City Shrink

Last weekend's New Orleans Times-Picayune had a two-part series on what Nola needs to learn from Pittsburgh and Buffalo — how to cope with getting smaller.

"Lost population usually translates into widespread blight, crumbling infrastructure, stretched budgets and the loss of civic confidence and clout. But more than three years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans must confront the reality of a reduced population, as resettlement has slowed to a trickle.

Embracing or even accepting a downsized city can be painful for leaders and residents accustomed to seeing their town as the center of the universe -- with reason."

Reading that, I was reminded of something Councilman Kemp Conrad brought up several times when discussing the police residency proposal:

"Memphis has lost 7 percent of its population in the last 10 years if you don't count annexation. That's scary. ... We need rapid change," he said during a Leadership Academy forum.

Of course, New Orleans suffered a devastating tragedy, though the population was already declining before Katrina; our city shrink is more like a balloon deflating.

The story says that the process should be just as thought-out as smart growth, saying some call it "smart decline":

"The process offers opportunities, not just unpalatable choices.

When the warehouse is in disuse, should it be demolished? Can the site be reused in an inventive new way? Can green space be used to mitigate flood risk? Should we rethink zoning laws in lightly populated areas? Can we deed vacant land to neighbors so it will be better kept? Do we need to sustain the entire network of roads, sewer pipes, bridges and gas lines?

Perhaps the most direct — some might say draconian — approach to shrinkage has occurred in Youngstown, Ohio, which has lost more than half its population after a series of steel-mill shutdowns since the mid-1970s."

Youngstown (which, a personal note, was basically where I went to high school and, if memory serves, where Reid Dulberger, the chamber's vp for the MemphisED initiative, was the chamber's executive vp before coming here) has started decommissioning sections of town that have already begun to return to nature. City officials in Cleveland and Pittsburgh steer public money toward areas that have "a fighting chance."

Of course, if you're a glass-half-full-type person, growth has its own problems: sprawl, over-crowding, etc.

The second story in the series talks about ways New Orleans could slim down to match its smaller population. It might be worth Memphis taking a look, as well.

More Farr Side

When Sustainable Urbanism author Doug Farr spoke at the Sustainable Tennessee Regional Opportunity Forum last weekend, he traced the streetcar back to early electric companies looking for a way to use excess electric capacity during the daytime.

Of course, most of the trolleys and streetcar systems now are financed by the federal government (tho Portland, Oregon, is a notable exception; that system was paid for locally).

"Once you federalize it, innovation goes out and overhead comes in," Farr said.

More importantly, for the book, he asked about the density needed to support transit systems and was told that "density is old think."

Instead of looking at population density, transit lines are now planned around nodes: the university area, downtown, the airport.

It's more connect-the-dots than connect-the-people.

Farr's discussion reminded me of our own Madison Avenue line, which links the medical district to downtown ... and judging by the ridership, didn't seem to take into account whether people wanted/needed to ride from the medical district to downtown and vice versa.

And the proposed airport extension is just another node.

I link to this cover story quite a bit, but I'm going to excerpt a bit here:

"It's little wonder that light rail has generated so little excitement. The airport-downtown line would serve only a small fraction of the residents of greater Memphis, a low-density metro area of more than 300 square miles. The train trip would take 29 minutes from beginning to end and make 10 stops. A car can make it in less than 15 minutes. Most customers would have to drive their cars to a light-rail station. ...

"With the uncertainties of $4.52 gas, tight budgets, and a declining Memphis population, the grand vision of a light-rail line from downtown to the airport is by no means a sure thing. Nor does it necessarily make sense.

'Memphis is not a high-density market, so it's pretty difficult to make the numbers work, but I don't want to prejudge them,' says Larry Cox, head of the Memphis and Shelby County Airport Authority.

The project is premised on easing traffic congestion, improving neighborhoods, and sparking development near the rail line. Connection to the FedEx sorting hub is also thrown out occasionally, but suffice it to say that if FedEx, with 35,000 area employees, really wanted a light-rail line, it would be well under way by now.

The other rationales can be easily debunked. Traffic congestion was eased by widening Interstate 240 and the Midtown interchange. It will be further reduced if people drive only when they have to. Except for a fledgling neighborhood called the Edge, Madison Avenue looks even more desolate since the trolley line was built. Ironically, the one big-bucks development MATA might have partially claimed credit for is off the line. In 2006, MATA's board killed the so-called Fairgrounds Alternative and shifted the proposed airport line from Midtown and East Parkway to Lamar and Airways. A year later, developers secured more than $100 million in state Tourism Development Zone funds for the fairgrounds."

(See? I said there would be more on Doug Farr later and here it is. I'm a woman of my word — well, I try, anyway.)

The Vacant Lot as Blank Canvas

I often think of Detroit as one of Memphis' sister cities.

Detroit has 834,000 residents; Memphis has 643,000. Both have large African-American populations; both have fairly high rates of poverty, though Detroit has more. The median household income in Detroit is $28,000. In Memphis, it's $32,500. Then there's Motown and Stax.

It's not the exact same city, but I think both cities struggle with a lot of the same problems.

Detroit's Metro Times has a piece this week that says Detroit's greatest resources are its abundant land and artistic talent. And suggests ways to use both.

(BTW, if you click on this link, you might notice they are in the midst of their Best Of issue, too. Rest assured we didn't steal it from them; it's a pretty common issue in the alt weekly world.)

From the story:

"Detroit, through misfortune, has one natural resource which every other major city in the world except for Paris, with its extensive parks system, covets: land space. It allows for many opportunities transforming the land or placing objects on it. Working with vacant land in some manner is probably the least expensive way to make transformation. You could change the city landscape more cost effectively than a $20 million building could."

With quite a few vacant properties here, I just thought it was something to think about.

Bad Billboards

Apparently L.A. has a problem with their skyline. And, no, it's not smog.

LA Weekly reported this week on 4,000 illegal billboards in the LA area, including one erected last November "in full view of the windowed offices of Los Angeles city billboard inspectors."

On top of that — or as high as that, at least — the city is letting CBS, Clear Channel, and Regency erect 877 light-emitting-diode advertising signs in a sweetheart deal.

The story goes into a lot of detail and history, probably more than the local reader might be interested in. However, in March, the Memphis City Council lifted an almost-two-year-old moratorium on construction of "regular" billboards.

At the same time, they approved a 6-month moratorium on new electronic and digital billboards and old, regular billboards getting rehabbed to digital. The plan is that the new Memphis and Shelby County sign ordinance will be rewritten by then, and it will establish guidelines for digital billboards.

This is something worth watching. Billboards are big business. The city's billboard ordinance keeps new billboards off city streets, only allowing billboards to be erected along interstates. (Obviously, the ones that already exist are grandfathered in.)

Though part of the ordinance prohibits billboard owners from replacing existing billboards on city streets, there's been a bit of legal wrangling from time to time over what "replacing" means (for instance, can a billboard company upgrade a crappy, existing billboard, thus extending its life another 20 years?) Former city council members Rickey Peete and Edmund Ford were both charged with accepting bribes over a billboard project. The billboard companies have even gone after each other from time to time.

The Weekly story echoes something consultant Eric Kelly told the council a few years ago: "When you look at sex businesses in Memphis, it's worse here than in other places," he said. "But with signage, Memphis is in the same boat as everybody else."