This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, we’re all about podcasting! Sonosphere creator and host Amy Schaftlein joins Chris McCoy to talk about her pioneering music podcast, her day job at United Housing, and The Brutalist. Read this week’s cover story here.
According to 2024’s “The Infinite Dial” report by Edison Research, 47 percent of the U.S. population, 12 and older, listened to at least one podcast in the span of a month, up 12 percent from the year before. What can we say? People like their podcasts. So much so that there are millions of them. We tried Googling the exact number but got bogged down in the AI of it all, so we landed at millions … or at least hundreds of thousands.
What we can say with certainty is that a decent number of podcasts are being created right here in Memphis. Check out what a few local podcasters had to say in this week’s cover story, and take a peek at the sidebar to discover even more podcasts to add to your playlist.
Verbally Effective
If there’s a go-to expert in podcasting in Memphis, it’s Ena Esco. She’s the host of Verbally Effective, innovator in residence at Cossitt Library, founder of the PodBox Memphis Podcast Festival, and the wearer of many more hats in this new media landscape.
With a background in radio since graduating from LeMoyne-Owen College in 2001, Esco started her podcast in 2018. “With radio, you only have so many minutes that you can have a conversation,” she says, “and I wanted to extend those conversations through podcasting. And so I wanted it to be a podcast that intersected art, culture, politics, entertainment, with a Memphis focus.”
Her Verbally Effective became home for just that, with each episode, over 300 in total, in conversation with a Memphis changemaker — from National Civil Rights Museum president Russell Wigginton to Grammy Award-winning Crystal Nicole to therapist Brandy J. Flynn. “You just never know what people have gone through to be where they are today,” she says, “and to hear their stories lets me know that the type of work that I’m doing with podcasting is important because I know that their stories will resonate with other people.”
Esco’s goal, she says, is to elevate voices, whether that’s in her own podcast or through helping others create theirs. “So much is going on right now, especially right now, with people trying to silence voices, but we can utilize the new media platforms to get our messaging across.”
“With podcasting, anything is on the table,” adds Esco. “In podcasting, you can create your own situation. You can format your show however you want to format your show. You can monetize. You can build relationships with people that you probably never would.”
After building her audience with Verbally Effective, Esco drew the attention of Memphis Public Libraries’ leadership and before too long became its first-ever innovator in residence, coordinating free podcast programming at Cossitt Library, developing workshops, curating panels and shows, and working with podcasters individually. In her nearly three years at Cossitt, Esco has helped podcasters in a gamut of genres, from sports to lifestyle to travel. “When you get [people] into podcasting, you’re really building up their confidence in making them a stronger speaker, a better storyteller,” she says. “It just gives me joy to see people transform in their way.”
For her work through the library system, Esco earned an honorable mention from the Urban Libraries Council Innovation Awards in 2024. “It was a big deal because it afforded [the Memphis Public Libraries] the opportunity to receive a grant to bring in more innovators [in other areas],” she says.
This coming year, Esco hopes to produce 10 podcasts, with a focus on community podcasting. “It’s going to be quite the undertaking,” she says.
Also in 2025, Esco will lead digital radio, podcasting, and TV broadcasting programming for the recently reopened Lowery Communication Center at LeMoyne-Owen College. “This is a full-circle moment for me because I started my media career as a senior, and now I’m back at my alma mater, seeing the students in this particular subject matter, so I’m just blessed. I am really blessed.”
In September, she’ll host the PodBox Memphis Podcast Festival, an annual event with industry experts, panels, mixers, and more. She’ll also host quarterly meetups with established and potential podcasters throughout the year.
Find Esco on social media @enaesco. Verbally Effective, in addition to being available for streaming, is aired on WXYR on Tuesdays at noon. — Abigail Morici
Cemetery Row
A deep and ominous bell tolls over the cold, lonely, windswept graveyard.
