Tag: construction

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News The Fly-By

Outer Limits

CREDIT: David Seymour | dreamstime.com

For more than a year, I’ve driven out to Collierville at least once a week because of roller derby.

When people would ask me for directions to the bouts, I’d tell them to get on Bill Morris Parkway and drive until it ends. You’ll pass Winchester, the Mike Rose soccer complex, and the Avenue at Carriage Crossing shopping center, and when you see the orange barrels and can’t go any farther, that’s when you know you’re there.

But I can’t say that anymore. Last month, a new section of Bill Morris opened. The new stretch runs from Highway 72 to Piperton, cutting the drive considerably.

The project, part of Memphis’ new outer loop, cost taxpayers $36 million and brings Fayette County closer than ever before. But — no offense to Fayette County — is that really a good thing?

USA Today ran a story last week about more people being on the road earlier than ever before to beat morning rush hour. According to recent census figures, one worker out of every nine left for work before 6 a.m. in 2001; in 2006, it was one worker in every six.

The newspaper noted that the “commuter-creep” — partially a result of suburban sprawl — affects everything from “the breakfast-food industry to television viewership, from traffic-signal timing to newspaper delivery times,” as well as family relationships and personal health.

People are literally going to work too early and getting home too late to see their families. All because they’re trying to get to work on time.

I’m not against development. Whenever I hear people disparage suburbanites or say that they “hate the suburbs,” I find it ironically close-minded. Many of the city’s most beloved neighborhoods were once considered suburbs. The style of the houses may be different, but the basic idea is still the same: Give people a place where they have their own space but are not completely isolated.

There are also powerful incentives to living and building outside developed neighborhoods. Because of codes and zoning regulations, it’s often easier, not to mention cheaper, for developers to build on previously undeveloped land than to reuse land in the heart of the city.

Let’s say you want to build a new shopping center. You’ll want to attract a national retailer as a tenant, but they’re going to want a certain number of parking spaces for their customers and that can mean a lot of land.

Despite the reasons for sprawl, people are beginning to see the problems it causes. A Pew Center for Civic Journalism study found that Americans are beginning to think of sprawl as important an issue as crime, taxes, and education. Probably because sprawl affects all those things.

I recently heard one urban planner theorize that women, specifically suburban soccer moms, are “driving” a national movement back to the city limits. This is a group that spends large portions of their time in cars, shuttling children from one activity to the next, getting groceries, and doing errands. Who could blame them for wanting to consolidate their destinations?

Add in high gas prices and the inner loop of a city looks pretty good.

On a community level, sprawl has contributed to the financial problems of Shelby County, creating false growth through migration and coring once-vibrant areas.

The problem, however, is that sprawl is akin to gaining weight. Once it’s there, it’s difficult to get rid of it.

But there may be a way. On Thursday, the local Urban Land Institute and the UrbanArt Commission are presenting a free screening of Save Our Land, Save Our Towns, a film about the causes and effects of urban sprawl along with possible remedies.

Journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Hylton began his study of sprawl after the high school across from his house was closed and demolished because of declining enrollment. Visiting Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Oregon, Hylton found that codes and zoning laws can have an enormous impact on sprawl.

Incentives and tax credits can also help. If building is easier and more inexpensive outside the city, something has to be done to make redeveloping land within the city limits more attractive.

But, for those who have the means, there’s one simple solution for both extra weight and urban sprawl: Just move.

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News The Fly-By

Q&A: Alex Garvin,

The scenery in Shelby Farms is reminiscent of a car commercial — open road, an expanse of green space, rolling hills, buffalo. Other than in a few small areas of the park, people are a rare sight.

But park advocates are hoping to change that. Two recent decisions by the Shelby County Commission have advanced plans to transform the 4,500-acre site into a “world-class park.”

Last December, the commission approved an easement that will limit development on the land for the next 50 years. Then last month, the commission voted to turn the park’s management over to a private, nonprofit entity.

Though that entity has yet to be named, Alex Garvin, the consultant hired last year to create a vision for Shelby Farms Park, believes it’s the first step in transforming the former Penal Farm into the county’s main attraction.

— by Bianca Phillips

Flyer: What will a nonprofit bring to the park?

Garvin: The park happened almost by accident. There’s never been any conscious decision made about how to operate a 4,500-acre facility. The amount of money currently spent on operating the park is less than one-tenth of what is spent on managing and operating Bryant Park in New York, which is only six-and-a-half acres.

