Tag: Gordon Alexander

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Boom Town: Can Memphis Handle Its Growing Pains?

CREDIT: Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

You’re pumping up Memphis at an out-of-town cookout. Sun Studios and Stax? Check. Barbecue? Check. Humble-brag on Memphis water? Check. Now it’s time to turn up the heat and break out that bit sure to set the HGTV crowd salivating — affordable housing. 

“You can get a lot of house for a lot less in Memphis,” you say. “It’s well-built stuff, too. Old craftsmans, bungalows, and cottages from the early 1900s. And I can walk to bars and bike to work.”

They ooh and aah appropriately (but you know deep down they’re thinking, “Well, at least I don’t have to worry about crime in my neighborhood.” And you’re all, like, oh my god, dudes, give it a rest).  

Memphis ends up on lots of lists. Still, our rankings don’t make the news like they used to. Remember how we were always among the dumbest, fattest, and sweatiest people in America, according to clownfart.com (or whatever)?

But there was one list we’ve always liked. For as many years as I can recall, Memphis has always ranked high in Kiplinger’s list of “most affordable cities.” We may not have downtown Nashville’s rolling hot tubs (not yet, lord help us), but you sure can get some major housing bang for your buck here. 

Here’s what Kiplinger’s had to say about the Memphis housing market this year, in which we ranked 4th for affordability across the country (up from 7th in 2018): “To say that real estate is cheap in Memphis is an understatement,” reads the story. “You can buy a home for less than $100,000, an amount that barely qualifies as a down payment in many of the most expensive U.S. cities you could live in.”

But there’s a rub. The needle moved up on the median home price between 2018 and 2019. If you stacked all the houses in Memphis from highest cost to lowest cost and picked one from the middle, that house has become $10,500 more expensive in the past year, according to Kiplinger’s. 

Is it a dark omen of things to come? Are we about to “It City” our way into some Nashville-style, crazy-expensive dystopia? Not likely, say the experts I talked to.

But business is booming here, if you haven’t noticed. No, construction cranes don’t litter our skyline like they do in Nashville. Our boom is different, more conservative, more Memphis, really. For one, we have plenty of empty houses and vacant land on which to boom, say those experts. Though, one Midtown real estate veteran I spoke with said supply is tight and it’s pushing up home values.   

But Memphis does follow one national trend. More people (especially younger people) are choosing to live in the inner city. They want to walk to restaurants, bike to work, and live among the old buildings that give a city its identity. 

And, of course, developers are eager to give these young customers a place to go. Consider South End — once a spooky, deserted warehouse district below South Main. The area now pulses with the thousands of residents who live, maybe work, but definitely play right around Tennessee, Georgia, or Carolina streets. They reside mostly in brand-new, fresh-looking apartment complexes like the ones at South Junction. Built by Henry Turley Co., the project is described as “part historic Downtown Memphis, part modern community.”

But some see the South Junction apartments and those around them as bland, cookie-cutter designs that belong in the suburbs, not historic Downtown Memphis. Aesthetics and historical alignment have been a source of controversy as developers continue to build modern-looking developments among the city’s more historic neighborhoods, such as Central Gardens and Cooper-Young. 

Call these all growing pains, if you like. The “Urban Renaissance” has been happening in cities all over the country for years, and most of them are experiencing similar pains. 

Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

More people are choosing to live in the inner city, sending development back Downtown.

LIKE IT’S HOT?

Okay, the housing market in Memphis is hot. We’ve all probably heard that by now. So, like, how hot are we talking here? 

Since 2014, investors have poured about $14.7 billion into 290 Memphis projects, according to data from Cushman & Wakefield Commercial Advisors, a local commercial real estate firm. These projects are industrial or commercial facilities, hotels, schools, parks, multifamily homes, and more — the engines of an economy. 

Here’s the hotness: 29 of those projects are complete ($520 million), 107 are under construction ($6 billion), and 158 are proposed ($8 billion). So, most of these projects aren’t even started yet. Big-money investors, it seems, believe in the future of Memphis. Which is undeniably hot.

That $14.7 billion figure does not include individual home builds (though it does include big, multi-unit projects such as The Citizen at McLean and Union). According to Chandler Reports, 639 single-home building permits were pulled in Shelby County last year. 

The number of homes sold was flat from 2017 to 2018, rising slightly from 18,871 to 18,957 sold, a .5 percent increase, year over year. But the average home price rose 4.4 percent across Shelby County — from $165,755 to $173,078. The price of that median home — the one plucked straight from the middle of the most- and least-expensive homes here — rose slightly (2.7 percent) from $130,000 to $133,540, according to Chandler. 

Tony Pellicciotti, a principal at local architecture firm Looney Ricks Kiss, puts it a bit more simply: “Memphis has turned the corner from being a market that was critical [of itself] and down on itself for so long to being one that actually has optimism and is thriving.”

Though Memphis rents may be on the rise, they’re still a bargain compared to other cities of comparable size.

Where Are the People?

