Downtown Development Is a Failed Policy

I have been watching the Panhandling and Single Beer Sales Ban Ordinances battle for a few weeks. I keep hearing numbers like $5 billion invested over the past 10 years, 20,000 people live downtown, 60,000 people are employed there, etc, etc. Now I am not going to call the Center City Commission liars, but they have an expansive definition of Downtown. Downtown is primarily 4 census tracts, you can throw in Mud Island but living on Mud Island isn't the same as living Downtown. Those census tracts run from EH Crump to the south, Auction to the north, Danny Thomas to the east, and the river to the west. What happens is that the CCC's turf and the Medical District's turf overlap east of Danny Thomas. So I figure the CCC is poaching some of those job numbers to pad their stats and including Mud Island in the population numbers. I just wanted to cast a bit of a critical eye on those tossed around numbers. Over at West Tennessee Liberal, there has been a great job done examining all that "studying" the CCC has done and their heavy reliance on a policy out of Seattle. To say the CCC is cherry picking data from that policy evaluation would be considered pushing the boundaries of the proper usage of the term "cherry picking".

At this point you are wondering what does this have to do with the title of this blog post. Well, here we go. What was promised when all this downtown redevelopment started and was embraced as development plan by local government, was that by bringing downtown up it would raise the whole city. Let me say now that has proven to be a failure on an epic scale. It is true those 4 census tracts have gained population over the past 10 to 20 years. Woohoo, 20,000 people live in "downtown". Well in the past 10 years the city as a whole has lost 50,000 and we've lost even more over the past 20 years when you factor in all people we added through annexation. There are about 160 census tracts in the city, about 2/3s of those have lost population, the biggest losers being the census tracts closest to downtown. Compounding that, much of those 100 census tracts have poorer people living there today than 20 or even 10 years ago.

As for downtown being an economic hub and job creator, this is not as what the data is showing. The commute times for people living immediately around downtown but not in the 4 census tracts have greatly increased (here's a flyer article about it). Why are people who live the closest to downtown having to drive or ride our crappy MATA system further and further east if downtown is such economic engine? The CCC recently increased it's subsidies to office space renters to try to get more businesses downtown. Good luck with that. In addition, there are so many pilots issued downtown that last seemingly forever, the city still isn't get much property tax revenue out of the area.

So after banging the CCC on it's data, I'd now like to quote some of their statistics from a poll they did a couple years ago. (Note, this poll disproportionately sampled middle/upper class white folks, kind of tells you who their focus group is. Middle and upper class white folks make up about 25 to 30% of the city's population) Here was the question- "Why do you not go downtown more often?" The 3rd most common answer was "too far to drive" by 15.8% of respondents. Maybe if we would have dispersed some of that $5 billion around the city we could have kept more people in it and folks wouldn't have had to drive so far to go to our more modest downtown. The 4th most common answer was "not interested" with 12.5%. People could have stayed uninterested in downtown and still lived in Memphis, but no we lost these taxpaying residents AND they don't want to come downtown. Thank god we have $35 million boat dock to change these folks minds. Number 2 and number 5 are my favorites. 2 was "parking is inconvenient" and 5 was "parking was expensive". What did the CCC do not a little over a week ago? Bust all the wildcat parking lots south of the FedEx Forum and on the edge of one of those downtown census tracts. The CCC was down $11,000 at one of it's related Central Parking lots and sent code enforcement out to bust folks muscling in on CCC action. I'd like to add that the neighborhood where this wildcat parking was happening is one of the poorest in the city. I believe Phil Jackson, coach of the Lakers, said it looked like Beruit in the 1980's. Yet the CCC says screw you (even though we are sucking at our job), we are still a subsidized monopoly with government protection. Oh, and coming in #8 with a bullet at 4.6% of the vote, panhandlers. Yes CCC you are all over doing your job well as a government protected monopoly.

By CCC's own survey not only are they failing, but Downtown development is failing. The city poured finite resources into downtown and neglected the rest of city as it crumbled. Now we have squatters on condominium complexes all the way out in Fox Meadows. (Boohoo says CCC, we can't sell our $200,000 condominiums in Downtown, even sans squatters.) You have homeless people sleeping in Audubon Park (but they better not in Confederate Park!). There are over 8,000 empty houses in the city. Yet we still have to focus all our attention on the #8 problem in downtown. We have to fill up the jails with the homeless and panhandlers, costing tax payers not only in Memphis but all of Shelby County hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs and hundreds of thousands more in jail costs. So when all these homeless people and panhandlers go to your neighborhood, cause fires in vacant houses (which costs thousands of dollars to the fire department to pay to put out and a couple thousand more for the city to demolish), sleep in your parks, and ask you for money at the gas station, ask your city council person why your neighborhood
1) doesn't have a direct line to the police department like the CCC even though downtown is the safest area of the city?
2) how much money was invested in the past 10 years (because it sure ain't $5 billion)
3) doesn't have super duper, glorified neighborhood association with direct ties to the City Council like the Center City Commission
4) where are the PILOT revenues to fix our neighborhood up
5) how did you vote on the Panhandling and Single Beer Ban ordinances that brought all these panhandlers and homeless folks here

and finally
6) Do you as a city council person think downtown development has benefited this neighborhood?