A Dense Population, Often Considered a Bad Thing, Can Reduce the Cost of City Services and Improve a City’s Quality of Life. That’s the Goal of Memphis 3.0.
By Tom Jones
Density matters and the government planners plotting ways for Memphis to move ahead clearly believe it should matter as much to us as it does to them.
After all, they mention density 105 times in Memphis 3.0, the city’s first comprehensive plan in 40 years. In the plan — recognized as exemplary in 2020 by the American Planning Association — the Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development makes the case that more people per square mile is the key to Memphis’ bright future.
It’s likely the toughest sell in the plan, but anyone who pays Memphis property taxes should care. Lower density — the number of people living in a square mile — makes public services more expensive.
“Memphis cannot continue its growth policy of the past,” the authors of Memphis 3.0 wrote. “The City will succeed by creating compact communities where land use and density support walkable, active, and transit-served communities with growth in priority redevelopment areas supporting higher density in-fill, and mix of uses.”
The challenge to talking about density is how it’s defined and how it’s implemented. Density provokes images of neighborhoods that only exist because residents fought for them being destabilized by existing homes turned into duplexes and fourplexes, by more apartment buildings, and by aggravating the problem absentee owners by attracting more.
Planners say this is not their intent.
The most vocal concerns about density come from Midtown, which is itself a model of density that’s working, but also a reminder of how fragile neighborhoods like it can be.
In many inner-city neighborhoods, half of the houses that were once there are gone, leaving vacant lots and abandoned structures. The “missing teeth” of these once-dense neighborhoods drive up the costs of delivering city services and maintaining public infrastructure; however, they share Midtown’s pride about their neighborhoods and concerns that density will damage their character.
The best news about Memphis 3.0 is its dramatic departure from the so-called “growth policies” of the past that produced low-density suburban sprawl, economic segregation, disinvestment in inner-city neighborhoods, and increases in public budgets.
Memphis 3.0 is what planners call “place-based,” which means the plan emphasizes anchors and investments in primary streets, neighborhoods, and districts that already exist, all with the aim of creating more walkable neighborhoods served by public transit, growing business and retail, reducing blight, enhancing neighborhood distinctiveness, and attracting new people.
Like most things in cities, it won’t be easy.
City government budgets today pay for services over a land area that grew 60 percent since 1970 and is larger than St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Atlanta combined. The average density in those cities is 4,200 people per square mile. In Memphis, the land area went up from 129 square miles in 1960 to 295 today, decreasing density from 3,857 people per square mile to 2,146 by 2020.
The late planner Tommy Pacello determined that between 1970 and 2000, 170,000 people moved out of 1970 Memphis and city government decided to address its “great migration” with aggressive annexation. In the end, this strategy meant that Memphis had too few people living on too much land. The impact of this imbalance rippled through city government budgets, increasing the cost of services, pitting quality of life investments like libraries and parks in core neighborhoods in a losing battle against climbing police and fire costs.
Everything changed in 2014 when the balance of power shifted away from Tennessee cities. No longer could they unilaterally annex. Rather, a new state law said annexation could only happen with the written consent of owners of the land or by referendum.
But the city still had a target on its back in the state Legislature and it led Memphis to de-annex Eads/River Bottom, Southwind/Windyke, South Cordova, and Rocky Point, where about 11,000 people lived.
Memphis City Hall billed deannexation as “a measured approach to rightsizing Memphis” but in the end, it was actually about taking enough action to placate state legislators. The answer to what is Memphis’ right size — its land area, its tax and bond implications, and service delivery impacts — was left undecided.
Getting to the answer would have been a valuable exercise in determining “right size” scenarios. It could have determined the impact on density by Memphis’ population decline of 30,250 since 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It recently announced that Shelby County lost more population between 2023 and 2024 than any other U.S. county with at least 20,000 people. That loss is clearly Memphis-related; the population of the county’s other municipalities were stable.
It was in the context of these right-sizing efforts that Memphis 3.0 was developed. From the beginning, it set out three “guiding values” for its “Build Up, Not Out” focus. Density was chief among them.
“Memphis cannot continue its growth policy of the past,” the authors of Memphis 3.0 wrote. “The City will succeed by creating compact communities where land use and density support walkable, active, and transit-served communities with growth in priority redevelopment areas supporting higher density in-fill, and mix of uses.” This in turn makes city services more economical and efficient.
And yet, what seems to be missing is a complementary plan that aims to accomplish the most obvious way to achieve greater density — by luring back the people who left Memphis for the green fields of sprawl.
The last comprehensive plan before Memphis 3.0 was released back when the Commodore 64 computer was all the rage. Memphis 3.0 was released in 2019 when Google became the first to create a quantum computer.
In other words, the world had drastically changed and so had Memphis, where the changes took place over decades when local government lacked a commitment to urban planning.
Memphis 3.0 changed that. It is serious planning for serious times, and Memphians are serious about discussions regarding what density really means for their neighborhoods. The best solutions for cities often emerge when public passion and urban planning converge. After all, everyone involved — they are a neighborhood advocate and city planner — lives in Memphis and should be invested in finding its best future.
