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Memphis seen as an example of success

By Julie Goodman
jgoodman@clarionledger.com

MEMPHIS — Memphis has seen burgeoning residential development in its downtown, spurred initially by the reopening of the Peabody Hotel 24 years ago.

Developers say they descended on the city because of its riverfront property and, eventually, the Autozone Park, home to the minor league Redbirds baseball team, with its inexpensive tickets and family-oriented charm.

They used funky urban styles to lure in the 20- and 30-something crowd, future CEOs who eventually might want to move their businesses to the city. Other homes cater to a different demographic, featuring a classic Southern rivertown theme with porches and clapboard siding.

Here, residents can take in everything from pulled pork to the Rock 'N' Soul Museum, which explains how rural families of yore played music on a diddly bow. It is a far cry from Jackson, Miss., which offers no waterfront or sultry guitar music to pour into the streets at night, although the night life is what city officials are working toward on Farish Street.

Developers, architects and planners mostly from around Tennessee gathered here this week for the "Uptown Downtown and Around Town Memphis" seminar, presented by The Seaside Institute and Looney Ricks Kiss Architects.

Participants discussed what works and what doesn't work for city development. A successful decision could be something as simple as raising a first-floor dwelling several feet to give a resident an elevated view that is not just an eyeful of a sidewalk, they said.

Organizers pointed to areas of Memphis that were once boarded up, rife with urban blight, and have since turned into hotspots for construction and renovation. Warehouses have been converted to loft apartments, decades-old housing projects were torn down for mixed-income dwellings, and a railroad yard was converted into townhouses and apartments.

Downtown streets are studded with portable toilets, with men toiling away on rooftops amid mounds of dirt and construction machinery.

The high-growth sector of downtown Memphis experiences 10.3 percent annual growth, while the city as a whole only experiences 1 percent, said Jeff Sanford, president of the Center City Commission, a public-private partnership charged with downtown redevelopment.

Developers have catered to a range of target markets, investing in everything from sprawling homes overlooking the ballpark to 450-square-foot lofts.

"If someone walked through with a ring through their nose, we had something for them," said Brent Little, a developer who worked on the Echelon at The Ballpark Apartments, $36 million worth of luxury rental property with 9-foot ceilings, gourmet kitchens and granite countertops.

The apartments have a 93 percent occupancy rate.

Paige Close, an architect with the Memphis-based Looney Ricks Kiss firm, a principle designer of the Echelon apartments, also worked on a project that involved converting the top four floors of the historic YMCA into loft apartments, featuring exposed concrete and interior brick facades.

While the downtown area did not fare well in traditional market indicators such as job, population and employee income growth, Close said, it did show a tendency toward higher rents and occupancy rates, and that was enough for developers.

Over the years, the development has helped bring Memphis out of a precipitous decline, brought on in part by massive white flight after the assassination of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

The ballpark, for instance, drew suburban families to downtown, ones who never considered the attraction of the area before.

"There is something about baseball and that beautiful green field, the electric atmosphere and the lights and everything, that just make it spectacular," Close said.

"The other thing we felt like it created was this cohesion between black and white ... It's become this almost civic space where we've reconnected as a community — suburban, urban, white, black, every different socio-economic category out there is part of that audience."

Sanford said there is now $2.5 billion of new construction and renovation under way in downtown Memphis which, by some estimates, still is just about 30 percent of what needs to be done.

Development breeds development, he said. "We're sort of victims of our own success in that regard."