Pinch District condos bolster Downtown living

By Amos Maki
Memphis Business Journal
Updated: 7:00 p.m. ET Jan. 16, 2005

Betting on the success of Uptown to spur interest in living in the north end of Downtown, a group of developers is set to build a condominium project in the heart of the Pinch District.

Barnett Naylor Construction Services Group will build Harbor Lights, a $5 million, 24-unit condominium development, at the corner of Front Street and North Parkway, directly across the street from the Pyramid arena.

The developers expect to break ground on the project in March and be open a year later. The condos will range in size from 1,200-1,700 square feet and cost $200,000-$350,000.

Tammy Morgan of Naylor Construction is high on the area, citing St. Jude Children's Research Hospital's expansion and the continued emergence of Uptown. The company has offices on Front Street in the Pinch.

"This is where we're concentrating some of our efforts," Morgan says. "St. Jude is here and is a big player in this part of town. They are going through an expansion and all those doctors and researchers will need a place to live."

St. Jude is in the process of a $1 billion, five-year expansion that is doubling the size of the original campus.

"By putting in a residential unit like this, we hope it kicks off more development," Morgan says. "I think when we break ground on this people who have been waiting on the edge will jump in."

The Pinch District has been drawing the attention of developers recently.

Bluff City Group LLC is nearing completion of a 20,000-square-foot retail and residential project located at the corner of Auction and Front streets. The $2 million Turning Pointe development is the company's first venture, and it will feature 8,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor and 12,000 square feet of residential space on the second and third floors.

The Memphis chapter of Bridges USA, a national youth services organization designed to help high school students become future leaders, built a $9.5 million complex in Downtown just north of St. Jude.

In Uptown, work on The Metropolitan, a 114-unit apartment complex of 19 buildings covering six acres, is nearing completion. The complex is made up of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, which will lease for $562 a month, $674 a month and $775 a month, respectively. The apartments range from 750-1,400 square feet in size.

"Outside of Harbor Town and the South Bluffs, it's the first set of garden style apartments Downtown," says The Metropolitan property manager Jim Kilboy. "It's something brand new for Downtown."

So far, Kilboy has leased seven of the Uptown Partnership apartments. The Uptown Partnership is a collaborative effort between Henry Turley Co. and Belz Enterprises.

"I'm leasing them as fast as I can get them," he says. "As soon as the contractors turn them over, we fill them up."

The Metropolitan is the last of three leasing components of Uptown to come online. The other two, Uptown Square and Greenlaw Place, are completed and leasing.

In another sign of the continued resurgence of Downtown, a new project is under way that could finalize the redevelopment of the area around AutoZone Park.

At 287 Madison, Mike Todd of Monroe Associates LLC, is renovating the three-story structure for a possible condominium development.

Nestled between the 385-unit Echelon at The Ballpark apartment complex that opened in 2001 and directly across the street from the Downtown School, the 44,000-square-foot building was the last remaining piece of the redevelopment puzzle around AutoZone Park.

Todd says construction will be done in phases, starting with a 29-space underground parking garage and $150,000 in facade improvements, including restoring 18 original windows on the second and third floors and placing an awning out front.

"It will have a nice impact as you come down (Madison) and into Downtown," Todd says. "It is very well located and it offers a lot of flexibility in design."

Todd is counting on the aesthetic improvements to make the building more attractive to future developers, although he says he could move forward with a condominium project of his own.

"We'll see what type of bump in interest we get from creating this facade," he says. "I think it is going to be high. If I end up being the final developer, condos will probably be the most feasible."

Ten years into plan, goals still elusive

By Blake Fontenay
January 9, 2005

Almost 10 years ago, the Memphis 2005 plan was introduced with great fanfare.

A coalition made up of about a dozen government, educational and business organizations came up with what they hoped would be a blueprint for the community's future.

The plan included specific goals covering everything from economic development to education to crime. Memphis wanted to measure its progress against seven peer cities, mostly its neighbors in the South.

The initial commitment to reach those goals seemed strong.

"This is not a planning effort that is intended to ... reside on the shelf,'' proclaimed John Kelley, then chairman of the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, when the plan's details were unveiled in November 1995.

The plan hasn't exactly been shelved, although it has been through some big changes during the past decade.

For one, it's now called "Think Memphis: Planning Ahead." Some of the goals have been modified or expanded. And even though many different groups collaborated on the original document, it's now primarily used by the chamber of commerce, an organization now known as the Memphis Regional Chamber.

Marc Jordan, the chamber's president and chief executive officer, said the original plan called for funding from city and county government to be matched by private contributions.

As the local governments have gone through tough times, their contributions have steadily declined, though.

City and county funding for the plan peaked at slightly under $1.4 million in 1999 and dropped to around $600,000 last year.

Meanwhile, private fund-raising has remained around $1 million to $1.2 million annually since 1997.

"The public sector funding sort of went away after a while,'' Jordan said. "As we look back on it, we probably didn't do a good job of keeping the coalition together."

In order to fulfill some of the plan's more lofty goals, such as providing more job training programs to the local workforce, Jordan said a greater private sector commitment will be needed.

Which isn't to say the plan has been a total failure.

For example, one of the early goals was to bring at least $1 billion worth of new nonresidential capital investment into the community each year.

That threshold was met from 1997 through 2003. Chamber officials are still collecting some data from last year, although the $1 billion mark appears to have been reached again.

Another one of the plan's goals was to bring 12,500 new jobs into the community each year. That goal has been met only twice, during 1997 and 1998. However, other peer cities have fared worse in job creation during a shaky period in the nation's economy.

In 2002 and 2003, the Memphis metro area attracted 5,000 new jobs. During that time, the average in Memphis's peer cities was a net job loss of 5,500. Only Nashville fared better than Memphis, with 8,500 jobs created during that span.

In terms of overall economic strength, Memphis still lags behind its peer cities.

POLICOM, an independent economics research firm based in Florida, ranked Memphis 23rd among 361 metropolitan areas nationwide based on statistics collected over a period of several years.

Six of the seven peer cities -- Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Indianapolis and Nashville -- all finished higher in POLICOM's survey. Only Louisville, Ky., which ranked 30th, finished lower than Memphis among the Memphis 2005 plan's designated peer cities.

John Threadgill, the chamber's chief administrative officer, sees that as an indicator of how ambitious the original plan was.

"Obviously, we picked some darned good cities to benchmark,'' Threadgill wrote in an E-mail. "One could easily say that Memphis is in the major leagues of economic development, we're just not going to win the 'World Series' in a year or two."

A research team at the University of Memphis has helped the chamber keep track of progress in meeting the plan's goals from year to year.

David Cox, executive assistant to university president Shirley Raines, pointed out that many of the benchmarks, such as school test scores or crime statistics, are beyond the chamber's control.

Cox said the chamber can and does play a role in the community's economic future through the types of companies it tries to bring here.

However, Cox said public policy issues, such as taxation and local government's commitment to neighborhood revitalization projects, are also factors.

"The initial 2005 (plan) was very ambitious,'' Cox said. "It touched on so many areas of the community."

Copyright 2005, commercialappeal.com - Memphis, TN.