The Poverty Occupation. There Aren't Going to be Any Green Zones Here

Today, I was forwarded a blog post by Mr. Paul Ryburn. It was about Triangle Noir. Mr. Ryburn argued that this would be good for downtown because it clear out the occupants of Cleaborn and Foote Homes. It has been stated numerous times that Downtown has the lowest crime rate of any area in the city, so why I should be particularly concerned about crime there as opposed to Raliegh, Frayser, Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, the U of M area, etc, I’m not sure. Maybe it has something to do with class. But that’s neither here nor there, the occupants of these public housing units are apparently criminals and should be taken away from the area. Here’s Mr. Ryburn’s words- “This could help clean up crime Downtown, as many of the area's panhandlers list Foote and Cleaborn addresses when they get arrested. Their arrests include not only panhandling charges, but car break-ins, burglaries, and drug charges. Not nice people to have as neighbors.”

The public housing projects of Memphis were in poor condition and the city was mandated to demolish and replace them with Hope VI projects and section 8 housing over a decade ago. Memphis has been a model for Hope VI redevelopments and recognized doing a good job with the physical infrastructure of these neighborhoods. For that we should be proud. Here’s the catch though, Hope VI cleans up blight, it’s not so good at addressing the underlying root of poverty. Hope VI was a little different when it started, it was more about empowering the residents of the these poor neighborhoods and helping alleviate poverty, but like all government policies with budgets of billions of dollars, you get some lobbyist representing developer interests and the program changes over the years.

Concentrated poverty that existed in Memphis was awful. People shouldn’t have been made to live in conditions like that and federal government correctly mandated the demolition of Memphis’ pubic housing projects. Section 8 allowed people to move to declining neighborhoods that were better than the public housing. These neighborhoods were already stressed because they had declining rates of home ownership and increasing rates of rental housing. A problem with decentralizing poverty was that there were no support systems in place for all these poorer folks spread out across the city. Just because you move a person into area with higher income levels doesn’t mean they’ll get wealthier by osmosis. You can probably guess the real and perceived problems that come from this. Not everybody loses in this situation though. Places that had no property value because poor black folks lived there have new found value and cotton fields outside the city go up in price because subdivisions are needed for all the white flight. Hhmm, what business group would be interested in changing property values? It is communist propaganda that this same business group would have any influence over local government too.

You are probably wondering at this point what the connection between crime and downtown development that started this blog post is. I’m getting back to that. Remember back in the 1990’s when we were told that downtown redevelopment would be the economic engine that improved the conditions of the whole city. That seems like a long time ago and galaxy far far away doesn’t it. Close to $4 billion in public and private investment has been allocated to downtown. Things ranging from a $255 million basketball stadium to a $30 million boat dock. Aside from those Hope VI projects and downtown, how many areas of the city can say their neighborhood is in better condition now than it was 15 years ago? Maybe it was that left over Reagan thinking that wealth would trickle down and poverty would just fade away or we could just lock poor people up. Or perhaps people knew it wouldn’t work and were just getting their piece of the pie. Could be a combination of all of them. The tragedy is we had some money to address root causes of poverty not just superficial blight. Now we don’t, but even after the downtown redevelopment model failed, with poverty and crime worsening across the city, I still have to worry about the area of city with the lowest crime rate and smallest population. What else does the citizens of Memphis have to give downtown? Was our taxes, resources, and cops not enough? Now downtown want these residential neighborhoods to take even more of the poor and the homeless. The complete lack of concern for rest of the city by downtowners is stunning. In the 1990’s, the percentage of people living at or below the poverty line was about 20%. During the past few years it has crept up and now tops out at 25%. 1 in 4 people are poor. 150,000 people, enough to fill the Liberty Bowl two and a half times. That number grows everyday and will continue for the next year at a minimum. It doesn’t matter if the city built Triangle Noir tomorrow. There are as many poor people in Memphis as US troops in Iraq.

One final thought about Mr. Ryburn’s argument. Let’s return to his word- “This could help clean up crime Downtown, as many of the area's panhandlers list Foote and Cleaborn addresses when they get arrested. Their arrests include not only panhandling charges, but car break-ins, burglaries, and drug charges. Not nice people to have as neighbors.” And “The Foote Homes and Cleaborn Homes housing projects would be demolished, with renters in those projects given Section 8 vouchers for private housing.” When a person frames an argument like this, why would city council members like 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and most of Super 8 and much of Super 9 want to give “criminals” section 8 vouchers to move into the neighborhoods of such council members as Morrison, Collins, Halbert, Strickland, and Ford. One day soon, a local politician will get the brains and nerve to run a populist campaign with a simple message, “$4 billion for downtown and not a penny anywhere else.” And it will shake the foundations of the political establishment of Memphis. I’m sorry Downtown, you don’t get to be the fenced off Green Zone, come join the rest of the citizens of Memphis in the great social unraveling.