It’d be pretty scary, but the hosts of Cemetery Row are there to hold your hand and tell you it’s all okay. Then they start telling you the stories of some of the folks buried there and — before you know it, champ — you’re starting to have fun.
“Cemeteries are not scary places,” says Sheena Barnett, one of the podcast’s three hosts. “They’re not sad places. They can be, obviously if you’re going to where a loved one is buried. But I see them as places of love, places full of stories, places that need to be preserved.”
The sentiment is shared by hosts Lori Pope and Hannah Donegan. The trio of “spooky girls” met as Ole Miss journalism students, kept tight after school, and wanted to stay that way when Donegan moved to Chicago. Barnett volunteered at Elmwood Cemetery cleaning headstones and told the others about all the great stories out there. Cemetery Row became a way for them to connect and to hone their haunted proclivities.
Pope’s dad would tease her about “Rosie the ghost,” who was said to roam an old family cemetery on her grandparents’ farm. Barnett grew up on Unsolved Mysteries and going to cemeteries with her mother and grandmother. A “Jane Doe” headstone mystified a younger Donegan when seen in a graveyard in plain view of her Olive Branch Middle School.
That ominous bell really does toll to open each episode of Cemetery Row. The hosts introduce themselves, banter, connect, tell a few inside jokes, and they cuss … like a lot. The meat of the show, though, is true stories of the dead.
“Just like most people from history, she has parts of her life where she’s a total relatable badass, and then there’s parts where she kind of sucks a little bit,” Donagen says of occultist, ceremonial magician, and novelist Dion Fortune in an October episode called “Occultists, Psychics, and Cryptids.” “She was a rich, white lady in early 20th-century England. So, what are you gonna do?”
That episode also featured the stories of Simon Warner, a psychic and crime doctor, known as The Seer of Shelbyville (Tennessee), and some spooky tales from Idaho (a bit outside of the cemetery, strictly speaking, but right next door).
The hosts laugh, bomb each other with bon mots, and keep things casual. But they flex those journalism degrees in well-researched stories, written with a straight-ahead newspaper eloquence. Not every episode has a theme but some have featured athletes, LGBTQ folks, Black excellence, and more. One featured people named Dick.
Dial up Cemetery Row wherever you find podcasts. Pope, Doengan, and Barnett will have you skipping through the headstones in no time. — Toby Sells
Night Classy
Have you ever been curious about the deep intricacies of society that our history books never dreamed of covering? You know, like the 1950s quiz show scandal that unearthed rigging and resulted in congressional hearings? Or have you or a loved one been approached by a charming Nigerian prince who only needs your entire life savings to help him out? If you’re looking to dive more into his origin story (and the many ways he presents himself), or just looking to satiate your hunger for obscure knowledge, class is in session on the Night Classy podcast.
Hayley Madden and Katja Barnhart are two educators by day, taking their aptitude for knowledge from the classroom to the mic. Both women met through Teach For America (TFA) and bonded over The Office — facilitated by the “TFA experience,” which Madden explains is like an “extension of college.”
Madden says the podcast was originally Barnhart’s idea, which she says stemmed from her “obsession” with podcasts, and after moving to a new place, this seemed like the perfect new hobby to take up. Barnhart remembers thinking, “This is it; this is going to be good.”
The podcast’s future was further solidified when Barnhart met her longtime boyfriend Alec Ogg, who’s a podcast producer by trade and offered to produce the podcast.
As a child, Madden says she liked to experiment with different things such as making mud pies and catching frogs. “Maybe not researching like I do now as an adult, but just getting into things is something I’ve always been into,” she adds.
Barnhart says she’s always been obsessed with history, always finding herself engrossed in historical fiction. She then found herself obtaining a history degree, but ended up teaching math.
“[I] didn’t really have an outlet to read about the kind of things I wanted to aside from my spare time, so the podcast has been a good way to scratch that itch,” Barnhart says.
