Month: April 2018

This week’s Memphis Flyer cover story “Coin Flip: Wealth, Poverty, and Race in Memphis — Myths and Misconceptions” contains commentary from University of Memphis associate professor of sociology/poverty report author, Elena Delavega. This is an edited and hyperlinked transcript of the conversation from which much of that commentary was taken.

Elena Delavega

Memphis Flyer: So, as you know I’m trying to put together a story about the wealth gap, and a lot of it is inspired by the numbers you presented at the Poverty Forum.

Elena Delavega: People talk about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.

But there are no bootstraps.

But there are no bootstraps, right. There are no boots. So I think as a society what we need to do is to create boots. Create the basis for the opportunity to exist. But it does not exist when we ask people to be entrepreneurs but there is no access to credit. When we don’t have things like public transportation.

The city invests a lot of money in PILOTs. And it invests a lot under the premise that they will be able to create low-wage jobs. We have to look at that money and look at what kind of credit can we provide at the micro level to create local and minority-owned businesses. Instead of giving so much money to IKEA couldn’t we have develop a furniture company here? Nationwide and worldwide we’re not investing in people, we just keep giving more to those who have already. And in every conversation about wealth and about income and about disparity and about justice we have we need to talk about wages. And we need to talk about the minimum wage.

The Fight for $15 movement…

$15 is a good start but it is not enough. I have said that the minimum wage should be around $18 an hour. If someone were to work [for $18 an hour] without taking any time off 40 hours a week for 52 weeks in a year that’s a little over $37,000. That’s about what the economic policy Institute says a family of four needs to live in Memphis. When we find those PILOTs on the premise that they’ll bring us jobs that pay $12 an hour, we’re not doing what we’re supposed to do.
[pullquote-1] What are we supposed to do?

I think we need to invest in the micro level. Invest in microloans to promote small businesses here. We also need to have work supports. By work supports I mean things that allow people to have good healthcare, good transportation. You know, the ability to get their job, sustain the job, focus on the job, and pay attention to the job.

Is transportation more urgent than housing?

What happens if we have public transportation that doesn’t exclude any area is that we have no areas that are out of reach.

Part of the problem is it some areas want to remain out of reach. Areas want to remain white. There are areas that want to remain free of poor people.

Lack of public transportation serves as a barrier to certain people in certain areas. I think we need to confront that head-on. Because it is a reality. We need to talk about the racism inherent in trying to be isolated in gated communities…

We can also see this reflected in the six school districts that were formed. We now have seven districts where we had only two. And two was too many. The many school districts have now created a very top-heavy structure. We don’t have one superintendent we have seven. This top-heavy structure exists because we don’t want to be integrated. Memphis has a tremendously large number of private schools and this is also the result of integration.

So we need a system of public transportation to unite the city. We also need to have an ordinance that requires that a certain percentage of housing in any neighborhood is reserved for low-income people. I would say 30%.

30% sounds reasonable.

It can be done. It’s been done in many places. The building I live in Memphis has luxurious apartments and apartments for much lower-income people and we all coexist happily.

These are ideas that were presented by Jane Jacobs in the 1960s. She talked about the importance of having vertical integration — economic integration in addition to racial integration. Because, when services are acceptable and utilized by the middle class poor, people benefit by that. That also raises standards of behavior for the entire community. There’s more interaction within the community and that tends to reduce crime. There are a number of theories that support this.

When we interact with someone and we see them on a daily basis there’s a lot less fear, a lot more understanding, and a lot more respect for each other. There’s also the broken window hypothesis based on research that was conducted and showed that when communities are more invested in and better cared for, that in itself is a deterrent to crime. And I have to ask, what is a young person to do when they are excluded from economic life? From jobs? Who don’t have transportation and can’t access jobs? Who can’t access anything?
[pdf-1] You mention the broken window hypothesis. But even the broken window it takes its name from — does that reflect resident culture or exploitive housing practice?

