An editorial in last week’s Memphis Flyer applauded a city attorney’s opinion that the City cannot hand over a portion of the Fairgrounds to the Salvation Army. Instead, according to the attorney, the land can be sold to the Salvation Army at market price, which is currently around $3 million. The Salvation Army, using a grant from the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, wants to build a $20 million recreation and community services facility in Memphis; its choice location is one of the more attractive pieces of the Fairgrounds property – the East Parkway frontage between Fairview Junior High School and the old Libertyland site. The facility would represent a $72 million total investment: $48 million donated by the Kroc Foundation and $24 million raised by the Salvation Army in Memphis. The City, of course, envisions yet more housing at the Fairgrounds site; this in spite of the fact that without annexation, Memphis' population would continue its steady decline.
Besides the site location, the City is concerned with potential church-state conflicts. Lest we forget, the Salvation Army is a Christian organization, a church actually. Its roots are in Methodism, and it has a decidedly evangelical slant. Its leaders serve dual roles: they are both program administrators and clergy. Certainly, the City of Memphis should not be expected to provide public lands for churches. Besides the Constitutional concerns, there simply is not enough prime space to satisfy everyone; each religion or denomination would cry foul because another was given frontage space at a busy intersection.
Yet, if the Kroc Center does not get built, the community as a whole—regardless of religion—will lose. The same Memphis Flyer issue that praised the city attorney’s opinion includes an article about the rise of juvenile crime in Shelby County. The summer of 2006 was a disastrous one for teens in Memphis; the shutdown of Libertyland and the lack of a coordinated City summer job program left thousands of inner-city teens with little to do. A crime wave that lasted all summer left Memphis residents fearful for their safety and several teens injured or killed. A Kroc Center centrally located at the Fairgrounds would be accessible to teens in some of the least advantaged areas of Memphis via a single bus ride.
A quick glance at the homepage of the San Diego Kroc Center gives an idea of the kinds of services Memphians could expect from a Kroc Center here. Sports and arts programs, parenting classes, tutoring, child abuse prevention programs, and emergency food and housing assistance are among the services offered by the San Diego Kroc Center. Certainly, regardless of religious preference, we should all be able to agree that those services would benefit the Memphis community. Should we remind ourselves of the statistics? Memphis is second in the country in violent crime. Memphis has the highest infant mortality rate in Tennessee. Only 65 percent of Memphis City Schools students graduate high school.
Despite the good things the Kroc Center can do for Memphis and the City’s need for these things to be done, the question remains: Should a religious organization that provides much-needed services to the entire community be excluded from City programs that are designed to help the community? Until recently, the City has had little problem giving tax credits to for-profit companies that locate here, even though many offer only the slimmest promise of having a positive economic impact on the City. The Kroc Center, on the other hand, will undoubtedly have a positive effect for years to come on areas of Memphis where other development has all but stopped. What are those who oppose the Kroc Center on religious freedom grounds doing to raise up the Binghampton, Beltline, and Orange Mound communities? If the statistics are to be trusted, it is clear that few—save for a handful of dedicated community and religious leaders—are doing anything to help those communities. What is the greater good: the individual’s freedom or the community’s needs? This is a discussion that is worthy of more than an attorney’s solid-as-the-Gospel opinion.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Friday, October 20, 2006
Don't Feed the Bears... I mean the homless
Good post, Emily. It's interesting to note the contrast between this recent post on Smart City Memphis, which calls from increased police attention to the city’s downtown vagrancy problem, and Otis White’s column, which argues that locking up sidewalk sleepers won’t solve the problem until cities first provide adequate options for shelter. (Of course, I guess one could argue that Memphis has provided adequate options, and it’s now time for a crackdown on those who are not taking the options.) This is a tricky problem because while it is hard not to view a “sweep up the homeless” campaign as part of an attempt to create a shiny tourist bubble (making the city look nice for outsiders while hiding our real problems), I can understand the frustration of the Smart City Memphis poster:
There’s more good discussion in the comments to the Smart City Memphis post.
We tried to be philosophical this year, but it’s just too hard when the problem
takes up residence on the front steps.So, don’t tell us in the posters
canvassing our neighborhood that we should “say yes to charities that help the
homeless and the needy.” We say yes to the charities but we also say yes to
dealing with the problem where it exists, in the alleys and sidewalks all over
downtown.
There’s more good discussion in the comments to the Smart City Memphis post.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Lunch Pails or Laptops
If you were the economic development director for a major US city, which list of cities would you want yours to emulate?
List A
San Francisco
Austin
Boston
Seattle
Portland
Houston
Raleigh-Durham
Washington
New York
Minneapolis-St Paul
List B
Riverside-San Bernardino
Camden
Ft. Lauderdale
Newark
Las Vegas
San Antonio
West Palm Beach
Orlando
Oklahoma City
Richmond-Petersburg
You would probably pick list A; and who could blame you? Who doesn’t want to be like Seattle, New York, Portland? If you haven’t guessed, list A consists of large metro areas that rank in the top 25 of Richard Florida’s Creativity Index. But what if I told you that list B is made up of places that ranked among the “top 25 cities for doing business” according to a recent study? (Yes, Camden.) And what if I also told you that the same study cited 5 of the cities from list A among the “10 worst metro areas?” Might you change your mind? (Of course, you’d probably want to see the study first. It was conducted by Joel Kotkin and David Friedman for Inc. Magazine. The rankings are based on current and historical job growth as well as balance among industries. You can find it here.)