During each episode, the hosts pick two stories that they’ve each researched with detailed notes about topics that can be defined as “oddities and curiosities you’ve never learned in school.” As they approach their 250th episode on their main feed, the ladies have covered brain eating amoebas, the lore of America’s Next Top Model, and the Ant Hill Kids Cult to name a few.
“It had to be something we wanted to research,” Madden says. “If it’s not fun on the front end, then it’s not going to be fun for us to actually do, execute, and listen to later.”
Barnhart also adds that they didn’t want to limit themselves to true crime, paranormal, and reality TV. While they’re interested in all of these things, diversifying their content keeps the experience fresh.
“I feel like if you have to read about it every single week, you’re going to hate it,” Barnhart explains. “We wanted options.”
“We were like, ‘What’s our hook?’” Madden adds. “Well, we’re teachers.” — Kailynn Johnson
Sonosphere
Sonosphere is more than just a podcast, and had been even before it became a radio show on WYXR (every Monday at 4 p.m.). More than most podcasts, perhaps, it was founded with a mission: fostering more appreciation of unconventional music in Memphis. As co-founder Amy Schaftlein says, the goal of Sonosphere was “highlighting the sort of experimental bands that don’t really fit into a genre, but have always brought intriguing and interesting sounds. Not everybody could tell if they liked or not. You know, like when you try a new food, you’re kind of like, ‘I don’t know if I like that.’ But you might start to like it a lot more as you try it in different ways.”
Realizing this would take more than a mere podcast, Schaftlein started the nonprofit Sonosphere Inc. with then-fellow president/CEO Christopher Williams in 2017, intent on programming live performances and lectures, music festivals, and audio documentaries. Thus, right from the beginning, Sonosphere the podcast had a parallel production series known as Sound Observations. “A lot of the Sound Observations series that we brought to Memphis back in 2017, ’18, and ’19 highlighted experimental artists like Wu Fei, who plays a very ancient Chinese instrument.”
At the time, Schaftlein says, Crosstown Arts had not yet leaned into the kind of adventurous programming that they’re now known for. But as Crosstown Arts evolved, with Memphis Symphony Orchestra flutist and Blueshift Ensemble member Jenny Davis taking on music programming for a time, there was less of a need for the Sound Observations series, and Sonosphere the podcast came to the fore. When Williams moved away, Schaftlein, after hosting solo for a while, thought that Davis would be the perfect partner.
“Jenny worked with Chris and I on our Sound Observations when she was at Crosstown Arts,” says Schaftlein. “And she also created the Continuum Fest [a local celebration of New Music and avant garde classical compositions], which she invited Sonosphere to ‘sponsor’ — which really meant we covered it for them — and we came up with some content for the fest. We’ve always worked with Jenny through Crosstown Arts, and so she’s been a part of the podcast, tangentially, for a while. And so it just seemed like a really good fit.”
This was also a good way for Davis to keep her hand in experimental music as she moved on to become the executive director of the Memphis Youth Symphony Program (MYSP). A recent episode of the podcast, for example, focused solely on last year’s Continuum Fest, staged at the Beethoven Club.
Meanwhile, the podcast evolved into a radio show when WYXR began broadcasting in October 2020. And while that slowed the podcast production a bit, it’s really all of a piece. Indeed, as Schaftlein says, “I actually worked for WEVL when I was in college and I had a show on the station. That’s part of what prompted Sonosphere. I really wanted a radio show on WEVL, and they took a while to get back to me, and so I just kind of started it. I was like, ‘We can do this from home!’ You know, podcasting was a thing. It wasn’t as big as now, but it was still a thing then. So we just went ahead and did it ourselves.” — Alex Greene
For your listening pleasure:
Astronomica
Join a group of nerds as they crew the definitely-not-piloted-by-a-rogue-AI ship The Admiral Grace in a science-fiction OSR actual play podcast using the Stars Without Number RPG system.
Black Is America
Dominic Lawson highlights little-known African-American figures and stories.
