Tag: blight

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Demolition of ‘Eyesore’ Underway Soon

Credit: Google Maps

A multi-million-dollar glow up is underway at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center (UTHSC) campus in a plan that includes the $19.4 million demolition of a much-criticized, abandoned hotel on Madison. 

The plan was laid before the UTHSC board in a meeting Friday by Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer Raaj Kurapati. The slate of projects underway at the Medical District school totals more than $100 million, Kurapati said. 

While not the most expensive project on the list, Kurapati said there is one that “everybody gets excited about every time we speak about it.”

“That is the demolition of the eyesore of a building that comes on when we drive on to campus — that’s the Holiday Inn tower and the adjacent buildings,” he said. “We’ve been able to put together some funds to be able to finally say we’re going to move forward with that.”

The buildings are currently under review for hazardous materials. Demolition work is slated to proceed next month, according to a slide shown during the meeting. That work, however, will likely only include readying the site, including things like erecting a fence around its perimeter. The work is expected to be complete by June 2026 at a cost of about $19.4 million.   

UTHSC bought the buildings from the Memphis Bioworks Foundation in 2015 for just around $1.5 million million. The parcels were eyed for purchase by the school as early as 2013, nearly a decade ago. A UTHSC board committee said at the time they were interested in the buildings for “for the control and future use of the land base as anticipated in the UTHSC” master plan. 

The school’s 2020 master plan said UTHSC’s new College of Medicine building will be “located at the southwest corner of Pauline and Madison on the old hotel site.”

UTHSC officials sought a developer in 2015 to transform the existing 12-story building into a hotel and conference center, according to a story at the time from The Daily News. While the school earned the approval to do so, it was apparently unable to find a develop for the project.

The building has been vacant ever since. This has earned the building criticism for years. 

“UT is forever planning on developing that site but I wouldn’t hold my breath,” wrote u/tristanape on Reddit two years ago in a discussion of the building. “My understanding is the cost to knock it down and clear out the asbestos is just too much.”

That is at least partly true, according to Kurapati’s update on the project Monday.

“The reason it took a while is because there’s a lot of remediation work that needed to be done, clearly because it’s a very old building,” he told committee members. “There’s some asbestos, and other building practices, and materials that were used that call for us to be very diligent about making sure that we bring it down in a very safe and responsible manner.”

The most expensive item on the list of upcoming capital projects at UTHSC is a new Gross Anatomy Lab. Renovation work is now underway for the $30 million project on about 35,000 square feet of the school’s General Education Building. 

Gross anatomy is the study of the human body’s structure visible to the naked eye like bones, muscles, and organs. 

Also, expect a new fencing project to commence around UTHSC soon. That project is set to showcase the school in the community and to provide better security for parking lots that have seen some break-ins recently.  

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News The Fly-By

New Charter Lays Framework for Tackling Blight

CREDIT: Brandon Dill

As the revival of a handful of high-profile formerly blighted properties — the Crosstown building, the Chisca Hotel — is underway, there are still thousands of rundown homes, long-vacant apartment buildings, and abandoned storefronts scattered across the city.

The problem may seem massive and unmanageable, but as of this month, the city now has a roadmap of sorts for getting a handle on the blight problem. The Memphis Blight Elimination Charter, developed by a team from the public and private sector and coordinated by Neighborhood Preservation, Inc., sets up a framework for tackling the issue and paves the way for the development of a blight elimination team and action plan.

Blight fighter Brandon Gaitor took a few minutes to discuss the city’s problem, the charter, and what comes next.

— Bianca Phillips

Brandon Dill

Brandon Gaitor

Flyer: The charter’s intro says Memphis is facing a “blight epidemic.” How bad is it?

Brandon Gaitor: Blighted property in Memphis is currently worse than it has ever been. Both the amount of blight and the scale of its negative impact on quality of life has truly challenged Memphis. Frayser, Orange Mound, Whitehaven, and the Klondike/Smokey City area stick out in my mind as parts of our city that have the greatest challenge. These areas are predominantly African-American neighborhoods that are also challenged by a slew of other social issues like poverty, crime, divestment, and challenges associated with inadequate public transportation and access to fresh produce.

Why do we need a charter to help us deal with the blight problem?

Local government, the private sector, civic groups, nonprofit, and residents are realizing that Memphis’ challenge with blighted property is far too great to fix without coordinated collaboration. This means organizations sharing information that impacts us all. This means aggregating resources — human and capital — in a way that scales the impact of our efforts.

If blight had a motto it would be “divide and conquer.” As long as we are disjointed in our efforts, no progress will be made. This charter is our moral compass in blight elimination efforts in Memphis. But admittedly this is only the first step. Mere words can’t revitalize our communities. It will take years of ongoing efforts to implement the goals and principles of the charter. The second step in this process is finalizing an action plan that assigns specific tasks to various groups in pursuit of manifesting the ideals on paper into an increase in Memphis’ quality of life.

What are some examples of strategies that haven’t worked?

Underfunded code enforcement, disjointed organizations competing for the same resources for the same areas, unorganized neighborhood revitalization, an outdated tax foreclosure protocol and tax sale system that is too often exploited by out-of-town investors. We have to create incentives that allow good property owners to excel and bad property owners to fail.

Brandon Dill

Blighted property in South Memphis

What can residents do when dealing with a blighted property in their area?

