According to the Mayan calendar, doomsdayers, and a new movie, 2012
will be the end of the world.
Even if the apocalypse doesn’t happen in 2012, the landscape of
Memphis still will be altered, albeit for less dramatic reasons.
In less than three years, the Tennessee Department of Transportation
(TDOT) and the Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) hope to
have the last segments of I-269 — Memphis’ so-called outer loop
— completed.
I-69 is a 1,600-mile national highway project that connects Mexico
to Canada via Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi,
Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The outer loop, designated locally as
I-269, will connect with the Paul Barret Parkway near Arlington, travel
south along the Fayette/Shelby county line, and link with the Bill
Morris Parkway near Collierville before heading across the state line
to DeSoto County and Mississippi Highway 304.
The I-69 corridor was designated by Congress during the 1990s to
enhance economic development, and local officials argue that it will
relieve congestion and improve area air quality.
But community advocates, citing historic precedent, worry the
interstate will drive area residents and development further east,
exacerbating Memphis’ sprawl problem and costing taxpayers more money
in new infrastructure, schools, and services.
“Sprawl takes resources out of the existing neighborhoods,” says
Sarah Newstok, program manager for the Coalition for Livable
Communities. “Memphis’ population is not growing. The people who would
populate that area would move from somewhere else in Memphis.”
Much of the city’s population growth in recent years has been a
result of annexation. At 346 square miles, Memphis is 40 square miles
larger than New York City, but with 8 million fewer people. Under the
reserve area annexation plan, Memphis eventually will balloon to almost
500 square miles, or roughly the size of Los Angeles.
Maybe comparing Memphis to those cities is not exactly fair. What if
we compare Memphis to itself? In 1960, Memphis had 4,000 residents per
square mile. Twenty years later, that number had dropped to about
2,500. Now it’s down to about 2,000 residents for each square mile.
TDOT recently completed work on the $11.5 million section of Route
385 from Macon Road to the area north of Eads. That segment, which
opened to traffic just over a month ago, is a lonely stretch of highway
that peters off into a pasture near a lake.
TDOT also recently allocated $54 million for the second-to-last
segment of the project, from Highway 57 in Collierville to
Raleigh-LaGrange Road.
By the time its finished, I-269 will be about 25 miles from downtown
Memphis and could open up new development outside Collierville.
“If I lived in Cordova, this would be very worrisome to me,” Newstok
says. “It’s not just the urban core that should be concerned about
this.”
Shelby County population distribution from 1960 to 2008: Every dot equals 300 people.
The offices of most community development corporations, or CDCs,
are, at best, serviceable.
CDCs are non-profit organizations specializing in neighborhood
revitalization, whether by economic development, services, or
real-estate. Their offices often reflect their struggling, aging
neighborhoods.
The Southeast Memphis CDC is another story. Visitors pull into a
lush corporate office complex, each building with its own circular
drive. In the hushed lobby downstairs, spotless glass doors are
accentuated with gleaming silver handles.
Alan Gumbel, interim executive director of the Southeast Memphis
CDC, explains that most of the area’s office space was built within the
last 20 years, a result of the construction of the Bill Morris Parkway.
Now, with the construction of I-269, he worries how the area will
fare.
“From a regional standpoint, creating new transportation corridors
is essential,” Gumbel says. “But the local effects can be
devastating.”
As new buildings are built in outlying areas, companies often
abandon older offices for better real estate deals. Downtown’s
commercial stock, for instance, is an average of 47 years old.
Travel east, and the buildings get newer. Midtown’s commercial stock
is 33 years old; East Memphis’ is 23. Along the Bill Morris Parkway,
the average age of commercial buildings is 12 years.
If Memphis’ population was growing, that might not be a problem. As
it is, downtown has a commercial vacancy rate of 17 percent, while
Midtown’s is 23 percent. In the airport area, where the office
buildings average around 28 years old, the vacancy rate is 46
percent.
The same goes for homes, warehouses, and retail stores. As the
population migrates from one area of town to another, older buildings
are vacated, almost as if a swarm of locusts came through.
Big-box retailer Best Buy, once located at Riverdale and Winchester,
moved its southeast Memphis store a mile down the road to Hacks Cross.
Fortunately for the neighborhood, another retailer moved into the Best
Buy location, but it’s not the same.
“Best Buy is a premium big-box store,” Gumbel says. “The new store
sells dollar items. It’s catering to a population, and it’s not vacant,
but it’s not Best Buy.”