Champions of the Lost Causes
Marvin Stockwell talks to folks across the country about their success and setbacks.
Got Points Podcast
Ashling Woolley and Tiffani Denham teach listeners how to build up travel points quickly, how to keep a high bank of points, and how to use these points to maximize every benefit.
Grits and Grinds: Memphis Grizzlies
Keith Parish covers the Grizzlies year-round with in-depth analysis.
Like You: Mindfulness for Kids
Noah Glenn uses breathing, affirmations, music, and imagination to support social-emotional health and mental wellness for kids.
Memphis Flyer Video Podcast
Oh, hello, that’s us! Each week, Chris McCoy and a co-host take you through the paper and give you insight into the madness that goes on at the Memphis Flyer.
The Permanent Record
Just City’s podcast features conversations about the criminal justice system and how individuals can work to make it smaller, fairer, and better for everyone.
More and more Memphians are missing out on the American Dream, especially if you consider homeownership a centerpiece of that dream. Wall Street corporations are sucking up homes in struggling neighborhoods, spitting them back out as rentals, and — in doing so — sucking out wealth and access to upward mobility, particularly in African-American communities.
Some experts on this crisis call these corporations “vultures,” saying they use tactics comparable to the mafia. Across the country, they’re scooping up houses in low-income neighborhoods — sometimes by the hundreds — wringing what profits they can from them, leaving the empty shells, and moving on. The experts call this a “pump and dump” strategy. These companies sometimes use evictions as a way to get back rent, as well as levying fines and fees on tenants, a strategy designed to push profits even higher.
It’s a national problem, but Memphis is the poster child for it. Last year, 65 percent of Memphis’ single-family homes were rented, not owned. The figure was enough for Zillow, the real estate website, to list Memphis as the country’s fastest-growing rental market in 2018.
That rental rate is a massive statistic, given that more than three-quarters of the city’s housing stock is comprised of single-family homes. Investor groups and large corporations own 95,604 of those properties; more than 40 percent of those owners are from outside of Tennessee. It’s probably fair to say they don’t have the city’s — or their own tenants’ — best interests at heart.
“All these guys want to do is to maximize the short-term gain,” says Austin Harrison, a researcher from Georgia State University and a housing consultant, during a recent event in Memphis. “They don’t inspect the properties. You’ll hear stories about mold, or the plumbing or the electricity not working. They don’t fix anything.”
Those who’ve studied the issue say the problem runs deeper than real estate. It gets down to poverty, often cited as the city’s greatest scourge. How can we beat poverty here, experts ask, if African Americans can’t build wealth through homeownership in a majority-African-American city?
“As if the Great Recession’s foreclosure crisis of 2007-2008 was not bad enough, more than a decade later, instead of a phoenix rising from the wake of the burst housing bubble, the vultures have descended upon the housing market in Memphis,” reads a policy paper released recently from the University of Memphis’ Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Change. “The result is a policy crisis and the exacerbation of the wealth and racial division in the city.”
Photographs by Justin Fox Burks
Robert Holden, who is currently experiencing homelessness, very generously allowed himself to be photographed as he looked through a “picker pile” — the de facto symbol of Memphis’ eviction crisis.
Frayser: “Prime Feeding Ground”
Steve Lockwood sees outside corporate involvement in Frayser housing every day. He’s the director of the Frayser Community Development Corporation (FCDC), and as he drives in his silver pickup around the community of about 45,000, it seems he knows just about every house.
He thinks outside investment in neighborhoods like Frayser is, simply put, “bad.” Local brokers and developers sell the community’s homes to big firms all over the world, from California to New Zealand, he says. But at least two real estate players in Frayser do good work, Lockwood says, and are “good actors.” So he tries to work with them.
“Our objective all along has been to work on market forces, rather than pretend we could do it all ourselves because we can’t, and we know that,” he says.