Both, I think. Exploitive housing is one thing. Housing that is very inexpensive tends to attract people, of course, with the fewest resources. Because, if I have a little bit of extra money, I’m going to try to live in nicer housing.

Then there’s toxic stress caused by poverty. The results of that toxic stress caused by poverty results in more violence, shorter tempers, less ability to have self control. There were two books if you haven’t read I highly recommend.

(Delavega goes to her office bookshelf and pulls down a book.)

This book Evicted by Matthew Desmond.

I read Evicted a couple of months back. It’s pretty fantastic.

It is fantastic.

A lot of stuff in there.

The other is called Scarcity.

Scar City?

No, Scarcity. Scarcity.

I am so sorry. That makes sense. I thought you said “Scar City.”

It’s a small book and it shouldn’t be very expensive. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Little bit.

Mostly it talks about how our needs have a hierarchical order. Physiological needs being first: food, water, sex, maybe. Then shelter, safety, belongingness. Love actually comes after that.

Food and shelter — if someone is already having a lot of difficulty just meeting those needs, they’re not able to focus on greater things. Nobody’s going to paint their greatest masterpiece when they’re hungry. Much as we want to hear of the starving artist, they usually had a lot of nice food and some nice patrons to feed them. So what happens is, when they’re focused on those things they don’t have, they can’t be focused on the future.

That makes sense. And you can see a lot of that kind of thing happening in Evicted.

There was an interesting study conducted on farmers in Asia. Their math skills were measured at the time of harvest when there is plenty. And at planting time. When you have this to do and there is very little. What they discovered measuring IQ is it dropped 10 to 15 points.

We also experience scarcity when we’re against a deadline. Because there can be time scarcity. The difference is that a person who is under a deadline and has time scarcity always has the option to just say, “To hell with this! I’m not going to do it!” The person who is poor and starving does not have the option to say, “To hell with eating! I am never eating again!”

So, those are some of the things that happen. So, there’s a cognitive poverty. But it does go away when the scarcity and the poverty goes away. The poor aren’t poor because they make stupid decisions they make stupid decisions because they’re poor. And growing up in poverty can have lifelong and permanent brain effects.
[pullquote-2] You said something earlier about how, if we addressed all this stuff we wouldn’t need food stamps.It triggered a thought about census numbers I’d been looking at. I’ll get the exact number wrong but something like a quarter-of-a-million people qualify for benefits but less than 60,000 actually receive them.

I did that research, yes. (She goes to her computer to retrieve the data.) And that’s right, very few do. I crunched the numbers for fun.

You crunched numbers for fun?

Crunching numbers is what I do for fun. I’ve done some research that I need to write and I really haven’t had a chance to look at the data. What experiment where we looked at students who had food insecurity. Asked math questions at the beginning of the semester and the end of the semester. Because at the beginning of the semester all the students get $300 in money for food. And at the end of the semester they run out of that. I haven’t looked at my data at that yet.

I was shocked to see how few people who qualify actually receive benefits.

In smaller communities, people are even more resistant. So I looked at 3,200 counties. Many of these were less than 1,500 people or 1,500 households. In small communities there was twice as much resistance to take the food stamps, unless there were a lot of people with disabilities, which seems to make it okay.

That makes sense, I guess. I mean it fits a kind of pattern.

It does.

[pdf-2]
I don’t know if people understand how few people receive assistance or are in public housing. It always seems like such a grave concern. Or if people even understand that public housing wasn’t supposed to be but because it made sense to create housing for workers near work when private entities couldn’t or wouldn’t.

A negligible percent of people who live in poverty in Memphis receive welfare. And the exclusion is a bigger problem. I’d say the exclusion of those who should be receiving those benefits is a much greater problem than abuse.

Because of the multiplier effect. If everybody that qualified for assistance was receiving it that would be a lot more spending power in the community.

Corporate welfare is much larger than the amount the federal government spends on food stamps or welfare at all.

So when we talk about poverty and wealth what are the things we never talk about? Or that we never talk about seriously?