The single most important thing about this decision is that the County Commission has decided that it’s important to transform this from a set of accidental happenings over time into a real public park. They want to turn over the exclusive management of the park to a nonprofit entity that does nothing else but take care of the park.

What can be done with that much land?

In some cases, what has to be done is to take care of what’s there already. The trees have just been left to grow without any attention. We need to make sure the trees are pruned, fertilized, and that they don’t die.

The one thing I dream about for that park is a place where people can go swimming. There are all these lakes, but nobody can swim in any of them. I think you could do something really wonderful without spending a lot of money.

Large areas of the park are rarely used. How do you change that?

There’s no circulation system to get around the park, whether you’re doing that on foot or in a car or on a bicycle. There has to be better ways to get into the park and better ways to get around in it. For example, there’s no bus service into the park. There’s no bike system, and I think that’s a priority.

What’s the next step?

The next step is to create a master plan for the park. We hope to have an open competition for design of the park. We’ll select a small number of teams that would come up with ideas. We’ll look at them and then finally hire one of those firms to do the work.

We keep hearing comparisons to New York’s Central Park. How does Shelby Farms currently compare?

Shelby Farms is 4,500 acres. Central Park is 842. So Shelby Farms is more than five times the size of Central Park.

At the moment, on a typical afternoon on a weekend, there are a quarter of a million people in Central Park. On a typical afternoon on a weekend in Shelby Farms, you may have a few thousand people. While I don’t think it’ll ever be the center for a quarter of a million people, surely this is a facility that could accommodate much more than it is now.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Facing the Stadium Issue

A public forum was held this week on the issue of a new football stadium — considered urgent by the current mayor of Memphis, to judge by remarks His Honor made on New Year’s Day and subsequently — and, lo and behold, Mayor Herenton was a no-show. Both he and his chief finance officer, Robert Lipscomb, were actually listed on the program as panelists. And, though the event was held in the cavernous Rose Theater at the University of Memphis,
other significant non-attendees were university president Shirley Raines and U of M athletic director R.C. Johnson.

A pity, since the event, sponsored by the university’s Sport and Leisure Commerce program and by the student chapter of the Sport Marketing Association, boasted some illustrious participants. Those included City Council member (and mayoral candidate) Carol Chumney; Bank of Bartlett president Harold Byrd, a well-known university booster; Liberty Bowl executive director Steve Ehrhardt; Professor Charles Santo of the University of Memphis; and Professor Dan Rascher of the University of San Francisco. The latter two panelists provided in-depth analysis of the economic factors involved in construction of a new stadium.

It was no surprise that Byrd, chief backer of an on-campus facility, made a vigorous case for building at the university. What was surprising was the extent to which the two academicians, Rascher in particular, argued that more direct and indirect benefits to the community were to be had from an on-campus stadium, and at far lower cost. For his part, Ehrhardt pronounced himself perfectly amenable to the concept, so long as the requisite number of seats (60,000, in his estimation) were made available in order to keep the annual Liberty Bowl from retrogressing.

All participants tended to agree that a stadium at the Fairgrounds — the solution envisioned by Herenton — would require an additional and perhaps prohibitively costly investment in surrounding infrastructure to be viable.

Meanwhle, the projected facts and figures relating to that Fairgrounds proposal are yet to be laid on the table, and, for reasons we find unfathomable, Raines and Johnson decline to comment on either the Fairgrounds concept or the idea of a campus facility until and when such revelations are at hand. We advise them not to hold their breath.

Merely exhale and look again, closely, at the more viable proposal at hand — literally right under their noses.

An Anniversary

“With its radical concept of preventive war, the Bush administration is about to let a potentially dangerous genie out of the bottle.”

That’s what we said editorially four years ago, as the Bush administration led us, willing or not, into Iraq. In that first Flyer editorial on the war at hand (after issuing innumerable warnings beforehand), we suggested not only that catastrophe was being invited but that truth itself would be at serious risk. Both forebodings were, we regret to say, on point.

We have embroidered on those initial concerns extensively since then and invite interested readers to use the search engine at memphisflyer.com to check up on our percipience over the years. The bottom line is that the genie is still out of the bottle and growing more unfriendly and menacing every day. We don’t mind saying that we — and many, many others — told them so on the front end.

And now most of you, if the opinion polls are to be believed, are trying to tell the president the same thing. Now as then, it’s falling on deaf ears.