One of them, a local broker, buys up homes, cleans them up, and does “perfectly good work,” Lockwood says. He paints his renovated houses in a signature red, gray, or green. Lockwood says even if the developer’s houses result in more renters, rather than creating new homeowners, the homes at least help revitalize the rest of the neighborhood.
On a recent tour of Frayser, Lockwood points to four concrete slabs, PVC tubing still stuck out of the ground where plumbing was planned. The development failed — 25 years ago — but the slabs and pipes remain. It’s part of the “funk” that still pervades parts of Frayser, he says.
Less than a mile from the slabs, siding was going up on one of several new homes by a builder Lockwood likes, another “good actor” making real estate money in Frayser, he says. Lockwood and the FCDC connect potential homeowners to that builder. The group helps people get approved for loans and sends them to the builder, with no commission or any money changing hands. “We’re just trying to affect the neighborhood,” Lockwood says. If the FCDC doesn’t help the builder find local buyers, he may sell to out-of-town investors.
“I’m still trying to tip the ratios here, or figure out at what point is this no longer prime feeding ground for investors,” Lockwood says. “I’m afraid it’s prime feeding ground for quite a while yet, and there’s not much I can do about that.”
Remember the Recession?
It’s hard to know if Frayser is a prime target for Wall Street investors. But Frayser certainly was one of the the hardest hit by Wall Street in the wake of the Great Recession.
Frayser was the foreclosure capital of Tennessee, according to the FCDC. The 38127 ZIP code saw the most foreclosures in the Memphis area every year from 2000 to 2015. Those foreclosures gutted Frayser, leaving vacant houses all over the community.
But it wasn’t only low-income communities like Frayser that were hit. Foreclosure rates all over Memphis shot up 13 percent in the first half of 2008, compared to the same time the year before, according to a Memphis Daily News story by Eric Smith, published in September 2008.
“Foreclosure’s reach knows no bounds, no race, no limit on home value, no restriction on loan product,” Smith wrote. “Its reputation as being constrained to only the poorest parts of town dissipated long ago, and while it’s true that foreclosures historically have occurred in marginal neighborhoods where minority borrowers were targets of bad mortgages, foreclosure is happening frequently and with ferocity in suburbs such as Cordova, Arlington, and Collierville.”
As we know now, the national economy — and Memphis — has rebounded. The “Memphis has momentum” slogan helped Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland win another four years in office this year. Much of that momentum was pushed ahead by payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) deals given to real estate developers, principally designed to help spur the economy out of the recession.
A 2018 study by Community Lift, a group working to accelerate the revival of the city’s disinvested neighborhoods, says the incentives have worked, for some. While shiny, new roofs sprout in abundance throughout the fertile, PILOT-charged Poplar corridor, many neighborhoods outside that verdant valley haven’t yet been lifted by the rising tide.
“Memphis has been experiencing unequal economic development,” reads a summary of the “Searching for Economic Development Equity” study. “Some neighborhoods are growing while others are stagnating or even declining.”
Lockwood says in the 1970s (when the median household incomes in Frayser were 110 percent of those in Shelby County), many Frayser residents worked at International Harvester or at the nearby Firestone tire plant. When the plants closed, many people left.
He describes much of what happened to Frayser’s population as “middle-class flight,” not necessarily “while flight.” But whatever the reason, when the people left, hundreds of homes were left vacant. According to a May 2018 report by the Frayser CDC, 1,500 homes — 11 percent of all homes in Frayser — were empty.
A research study by Community Lift says buildings in older neighborhoods often don’t meet current standards for warehouses. Therefore, most industries that the city manages to attract or retain choose to locate in industrial zones that have more suitable buildings or available land or new construction options. Blue-collar jobs concentrate in those areas, and white-collar jobs concentrate in the Poplar/I-240 corridor and Downtown, where the Downtown Memphis Commission has led efforts to attract and retain businesses and corporate headquarters.