I think we need to talk about the role of taxes. And tax cuts and how damaging those are. Because essentially what we’ve done is we’ve made it impossible to have the money to support the boots. To support the infrastructure that we need to build so everybody has opportunity.

One of the things that happens here in Memphis and Shelby County, and nobody talks about it, is the fact that the county is not participating in any way to support the city. We’re occupying the same land. We’re occupying the same territory. But the county is not contributing anyway.

So, people in the county sometimes say, “Well, we have lower taxes and lower taxes are good!” Lower taxes aren’t good. Lower taxes make it impossible for cities to provide the services we all depend on. Services like roads. Clean water. Transportation.

The failures that we have in public transportation is no money. And there’s no money because the county just isn’t paying its part. We elect people who don’t want to pay their fair share taxes. Poor people in fact pay a tremendous percent of their income in taxes because they pay in addition to their income taxes all the fees and the sales taxes hit them a lot harder that tend to take a greater percent of their other income. It’s the wealthier parts of society who receive the most and are paying the least taxes who are in fact the moochers. So, the county has become a moocher on the city.

Not going to be a popular opinion in the county.

But if you look at the traffic patterns in the morning and in the evening you see that people come from the county to work at jobs in the city of Memphis and they go home in the evening. So they are here all day. They utilize the airport. They utilize the roads. The electricity. Everything.

Germantown and Collierville exist here because Memphis exists. They did not go start their communities in the middle of nowhere. They are part of Memphis. And yet they choose to contribute zero to the city in which they’re spending 10-hours a day.

We love to say, “the city is mismanaging money.” The city’s not mismanaging money, there’s no money to mismanage. People write me when I say these things and they say, “Oh, you’re giving the rest of the county a bad name by saying these things! It’s all Memphis’ fault! You have to separate us from Memphis because we’re Germantown or we’re Collierville and we don’t have anything to do with Memphis.” That’s not true. They are connected to Memphis but refuse to contribute to the support of Memphis.

There’s an intersection of wealth, housing and education. Property is more expensive near high-performing schools. Nationally, it’s something like 2.4 times higher, I think.

Every child with parents who have resources to move to a wealthier area will do so. And every child who has the parents with the education or motivation to apply for a charter or private school will do. Who remains in the neighborhood schools? The children with the greatest needs and fewest resources. And they’re now completely abandoned, so we have a concentration of high-need students. Concentrations of low expectations, high need, who don’t have the social capital around them to try to do better. Then, we say this school’s failing. It’s failing because we made it fail.

And even equal funding doesn’t cut it.

Even if we funded everything at the same level, if you have a school with a high proportion of children that are at risk with hunger, you probably need to fund that at twice the level to produce more services, more attention. For a lot of children it’s the only place they receive a meal and the only place they receive any attention.

The only thing people with resources say is, “I don’t want to see them, keep them in this area. Don’t bring them to me.” Without thinking, the most helpful thing we could do to improve things is to actually put high-need children together with children who have more resources and who’ve had different experiences. It would provide a lot of social capital for those children.

How?

A percent of housing throughout the city reserved for low income people. What that does is redistribute low-income people throughout the city. Then schools have children of all income levels.

[pdf-3] You’ve talked about wages. But if wages go up isn’t that just a great reason to raise rents and create a little more wealth for owners while keeping a lot of the same barriers in place?

We do need to regulate it. But we don’t need to think of regulation as eliminating freedom but providing freedom from exploitation freedom from abuse to common people.

Economic exclusion is exclusion. It’s a sign on the door that says, “You’re not allowed here.” The only thing is, you’re saying it with your wallet, not a sign. So how do you create an inclusive society without having regulations putting limits on the most powerful? There are ways to make money in a just way.

I’m not against the free market and capitalism. But we do need regulations. What we need to do is to think of regulations as a way of correcting the power asymmetries. [content-1] [content-2]

Peterson

One of four rape convictions for a Memphis man was overturned Wednesday by an appeals court that said while elements of his other crimes were similar the one at issue, they could not be used as evidence against him.