Just last week, the Norfolk Southern rail company announced a
$129-million intermodal hub in Fayette County. The location was
influenced by the I-269 route. Proponents of the road point to the
facility as an engine for economic development. The hub should create
about 400 jobs and will most likely result in new warehouse space.
“In this case, development will move out of Shelby County and into
Fayette County,” Gumbel says. “You have to wonder what’s going to
happen with the warehouse space already here. … Vacant warehouses
don’t provide tax revenue.”
In fact, it’s often the opposite with vacant buildings. If not
maintained, they contribute to blight and safety concerns.
“If there are not steps taken to prevent it, we’ll see a pattern of
construction that hollows out the urban area,” Gumbel says. “Southeast
Memphis used to be a suburban community, but it will see the same
problems as the urban core. This area stands on a knife’s edge.”
“People can argue that [highway expansion] isn’t the only reason
[for sprawl], and that’s true: crime, education, old homes —
there are a million arguments,” says consultant John Lawrence. “But
there is no question that where people have moved and built has
followed some type of road expansion.”
Lawrence is the former head of the Memphis Airport Area Development
Corporation recently helped the Coalition for Livable Communities
prepare a presentation on I-269 for the Memphis City Council.
“My concern is: Where do the new schools get built? Are the old
schools closed? Where do the new parks go? How much are my taxes going
to go up so that my neighbor can now move?” he asks.
During the 1950s, planners thought perimeter highways like I-240
would create a growth boundary for development and route traffic around
the city. The opposite happened: Instead of highways circling the
community, the community circled the highways. Instead of closing new
areas off, the highways opened them up.
For his presentation to City Council, Lawrence plotted retail
development from downtown Memphis to the Avenue Carriage Crossing in
Collierville as viewed against highway construction.
In 1954, for instance, the central retail district was downtown. In
the next decade, however, things changed.
“In the 1960s, the Poplar corridor was developing. At the same time,
the southern leg of 240/55 was completed,” Lawrence says. “By the
1970s, downtown had ceased to exist as a regional shopping
destination.”
During that decade, both the Raleigh Springs Mall in the north and
the Southland Mall near I-55 opened. They were joined by the Mall of
Memphis — just south of 240 on American Way — 10 years
later.
“The speculation is that a lot of this developed as a result of
access to the 240 loop,” Lawrence says.
By the mid-1990s, the Poplar corridor was still thriving, but other
older shopping destinations were struggling. Wolfchase Galleria,
located off I-40 heading to Nashville, was in the works, and by the
early 2000s, Germantown Road was well on its way to becoming what it is
today: congested and home to countless chain stores.
The Mall of Memphis was closed in 2004 and later demolished, while
the Southaven Towne Center and the Avenue Carriage Crossing were
built.
Consider these comparisons: In countries such as France, Italy, and
the United Kingdom, there is less then 5 square feet of retail space
per person. In the United States, there is about 20 square feet of
retail space per person. In Memphis, there is more than 25 square feet
of retail space per person.
“This is space, likely functionally obsolete space, where there are
retail buildings, but not retail businesses,” Lawrence says. “The
question is whether or not this is a predictor of what will happen in
the future.”
“An outer loop has been in the major roads plan since the
mid-1960s,” says Dexter Muller, senior vice president of community
development for the Greater Memphis Chamber. “It was supposed to go
where Houston Levee is, but once development happened, it got pushed
further out.”
Proponents for the outer loop say it will help the area economy by
spurring new development and relieving traffic congestion. That latter
is especially important given the area’s distribution economy. Freight
needs to be moved as quickly and efficiently as possible.
When the state began planning for I-269, the chamber’s major roads
committee, which falls under Muller’s purview, pushed for a parallel
route to 240. They felt it would open access to areas of north and east
Memphis.
“Without [the outer loop] we’ll have significant congestion on
I-240,” Muller says. “If someone is driving from Jackson, Mississippi,
and they want to go to Nashville, they don’t need to drive all the way
in on 240.”
There seems to be good evidence for this: The section of I-240 from
Bill Morris Parkway to the Poplar exit on I-40 is the busiest section
of interstate highway in the Memphis area.
Rusty Bloodworth, executive vice president of Boyle Investment and a
member of the local Urban Land Institute’s executive committee, says
I-269’s positives are big.
“If you look at I-269’s function, the primary reason is to pull
truck traffic around the city instead of going through the city,” he
says. “A lot of us worried about economic vitality are very much
interested in having another option to I-240. … It’s pretty difficult
to maneuver in the peak hours of the morning.”