The best thing that residents can do is organize. Take advantage of the Neighborhood Preservation Act. Take advantage of the Shelby County tax sale and the overstock of vacant land and property owned by Shelby County. Get to know the designated code enforcement field officer for your neighborhood and coordinate with them to bring blighted properties into compliance with city code.

Is Memphis a pioneer in creating a charter for dealing with blight?

Memphis is the first and only city to produce a charter of this scale, but cities like Flint, Michigan, and Cleveland, Ohio, have adopted blight-elimination frameworks or other collaborative efforts that have successfully seen an impact beyond what they could do in organizational silos.

When will the blight elimination team be organized? What would be their primary duty?

The blight elimination team will be the topic of discussion at the steering committee’s April meeting. I believe that the team will be finalized within the next few months. Their primary duty would be to implement and create the action plan, which gives specific tasks for various organizations with benchmarks and metrics to measure our impact.

Will they start by surveying all the blight in Memphis?

That blight survey has already been done thanks to the Bluff City Snapshot. Every parcel in the city of Memphis has been surveyed to assess property condition, litter, occupancy/vacancy, etc. This is a huge resource for all blight fighting efforts.

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News The Fly-By

Blight Group Involved in Years-Long Fight with County Over Property Taxes

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

Gennie Suggs-Smith is “angry as hell,” and she says that’s what keeps her hanging on to the blight remediation group she founded, Census Tract 61 Neighborhood Council, years after losing its South Memphis office in a property dispute with Shelby County.

Now Suggs-Smith believes the county is dragging its feet on giving her a free property from the Shelby County Land Bank to replace the one she lost in a tax dispute.

“A good year has gone by that I’ve been trying to get another property [from the land bank],” Suggs-Smith said.

The trouble began in 2008. The Census Tract 61 group, which was founded in 1986, had been operating out of a house at 1249 Cannon since 2002. There they coordinated efforts to deal with blight in an area just east of Soulsville. They also ran a club for kids, fed meals to needy residents, and organized neighborhood get-togethers for the small area bordered by South Bellevue, South Parkway, Walker, and the BNSF railroad.

Suggs-Smith said she filed for nonprofit status with the IRS and property tax exemption status with the state Board of Equalization (BOE) in 2004. But that didn’t stop tax bills from piling up. The outstanding tax bill on Census Tract 61’s office rose to $11,600.

“I started getting letters about property taxes, but I thought, since we were a tax-exempt organization, sanctioned by the IRS and the state of Tennessee, that they were making a mistake,” Suggs-Smith said. “I didn’t follow up about the taxes though. Since I’d filed all the necessary [nonprofit] paperwork, I didn’t think they were serious.”

But turns out they were. In 2008, Suggs-Smith received a letter from the county letting her know they were serious about taking the property. Although she said she’d filed for tax-exempt status with the state, the county never received confirmation, and at the time, Suggs-Smith didn’t have all the paperwork to prove her status.

“We had a flood in our building and lost a lot of files, but I eventually found a copy of the state stuff and showed it to the courts,” Suggs-Smith said.

Bianca Phillips

Gennie Suggs-Smith and her former office on Cannon

But it was too late to save her office on Cannon. It was sold in a tax sale in 2008.

Suggs-Smith eventually won an appeal to the state BOE in 2012, but although the board ruled Census Tract 61’s tax exemption should have begun in 2004, it also determined such findings “would not likely affect the validity of a tax sale that has otherwise become final.”

According to Greg Gallagher, a delinquent tax attorney with the Shelby County Trustee’s office, the issue was that Suggs-Smith lacked proof of her tax-exempt status at the time of the tax sale.

“Unfortunately, she had already lost ownership of the property by the time the BOE came in and said, ‘Well, we think the property was used as a nonprofit starting in 2004. But you no longer own the property, so we don’t have jurisdiction.’ It was a done deal. It had been sold,” said Debra Gates, chief administrator for the Shelby County Trustee’s office.

Suggs-Smith says she has an agreement with the Shelby County Land Bank to select a new property, but she said she has been turned down for two buildings and is awaiting a response on a third. Meanwhile, without an office, she says Census Tract 61 Neighborhood Council’s membership has dwindled down from about 20 active members to only a handful of people.

“When we lost the building, people stopped coming. There are only a few of us left cutting vacant lots here and there and serving a few meals for the people left in our Meals on Wheels program,” Suggs-Smith said.

As for her old property on Cannon, today, it sits vacant. It was purchased by an investment group in 2008, and Suggs-Smith said renters lived there for awhile. But it’s remained empty for years. A “For Rent” sign hangs in the window.

“Every time I pass by that house I get angry,” Suggs-Smith said. “It’s just sitting there. It’s going to become part of the blight scene.”

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Opinion

Broken Windows at Sears Crosstown

sears.JPG

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and a renovation of a building with a thousand windows begins with five of them on the fourth floor of Sears Crosstown in Midtown.

“It’s not construction, it’s due diligence for the window companies,” said Todd Richardson, spokesman for the project.

Still, it’s something for a blighted building that has been closed for years. The five windows on the south side of the building were removed so that bidders could do a mock up. About 65 percent of the building is windows, Richardson said.

The cost of replacing them will be several million dollars because they must comply with historic guidelines to insure tax credits and be more energy efficient than the originals.

“It’s going to be an interesting bid process,” said Richardson.

Asked if this indicates that the project is moving forward, he said “work is ongoing.”

Plans call for a mix of educational, medical, commercial and residential users.