Deandrey Peterson was convicted by four juries of raping four women in a 2014 spree. For one of those, on February 12, 2014, he was convicted of aggravated rape, aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, and possessing a firearm with the intent to go armed during the commission of a dangerous felony.

That conviction was overturned this week and a new trial was ordered for Peterson. James Curwood Witt Jr., a judge with the Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee, delivered the opinion Wednesday.

Witt’s opinion said the original court, the Shelby County Criminal Court, erred by admitting evidence in the case that was insufficient to identify Peterson as the perpetrator.

During the trial, prosecutors allowed testimony from two of Peterson’s other victims. Details of their cases closely matched those from the plaintiff in the case, the rape victim from Feb. 12.

The women all lived in the same apartment complex in Raleigh. They all said their rapist covered his face and ransacked their apartments. The perpetrator asked if he could perform oral sex on two of them.

He wore a condom when he raped all of them and spoke in a “soft manner.” He asked them all if they had any nude photos of themselves on their phones.

But it wasn’t enough for the appeals court judges.

“The closest thing to a ’signature’ or imprimatur was the perpetrator’s asking each of the three women whether they had nude pictures on their cellular telephones,” Witt wrote in his opinion. “This was not so unusual or distinct, however, ‘that reasonable people would conclude that the same person committed all of the offenses.’”

Judges said the cases were similar but that they had many differences, too. The perpetrator wore different clothes and covered his face with different things (a Chanel scarf, a white handkerchief, and a ski mask). Two were blindfolded; one was not. Only one victim was forced to “rub his penis with her hand.”

Those differences, the court said, made their similarities inadmissible as evidence.

”In our view, the record does not support the ruling of the trial court,” reads Witt’s opinion. “Although we agree with the trial court’s conclusions that identity was a material issue at trial and that the state established the other crimes by clear and convincing evidence, we cannot agree that the offenses committed against (the other victims) were sufficiently similar to the offenses at issue in the defendant’s trial as to qualify for admission under evidence (rules).”

Peterson was sentenced to 30 years for the crime. He’s now held at the Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville and will remain there serving time on his other three rape convictions. He is not eligible for parole until 2045, according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections.

No date has yet been set for his new trial.

Any given Sunday.

Are you a compulsive fashionista shopping on serious budget? Or a healthy eater who wishes you could know for sure your produce is pesticide free? Do you wish some ambitious person would solve all your problems for you? You may be in luck — eventually. LITE Memphis is growing a crop of problem-solving young entrepreneurs and there’s an even bigger problem they’re looking to fix: Memphis’ persistent racial wealth gap, discussed more thoroughly in this week’s Memphis Flyer cover story, “Coin Flip: Wealth, Poverty and Race in Memphis — Myths and Misconceptions.”

It’s a sleepy Sunday afternoon in the University of Memphis area. The busiest place seems to be the Highland Street Goodwill where there’s a 75-percent-off, special tag sale.
Brunch crowds at Brother Juniper’s have dissipated; the strip’s empty.

From the street, the university’s Crews Center for Entrepreneurship looks to be locked up. Inside, the center’s buzzing with activity. Along the walls and in the corners people are typing at work stations. Throughout the room, whiteboards are being decorated with business plans, formulas for success, and words of inspiration. In the center of it all a nervous young woman is trying out a pitch.

“My name is Chelsi, I’m 17 years old and I created Church Me because I want to see young people get involved with their church community,” she concludes before collapsing into herself like a puppet whose strings were just snipped. “It’s still way to fast, isn’t it?” she asks, laughing at herself. A patient coach nods, showing her the exact time on a stopwatch. They work together on content-building and confidence.

LITE Memphis invests in teenagers with an eye toward closing the racial wealth gap

Elsewhere in the room, coaches like LITE program assistant Sophis Fils-Aime work one-on-one with students or lead group sessions. Fils-Aime, for example, shows several students ways to make their pitches more persuasive with PowerPoint. She does so while talking about how students are sometimes required to submit work by email and projecting a card from a previous student’s project showing how 26% of American households don’t have internet connections. Students — all of whom are developing small businesses — take notes and ask questions.