Martha Lott, coordinator of the Memphis MPO, echoes concerns about
congestion and adds area health as another reason why I-269 is
necessary.
“If we didn’t do anything, by the year 2017, we’d have 45,000
vehicles diverted on roads such as Houston Levee and
Collierville-Arlington,” she says. “That will put those roads over
capacity. If traffic is bumper-to-bumper and people are sitting there,
idling, they’re causing air pollution issues.”
Shelby County currently is identified as an air quality
non-attainment zone, a fancy way of saying pollution levels exceed
national standards.
Lott says one of the MPO’s goals, as part of the Sustainable Shelby
initiative, is to create more livable, pedestrian-friendly streets, and
she sees I-269 ultimately helping with that goal.
“If we can divert traffic from surface roads, it allows those roads
to develop into more walkable, bikeable streets,” she says.
TDOT also cites the economic benefits of I-269. During planning
phases, TDOT compiled an environmental impact study that said the area
surrounding the highway would be converted from agricultural land to
other uses.
“The proposed project will have a beneficial secondary impact on the
local economy by supporting the local governments’ efforts to recruit
new industrial, retail, and other facilities to the project area,” the
report says. “The cumulative impact will be an increase in the tax base
in the surrounding communities through new development.”
The report said none of the proposed alternatives for I-269 would
negatively impact the local economy. But that study focused on the land
adjacent to the highway.
“The danger with this is we’ll get a sucking of development and
vitality out of the existing inner-city fabric,” Bloodworth says.
“There has certainly been a long trend of suburban movement that was
fueled partially by federal policy since the 1950s and partially by
automobile makers who figured out the more people drive, the more oil
we sell.”
“Just because we’re trying to move people and freight doesn’t mean
we support sprawl,” Muller says. “We may not have had the land-use
control we needed in the past, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have it
now, or that we shouldn’t build a road that’s needed for other
reasons.”
How much I-269 affects Memphis and the surrounding areas —
both positively and negatively — will likely rest with zoning and
planning decisions by local government.
The Coalition for Livable Communities would like to see a regional
conversation about I-269 — zoning in Memphis and Shelby County
won’t mean much without similar measures in neighboring Fayette County
— but there’s currently no mechanism for that.
“We’re looking at this as an opportunity to do something we’ve never
done and start having a dialogue about regional growth planning,”
Lawrence says. “A lot of people in northern Mississippi like northern
Mississippi because of the rural quality of life.”
The Coalition for Livable Communities have some ideas for preventing
additional sprawl from I-269, including growth boundaries, special
impact fees for developers, incentives to encourage the right kind of
development, and fewer exits to discourage local traffic.
“The hard thing about trying to stop it or mitigate its effects is
it’s very far out and it’s kind of abstract,” Newstok says. “It’s
pretty rural, so it’s not in many people’s backyards.”
Three years ago, Gail Sievers and her husband moved to 75 acres in
the Collierville reserve area, just a mile or so from the Mississippi
line, to breed Arabian horses.
“There are a lot of horse people who live up and down the street,”
Sievers says. She can’t see her neighbors’ houses from hers, but she
can easily walk to them down the tree-lined road.
The Sievers currently own 16 horses and have an arena on their
property where they exercise their animals.
A few months ago, they got a postcard in the mail. They initially
thought the town of Collierville was rezoning its annexation area. Then
one of their neighbors went online and saw a proposal for a four-lane
road that would have provided access from I-269 to a planned
high-density residential development. Sievers sprung to action, making
flyers and putting them in her neighbors’ mailboxes.
“The road went straight down the middle of our property, through our
barn. It went through one of our neighbor’s ponds and through our
neighbor to the north’s house and riding arena,” Sievers says.
In January, the neighbors rallied against the road at a Collierville
meeting, and planners listened, approving land-use guidelines for more
than 1,500 acres. The plan should protect the Sievers property, but she
believes at least one of her neighbors is interested in selling
property adjacent to theirs to developers.
“There were developers at the meeting who kept pushing for a road
through our property. They said, this will really help the
neighborhood,” Sievers says. “How can we run a horse operation with a
four-lane road running through our property?”
In this case, officials heard the residents’ concerns. But without
an overall plan, the land around I-269 could become a patchwork of
decisions from different jurisdictions.
“A healthy urban core can support suburbs and rural communities,”
Newstok says. “You can’t have a healthy suburban community without a
healthy urban core.”
Special thanks to Dane Forlines at the University of Memphis and
John Lawrence for maps and graphics.