“Not surprisingly, the neighborhoods experiencing the strongest job growth are the ones near jobs centers, or those that have good transit access to those jobs (Downtown, East Memphis, the Medical District, Midtown, and the University District),” reads the Community Lift study. “Neighborhoods farther away from those job centers have experienced decline or stagnation. Many of the job centers on the fringes of the city are very poorly served by transit connections to places with the highest unemployment.”
But there is a ray of hope in Frayser. In August, plans became public for a “colossal” (according to a Commercial Appeal headline) warehouse planned for 99 acres in Frayser, just north of the Nike distribution center. While no ground has broken on the project yet, Mayor Strickland tweeted at the time that the project was proof that “Memphis — all of Memphis — has momentum!”
The Vultures Return
It’s not really clear just how or why out-of-town investors began taking interest in Memphis’ lower-income neighborhoods. Whatever their motives, the “vultures” are back, according to that U of M Institute for Change study, and they’ve come again from Wall Street.
Wade Rathke is a founder of the nonprofit ACORN International and one of the authors of the U of M policy paper. He says in the “pump-and-dump” strategy, vulture firms will buy homes, slap a couple of coats of paint on them, line up some renters, then maybe evict them if the timing works out. They repeat this process for years, until the money dries up. When it does, the company walks away, leaving a vacant home and big question marks on who to call when the grass needs to be cut or when it becomes blighted.
“These Wall Street guys — if you think of them in the same mindset as the mafiosos — they are predatory landlords,” said Ben Sissman, a Memphis-based foreclosure prevention attorney, during the recent State of Memphis Housing summit. “They’re selling high and doing no work. They deny responsibility for what they’re doing. All they want is the rent money and nothing else.”
A 2018 Washington Post story reported that out-of-town investors bought 20 percent of all homes on the Memphis market last year. Cerberus, a Wall Street private equity firm, was the largest owner of single-family homes in Memphis in 2018, according to the Post.
So how does that affect Memphis? For one thing, such huge holdings could allow companies like Cerberus to have dominance, with the power to drive the Memphis housing market, according to Rathke.
This trend toward corporate housing ownership takes hundreds of homes off the home-buying market that might have been accessible to low- to moderate-income families — including the same families that may have been pushed out of similar homes in the foreclosure crisis, he says.
“Families [moving] in to some of these houses are paying pretty high rent and maybe have a hard time sustaining that,” Rathke says. “So, it’s basically frozen people back to where they were a decade ago. It hasn’t allowed some families in Memphis to get past the Great Recession.”
The Memphis families affected are largely African-American, according to Rathke’s research. “Renter household increases are highest among African Americans, with the total number of African-American renters double the number of white renters,” reads the paper, called “A Memphis Mirage.”
Overall, homeownership in Memphis declined from 66 percent to 59 percent from 2010 to 2017. Since the 2008 financial crisis, no major city has had a bigger percentage drop in owner-occupied single-family housing than Memphis, according to the Washington Post. The percentage of renters rose from 34 percent to 41 percent. Black homeownership fell by 1.2 percent from 2009 to 2017. African-American rental rates increased 26.1 percent during those years. In comparison, white rental rates grew three percent.
Wealth gets sucked from neighborhoods into corporate coffers, as renters replace homeowners. Residents aren’t building equity in a home. When their lease expires, they walk away with nothing to show for it. Building home equity is considered a fundamental building block to creating wealth and financial stability in America. Amy Schaftlein, executive director of United Housing in Memphis, says renters “not only lose equity in their house and the wealth they could have built through homeownership, they also lose trust in ownership as a wealth-building tool.
“We’ve seen so much wealth stripped out of, particularly, minority neighborhoods and neighborhoods with high African-American populations because those neighborhoods were, frankly, targeted,” Schaftlein adds. “That’s just awful because you see so much wealth built and then it goes tumbling. It goes back to the old days of redlining, and you just see it happening again and again.”