This little exercise is intended to turn the creative class ideology – the idea that cities need to attract a certain breed of creative professionals to remain economically vital – on its head. Others have beaten me to it. In a City Journal article titled “The Curse of the Creative Class,” Steven Malanga points out that “since 1993, cities that score best on Florida’s analysis have actually grown no faster than the overall US economy, increasing their employment base by only slightly more than 17 percent. Florida’s indexes, in fact, are such poor predictors of economic performance that his top cities haven’t even outperformed his bottom ones. Led by big percentage gains in Las Vegas (the fastest-growing local economy in the nation) as wekk as in Oklahoma City and Memphis, Florida’s ten least creative cities turn out to be job powerhouses, adding more than 19 percent to their job totals since 1993 – faster growth even than the national economy.”
While I’m put off by Malanga’s sardonic tone – especially his use of “the professor” as a term of derision – his position is worth consideration. Both Malanga and Kotkin, one of Florida’s most vocal detractors, argue that traditional factors are more important ingredients of growth. Affordability tops the list – both in terms of cost of living (including real estate prices) and the costs of doing business (including tax burden).
Still, even if the job growth figures cited above cannot be refuted, I admit that it’s easier to swallow list A as a group of role model cities. And I assume others probably feel the same way. So, why are those cities are innately more appealing, in spite of credible evidence? There are lots of reasons, but perhaps intellectual elitism plays a role. We know that the cities in list A are places with lots of high tech workers and artists of all kinds, but the sources of job growth in the list B cities are unknown, probably very broad, and likely to include lots of regular blue-collar Bubbas. For those of us who study cities (and therefore think we know best) the term growth seems to mean a certain kind of growth – it means more laptops, not more lunch pails! Image is everything, and the list A cities surely have a better image.
Sticking with the theme of elitism, consider the following. When cities like Cincinnati start distributing public money through “cultural funds” to attract edgy arts groups and bohemian culture, how widely are the benefits spread among the population? When we reshape our urban landscape to create entertainment districts, condos, and apartments that appeal to a moving target of young creative types what impact does it have on the locational decision of traditional middle class families? And at what point do we go from real cities with soul to PotemkinVillages?
List A
San Francisco
Austin
Boston
Seattle
Portland
Houston
Raleigh-Durham
Washington
New York
Minneapolis-St Paul
List B
Riverside-San Bernardino
Camden
Ft. Lauderdale
Newark
Las Vegas
San Antonio
West Palm Beach
Orlando
Oklahoma City
Richmond-Petersburg
You would probably pick list A; and who could blame you? Who doesn’t want to be like Seattle, New York, Portland? If you haven’t guessed, list A consists of large metro areas that rank in the top 25 of Richard Florida’s Creativity Index. But what if I told you that list B is made up of places that ranked among the “top 25 cities for doing business” according to a recent study? (Yes, Camden.) And what if I also told you that the same study cited 5 of the cities from list A among the “10 worst metro areas?” Might you change your mind? (Of course, you’d probably want to see the study first. It was conducted by Joel Kotkin and David Friedman for Inc. Magazine. The rankings are based on current and historical job growth as well as balance among industries. You can find it here.)
This little exercise is intended to turn the creative class ideology – the idea that cities need to attract a certain breed of creative professionals to remain economically vital – on its head. Others have beaten me to it. In a City Journal article titled “The Curse of the Creative Class,” Steven Malanga points out that “since 1993, cities that score best on Florida’s analysis have actually grown no faster than the overall US economy, increasing their employment base by only slightly more than 17 percent. Florida’s indexes, in fact, are such poor predictors of economic performance that his top cities haven’t even outperformed his bottom ones. Led by big percentage gains in Las Vegas (the fastest-growing local economy in the nation) as wekk as in Oklahoma City and Memphis, Florida’s ten least creative cities turn out to be job powerhouses, adding more than 19 percent to their job totals since 1993 – faster growth even than the national economy.”
While I’m put off by Malanga’s sardonic tone – especially his use of “the professor” as a term of derision – his position is worth consideration. Both Malanga and Kotkin, one of Florida’s most vocal detractors, argue that traditional factors are more important ingredients of growth. Affordability tops the list – both in terms of cost of living (including real estate prices) and the costs of doing business (including tax burden).
Still, even if the job growth figures cited above cannot be refuted, I admit that it’s easier to swallow list A as a group of role model cities. And I assume others probably feel the same way. So, why are those cities are innately more appealing, in spite of credible evidence? There are lots of reasons, but perhaps intellectual elitism plays a role. We know that the cities in list A are places with lots of high tech workers and artists of all kinds, but the sources of job growth in the list B cities are unknown, probably very broad, and likely to include lots of regular blue-collar Bubbas. For those of us who study cities (and therefore think we know best) the term growth seems to mean a certain kind of growth – it means more laptops, not more lunch pails! Image is everything, and the list A cities surely have a better image.
Sticking with the theme of elitism, consider the following. When cities like Cincinnati start distributing public money through “cultural funds” to attract edgy arts groups and bohemian culture, how widely are the benefits spread among the population? When we reshape our urban landscape to create entertainment districts, condos, and apartments that appeal to a moving target of young creative types what impact does it have on the locational decision of traditional middle class families? And at what point do we go from real cities with soul to PotemkinVillages?
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