Any given Sunday…

In some ways LITE is like other business incubators and accelerators that exist to mentor and support startup businesses. But where the organization departs from the standard formulas makes all the difference. LITE’s focus is on teenagers and young adults. They commit to working with participants until the age of 25, assisting them with market research, micro-loans, and prototyping money. These things make the award-winning organization something to watch. So does its official vision as paraphrased by executive director Pamela Urquieta: “We’re trying to close the racial wealth gap by giving people of color access to networks and capital.”

“Networks and capital are two of the biggest barriers that any minority in Memphis is really struggling with,” she adds.

“A lot of the students don’t know what it looks like to be a business owner,” Outreach assistant Alexandra Thompson continues. “They don’t have family members in the business community. So, we show them what it means and give them tools.”

Any given Sunday…

LITE’s intensive high school program lasts six months. Then, the students transition and become “innovation fellows.” They move from learning how to start a business to learning how to scale it and grow. In the best cases, it becomes on-the-job training.

This is a busy time for LITE. On Thursday, May 3rd, LITE students will pitch bright ideas to a full house at Clayborne Temple competing for a $2,500 prize to invest in their businesses. One of LITE’s innovation fellows is also launching a new business that Urquieta describes as, “very exciting.”

The students are encouraged to think local — to ask how they can improve the world they personally know — and to think big. One student with an interest in agribusiness is developing a product inspired by fingernail polish designed for women to test drinks for date-rape drugs. The new product, still in the early stages of development, would let consumers test foods for pesticides.

This week (with $10,000 raised with LITE’s help) White Station grad and DePaul University student Talia Owens is launching a startup. Her business is called Laude and it was designed to help people on strict budgets and a burning need for high end fashion accessories get the Coach bag of their dreams.

Here’s what Owens had to say about LITE, Laude, and the future.

Q&A with LITE innovation fellow Talia Owens

Talia Owens, LITE fellow and sophomore at DePaul University

Memphis Flyer: Before we talk about your business, tell me a little about you?

Talia Owens: I was born and raised in Memphis in the Cordova area but went to White Station High School all four years through the optional program. Before I did LITE or was even interested or introduced to the whole world of entrepreneurship, I was active in sports. I did gymnastics and cheer and tae kwon do. I also did theater in high school. So, in high school I was thinking I wanted to be an actress but that wasn’t the best plan of action.

Why not?

I got into theater as a hobby but, obviously, I thought this was nothing I could do long-term. So, I started thinking about other fields. So, I had a law internship. I thought maybe I wanted to be an attorney. But then I got the law internship and I realized it wasn’t for me. So, I kept struggling with what I wanted to do. I thought about (public relations) and advertising. And, then, I took a coding class at White Station and I fell in love with coding. So, my life changed again.

Are you doing coding in college?

So, now I’m at DePaul University in Chicago. I’m studying interactive and social media and computer science — app development, web development, that kind of thing.

So related stuff.

Yeah. And I don’t want to just be a person who works a job and have a 9-to-5. I want to create jobs. So, that’s what led me to my project, now. It’s this round-about way of me thinking I wanted to do one thing and then another.

How do you mean?

In high school I changed my mind five different times during the four years about what I want to do. And I learned it’s okay to not know what you want to do. I still don’t know what I want to do. I’m pursuing this business. It’s a fashion and ecommerce brand but I’m in school for coding and web development. They go hand-in-hand but I’m kind of riding a wave of uncertainty. I can live with that. That’s me right now.

And now you’re in college and not in Memphis but still working with LITE.

I go to DePaul University. And I was at a DePaul University cheerleader this year. Which is cool because I hadn’t cheered since middle school. I didn’t think I was going to make the team, and I did and I was, like, “Wow, that’s interesting!” That wound up becoming a big part of my life because I recently wound up having a big injury with cheer. It’s kind of affected a lot of what I’ve been doing lately and my school work. I’m still trucking along. I’m not going to let a spine injury get me down.