Tom Jones is the principal of Smart City Consulting, which specializes in strategic communication, public policy development, strategic planning. He tends the 20-year-old Smart City Memphis blog and is an author with experience in local government. He can be reached at tjones@smartcityconsulting.com.
For Planned Density, It’s About Planning.
By Robert Gordon
The biggest investment most of us will ever make is in our home. Memphis 3.0 discourages owner-occupancy and encourages duplex and multi-family housing, selling out neighborhoods to landlords — which today often means absentee landlords. In Memphis, the trend for non-local and especially non-USA landlords has risen dramatically in the past decade. While homeowners may care for their lawns, landlords generally care for their bottom line.
When Midtown was landlord-heavy in the 1960s and 1970s, the city recognized the problem and under the citizen-centric reign of Housing Director Gwen Awsumb, the city helped establish neighborhood associations and created the Memphis Landmarks Commission to honor and protect the well-preserved housing that so many other cities envy. The Midtown neighborhoods banded together and fought to be “down-zoned” which, over the next decade, helped begin the transformation to owner-occupants and resulted in today’s broadly stable Midtown with its solid mix of owners and renters.
Instead of unleashing developers to gobble up preserved neighborhoods, with Small Area Plans we can achieve more density without breaking what’s working. Memphis 3.0 is an expressway back to instability and lack of pride in place.
In May, the city will hear a case about a developer who seeks to tear down one beautiful 1948 home and replace it with 11 homes. The application trumpets in its first paragraph that the development is “consistent with the Anchor Neighborhood — Primarily Single-Unit ‘Accelerate’ designation” given by Memphis 3.0’s Future Land Use Planning Map, through the City’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD).
This map is the core problem with Memphis 3.0. The volunteer organization MidtownMemphis.org, with which I am associated, has called for a five-year moratorium on land-use decisions based on that map because it has involved minimal research, is inequitable, and ignores the affected neighborhood’s characteristics.
If the 3.0 map passes, as multi-family begins to intensify in single-family neighborhoods, home buyers will seek the areas that 3.0 deems “not affected” — single-family neighborhoods that won’t change. A superficial glance at 3.0’s Future Land Use Planning Map makes plain what’s inequitable: The density burden is placed on North and South Memphis and Midtown. East Memphis between Poplar and Sam Cooper/I-40, from Highland to Germantown is, with little exception, designated “not affected” by 3.0. Those many square miles will become the most valuable housing area in the city — much more so than now because other areas will be in decline. (My own home is in a small “not affected” area in Midtown, so small that “contextual infill,” which allows zoning exceptions if similar development is nearby, will quickly eliminate it. Also, I’m a Midtown landlord, so if the map passes, I stand to benefit financially on both accounts, initially — until the corrosion becomes apparent and 3.0 diminishes the value of the whole city.)
If Memphis were a blank slate without 200 years of development, this plan would be fantastic. Memphis 3.0 is a cookie-cutter plan from Opticos in Berkeley, California; a similar plan worked well for Seaside, Florida, built atop empty land. But as noted city thinker Tom Jones recently wrote in this magazine [“Living in a Shrinking City,” December 2024], “If there is a main lesson to be gleaned from other cities, it is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to population loss. Rather, solutions that work for each city must be organic and appropriate to its distinctive trends and conditions.”
If you’ve ever driven visitors through the tree rings of Memphis’ growth — from Victorian Village (latter-1800s) to Midtown (early-1900s) to the vast array of mid-century modern homes in the east, and you’ve heard them exclaim at the beauty, then understand that Memphis 3.0 does not value that. The example above, in the Red Acres neighborhood on Poplar Avenue near Highland, is just the latest; last year, developers tried similar projects in Central Gardens and in Evergreen. Active neighborhood associations banded neighbors together to protest in person at the hearings and their forceful presence swayed the board members. There will be more.
If you’ve attended a city-sponsored 3.0 meeting in your “planning district,” you know that at the first meeting they’ve asked the few attendees who show up — Midtown’s turnout was the exception — to confirm or establish anchors. The DPD’s determination for anchors is vague and arbitrary: LeMoyne-Owen but not Rhodes; hospitals but not schools or churches or parks; a small business district on Cooper but not “high-intensity commercial’ districts in East Memphis.
At the second meeting a few weeks later, there are vast “land use” circles radiating from these anchors, indicating the city’s “up-zoned” vision for these neighborhoods — supporting duplexes and multi-family. The few weeks between allow no time for research into any of those neighborhoods’ history, demographics, boundaries, infrastructure, tree loss, water runoff, or any of the basic tenets of neighborhood analysis. For the unicorn-believers, turn to page 58 of 3.0 and see the planning technique boldly on display: two compass circles. How in the world did a city with as many smart, innovative people as Memphis find itself doing city-planning by compass?
MidtownMemphis.org supports planned density. Memphis 3.0 devotes several pages to Small Area Plans, meaning on-the-ground research before development. Instead of unleashing developers to gobble up preserved neighborhoods, with Small Area Plans we can achieve more density without breaking what’s working. Memphis 3.0 is an expressway back to instability and lack of pride in place. History is shouting that warning to us.
Author and filmmaker Robert Gordon is chair of planning and development for MidtownMemphis.org
