning ours in at the same time as J.W.’s was very clear. Until we met with every community that would be represented in our TIF district, we could not turn in an application. We made it clear to the CRA we would not do so.”
Milton’s group reached out for expert advice, hiring Andy Kitsinger, chief designer of Development Studio, an organization which specializes in the kind of by-the-bootstraps economic effort that the newly formed SNDD was seeking.
Kitsinger had acquired his experience and demonstrated his chops by assisting in several other projects, including a successful and functioning TIF in Binghampton. Once on the Soulsville job, Kitsinger saw the developing TIF as one that was “aimed at creating stability, at preventing displacement of the existing population and spurring the development of affordable housing.”
“We worked a long time at getting input from the South Memphis community, getting a sense of their highest priorities, which included blight remediation and affordable housing,” Kitsinger says.
Finally, the SNDD was ready with its proposal and submitted it to the CRA in April. “It put a lot of pressure on them to make a decision,” recalls Milton. The usual situation for the CRA was that the agency would receive a single application for a single project area. Here it was having to deal with two groups — Milton’s and Gibson’s — submitting overlapping applications for approval.
“I didn’t see it as competition,” says Milton. “My theory was that it was twice as good to have two organizations wanting to do something for the community, but the CRA had never experienced that before.”
Complicating the predicament was the fact that one mayor, Lee Harris of Shelby County, was publicly endorsing the Gibson project, while another, Jim Strickland of Memphis, was encouraging Milton and SNDD. “He understood the necessity for the community to control this. He got the idea what we were trying to do,” Milton says.
Even today, Milton and Gibson, the impresarios of the two separate TIFs, do not speak ill of each other. Yet they were definitely rivals, and their missions, while overlapping, did operate on different premises.
Gibson made it clear that, without specific magnet areas already functioning in a target area, “your baseline is extremely low,” making it “extremely difficult to attract investors.” Hence, his insistence on a larger territorial spread, consisting of some 8,000 parcels, some already generating significant revenue.
The Specter of Gentrification
Milton renders his point of view this way, recalling a recent trip to Nashville. “As members of the County Commission, we get invited to a lot of places outside Shelby County. It’s always the same. They invite us to this very nice new hotel they’ve built, and at some point we’re sitting outside relaxing. And across the street is always a Starbucks, and two people come jogging. I swear it’s the same two people, I don’t care what city it is, it’s the same two people.
“And our host is saying very proudly, ‘Look at this area. Look how beautiful it is. Just five years ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in this neighborhood.’ I mean, here he was an elected official and he didn’t want to come into the area, which I’m sure he represented. And I asked the question, I said, ‘Could you tell me what happened to the local mom-and-pop businesses here and the residents?’ That man looked at me like I cursed his sister out. Because he never thought to talk about that. The fact was, those folks were moved out when they brought those glossier things in.”
What Milton was evoking was the specter of gentrification. “What happens is, in the effort to make an area better, you end up moving the poor out and into a more stable neighborhood. And because they arrive in massive numbers, you destabilize the community. So you’ve got dislocation on both ends,” he says.
“Water always goes downhill. It takes the easiest route. If you’re a business and you want to develop in an inner city community, the best way to do it is to buy up a lot of land in the area, push everybody out, and you can do your development. The hardest thing would be to try to actually go in there and work with the community.”
That’s one way of seeing the dilemma of economic development in an underserved area. To change the community by importing new business or super-charging the environment with up-to-date brick-and-mortar construction is, as Milton suggests, to risk transforming it and displacing its population. We’ve all seen — or even lived or worked in — such changed landscapes. (Hello, Edge District. Hiya, Cordova and Hickory Hill.) Such areas can once again become economic liabilities in the course of time.
Reginald Milton is urging what he acknowledges is basically an “experiment.” Can a poor community lift itself by its own bootstraps? Can it discover within itself the means to regenerate its prospects? In one of his discussions with the CRA, he recast the initials forming TIF this way: “The Indigenous First.”
In the end, the CRA — faced with having to choose between J.W. Gibson’s ambitious model and development expertise and the carefully coordinated community structure of the SNDD — decided upon a uniquely Solomonic solution. It would anoint neither the Gibson project nor that of Milton’s group. Maintaining that both projects were too large as conceived, the CRA produced its own territorial map, consisting of roughly 4,000 parcels, and proclaimed a TIF project under its own auspices.
Gibson, disappointed at the outcome and at the snail’s pace by which the necessary approval of the CRA’s TIF by the City Council and County Commission has advanced since its unveiling last fall, is skeptical of the agency’s reasoning. He points out that the CRA, which contended that a project of 8,000 parcels would stress out its staff, had forwarded out an Uptown TIF involving some 7,700 parcels.
Milton, too, sees something disingenuous in the CRA’s solution — though in a different sense. “Basically, the CRA said, ‘Well, we’re just going to create our own map, and we’re gonna design it on community organizing and outreach,’ which just so happens to have been everything we did. They literally took all our data and our design and copied it. They took it and made it their model. And they reduced our size by just a little. It was basically SNDD’s model.”
But Milton sees in the outcome the cause for a declaration of victory on his group’s part. He and the SNDD board, chaired by Rebecca Matlock Hutchinson of SCORE CDC, are official advisers on the project to CRA, though it is the agency itself that will direct things.
And Gibson has an open invitation to align himself with the CRA model. He and his associate Senchel Matthews are keeping their powder dry on a South Memphis Revitalization Action Plan — including a long-desired grocery store complex — which, to some degree, will undoubtedly come to fruition in part or in parcel.
Meanwhile, the CRA-crafted TIF — the Soulsville TIF — is finally about to hit the council and commission calendars for the final approval stages. There was some symbolic preliminary action last week in the commission on a $1 million grant to be shared by the SNDD itself and three of its components— the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, PURE Youth Athletics Alliance, and SCORE CDC. This funding, through the federal government’s American Rescue Plan, is technically unrelated to the TIF, but it does have the look of a favorable omen.