Consider the Picker Pile
Yellow hazard lights blink on a Salvation Army box truck as it idles in front of a home on East Parkway. Two men haul a few valuables from the vacant home, but they largely ignore a mini-landfill by the curb. In the picker pile, tube televisions with darkened screens lie helter-skelter with faded furniture, colanders, ice trays, empty dish soap containers, sweaters, jeans, and dozens of VHS tapes. The scene has a front-row view of Tiger Lane and Liberty Bowl stadium across the way.
It has all the hallmarks of an eviction, but it’s hard to know for sure. Maybe the tenant ghosted. Maybe someone died. One thing’s for sure, Memphis is seeing a lot of evictions these days, and the picker pile has come to symbolize their plight. And if you’re seeing more of them than you used to, consider that they may now be the results of investment policies of a Wall Street firm or other out-of-town “vulture capitalist” whose investors have never heard of Liberty Bowl stadium — and care nothing about what happens to the Memphians they’ve put on the street.
Evictions are profit centers for them. Once an eviction is filed in court, says ACORN’s Rathke, the corporations can collect all kinds of fines and fees. “They’re collecting not only their back rent and whatever penalties that were laid out in a lease, but they’re also collecting court fees and filing fees,” he says. “There are some landlords, particularly in lower-income communities in Memphis and other cities, who are basically running this as an income cycle. Often they don’t follow through on the eviction because they’ve made, potentially, the rent plus the penalties.”
From 2016 to April 2019, 105,338 eviction notices were filed in Shelby County General Sessions Civil Court, according to Harrison’s research.
In 2016, 4,593 evictions were filed in New Orleans, 5,909 were filed in Birmingham, and 17,169 were filed in Richmond. In that same year, 31,633 eviction notices were filed in Memphis. Notices here went out to nearly 21 percent of all Memphis renters. Renters who got eviction notices were predominantly African-American, Harrison says.
FirstKey Homes, the property management firm owned by Cerberus, files for eviction at twice the rate of other property managers in Memphis, according to that Washington Post story. FirstKey went to court here more than 400 times in 2018, the story said.
Fighting the Tide
John Paul Shaffer says the members of his neighborhood advocacy group, BLDG Memphis, get uneasy when they see signs that read “I Buy Houses” pop up on their streets. There’s likely an out-of-town investor behind the sign, one with cash readily at hand.
This housing issue would be easier to manage, he says, if it were some thought-out policy. Instead, he, Lockwood, Schaftlein, and the many others working on housing in Memphis are fighting market forces, mostly against anonymous competitors with Scrooge McDuckian piles of capital.
Lockwood’s FCDC has bought, renovated, rented, and sold dozens of homes in Frayser, each with a signature brass plate with the FCDC logo. The group, with the help of some local developers, has almost completely revitalized one neighborhood with targeted, intensive investment and are working on rebuilding another.
Schaftlein’s United Housing is dedicated to sustainable homeownership throughout the Mid-South. The group sells homes, rents homes, offers down payment assistance, offers mortgages, and has funds for home improvement, whether the tenant owns the home or rents it.
Shaffer’s BLDG Memphis is a hub for all Memphis-area community development corporations such as the FCDC. BLDG Memphis helps those organizations fight for better housing in their neighborhoods.
All of them are witnessing the corporate rental-conversion issue first-hand. “This is part of the national narrative, and Memphis has come up as a hotspot,” Shaffer says. “We have a few instances where maybe over 1,000 properties are owned by one particular entity. That creates a lot of issues to provide service if these properties do become nuisances and code enforcement gets involved, and, then, the environmental courts get involved.”
Schaftlein says some renter agreements won’t allow tenants to make repairs to the home, and a run-down house has a ripple effect. A bad house lowers property values, and that can make other homeowners move away, destabilizing entire neighborhoods.
“You see a lack of pride,” she says. “You see a lack of investment. Those who can leave, do. That’s what’s happened in a lot of our neighborhoods.”