Spine injury? Ouch.

No, I’m fine now. We didn’t know what was wrong. I started having really bad back problems at practice. I’m a flyer so I was flying and tumbling. During this game I’m running on the floor and everything is televised and I’m running on the court and all of a sudden everything in my lower left side from the hip down goes numb. I can’t feel my leg. I know something’s wrong but we have to go. So I go to the trainers and they think it’s probably just a pinched nerve or something. So, I go to the doctor I’m thinking everything is fine. I’m in pain but I’m still practicing because it’s nationals season. And I go to the doctor and they’re like, “You’re out for the season. And maybe even the next season.” And I’m like, “What?” And they’re like, “Yeah, you fractured your spine.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” So, it’s been a long process going through recovery. It did affect my school work and business stuff for a month and kind of slowed me down a little bit because the pain was a little unbearable. But I’m definitely fine now. Life throws a lot of crazy things at you.

But now you’re about to launch Laude, your company.

We’ve been through a lot of different trials. But we are launching. I’m making the site live next weekend on Sunday which I’m really excited about. I can tell you a little more about the brand and how it came to fruition and how I thought of this idea.

That would be great, please do.

So, obviously I went through the LITE program and they were offering us an opportunity to create a business and get grants in order to help us form the business. I’ve always been a little bit interested in the world of fashion, especially luxury fashion. Also, I wanted to do something that had a tech side to it.

That makes sense.

So, I’m in a sorority here at DePaul. And how my idea came to fruition is I had a sister who basically spent all her rent money that her parents gave her for a bag. She comes in one day and she’s showing off his bag and I’m like, “How did you go buy a $3,000 bag?” And she’s like, “I used part of my rent money and my parents are really really mad. They’re sending me more rent money, but I had to get this bag.” And I said, “Well, that’s dumb. Like, you have to live somewhere, you know?” And she was like, “Yeah, I know. But I had all the money in front of me and I just wanted the bag and I’ve never had all the money together like that before. So, I just kind of did it.” So, I started thinking about how, for a lot of girls, especially in college, want really nice luxury and designer things, but are on a college budget. How can they get what they want without breaking the bank or spending all their rent money? So I came up with Laude, which is a luxury ecommerce platform that allows people to buy, sell, and hold luxury fashion.

What does that mean, exactly?

What we do is we get all of our handbags from department stores and different wholesalers and we take our handbags and we mark them down lower than retail price and we allow our customers to have us hold their bag for a small holding fee as they work to pay it off for the next 4-to-6 months. What this does is it teaches people you can have nice things with a tight budget if you know how to budget your funds. We also allow people to trade in old, luxury fashion items for credit to go toward new ones. Because so many people have bags just sitting on the shelf that they don’t use. These bags are still valuable they just don’t use them anymore. So, we let them turn that in on credit toward new handbags. So, we can hold those handbags for someone who might want them.

Cool.

So that’s the gist of my business and where it came from.

[content-1]

Shelby County Schools/Facebook

Students across Shelby County walked out last week to protest gun violence in schools.

Please do not arm our teachers.

That’s one of the eight demands that a group of student activists delivered to the Shelby County School board at its Tuesday meeting.

This comes a week after students organized a citywide walkout to protest gun violence and other issues compromising safety in schools.

During the walkout, students across the city brainstormed and recorded suggestions on how to make schools safer. The organizers and other students met over the weekend to narrow down the recommendations that would be presented at the school board meeting.

Here are the eight requests the students came up with:

• Stop kicking students out of school instead of figuring out what’s going on

• Make time for teachers and administrators to have one-on-one time with students

• More counselors and support groups

• Add conflict resolution classes

• Add mental health classes

• Do more to stop sexual harassment and assaults in schools

• Do not arm teachers

• Support student activism

After the meeting, SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson said he’s “very impressed” with the students’ efforts.