On Memphis Facebook, there is often a common thread: “We’re building all this stuff — these apartment buildings and high-rises. Who is going to live in them?” It’s a fair question.  

About 100 people moved into Austin, Texas, every day in 2018. About 83 were moving to Nashville each day that same year, according to the most recent count. Both figures were down slightly from 2016 and 2017. 

From 2010 to 2018, the U.S. Census Bureau says about 3,729 people moved to Memphis (from 646,889 to 650,618). That’s about 466 people per year — around two-thirds of a person per day.

“Slow and steady” is how one consultant put the city’s household growth in 2017. Back then, the city hired Robert Charles Lesser & Co. for a snapshot of our market and some suggestions on how to build on our strengths. That study said we could expect about 1,300 new households here each year (assuming no major economic events) from now until 2040. 

Josh Whitehead, planning director of the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Planning and Development (OPD), says that while our growth rate “may look pretty good” to a Rust Belt city, Memphis is one of the slower-growing Southern cities. There are reasons for that, he says, and he didn’t mention crime even once. Chief among his reasons — isolation.

“For being on the east side of the Mississippi River, we’re probably further from another big city than any other [similar] metropolis,” Whitehead says. “You look at Atlanta and its synergy with Chattanooga now. Cities all up and down the Eastern Seaboard [have this synergy], and like in North Carolina with the Research Triangle.”

Asked who will fill all these new Memphis residences being built, Whitehead says it could be those who would have chosen to live in a subdivision in unincorporated Shelby County. Since those are drying up (thanks to city officials cutting new sewer taps to them), those people have to choose between living in a municipality (with amenities like sewer and trash pickup) or going it alone in rural Eads or elsewhere. Once they weigh city taxes against conveniences and transportation costs, many may choose to live in town, he says. Especially younger people.

Downtown’s narrative very much tracks that ongoing national story of young people seeking “authenticity.” Jennifer Oswalt, president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC), says the area also gets a fair number of retirees or empty-nesters looking to downsize. But she’s seen an interesting trend among those just beginning their careers.

“A lot of people are making choices independent of their jobs,” Oswalt says. “It used to be the case that you wanted to be near where you worked. But now people are choosing where they want to live — even if it’s choosing a city — before they find a job. They may say, ‘I want to live in Memphis,’ come here, and then find a job.”

Those moving Downtown are, largely, coming there from other parts of Memphis. Oswalt said that’s the case for about 70 percent of those moving there. About 20 percent are moving from outside the Memphis region, and the other 10 percent are from outside Shelby County.

But Whitehead notes that the city does have a wider draw. Fortune 500 companies like FedEx, AutoZone, and International Paper call Memphis home. There are also huge medical device companies like Medtronic, Smith & Nephew, and Wright Medical here. And St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital draws employees from all over the world. 

Debbie Sowell, a veteran Midtown real estate agent with InCity Realty, says the draw for many of the new apartment complexes like The Citizen and Madison@McLean could be from the Downtown area’s medical education institutions — the Southern College of Optometry (SCO) and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC).

“We have a lot of med students with SCO and UTHSC, and they tend to have money,” Sowell says. “They’re going to rent these nice places with low maintenance. They’re going to be here for two to four years, and they’re going to sleep and study and not have much of a social life. The people who are living and enjoying Midtown, they want something a bit more roomy.”

Are We Still Affordable?

An email hit my inbox recently with a warning, bolded in capital letters: “RENTS ON THE RISE.” After two months of rent declines in Memphis, the email warned that the rental rate went up from April to May. Oh, no! Well, not so much. It turns out that rent rose by 0.3 percent, month-over-month, and it rose 0.8 percent from 2018 to 2019. That yearly growth rate in Memphis “lags the state average of 1.6 percent, as well as the national average of 1.5 percent,” according to Apartment List, which concluded: “Currently, median rents in Memphis stand at $700 for a one-bedroom apartment and $830 for a two-bedroom.”

In Tennessee, Franklin, at $1,310 per month, has the highest rent rate for a two-bedroom apartment. Around the country, Memphis rental rates are still a bargain. San Francisco ($3,100 per month) is the highest.  

At The Citizen, rental rates for a two-bedroom apartment are listed between $2,100 and $2,300 per month, according to its website. Two-bedroom apartments at The Chisca Downtown run from $1,350 to $1,800. At South Line (the new apartments at Central Station), two-bedroom units start at $1,640 per month.  

Sowell says she worried about her Midtown rental units when new apartment buildings began to spring up all over Memphis. 

“Then I thought of it on the flip side — there are some junky rental apartment buildings in Midtown that, for the owners, have just been cash cows,” Sowell says. “They’ve been making money, but they haven’t really made any improvements.”

She said she hopes the influx of shiny, new rental options will make landlords up their games as they realize they might have to improve their properties to compete.

Oswalt says affordability has been maintained in Downtown, at least with any project the DMC incentivizes. That program requires that 20 percent of the units in a building that gets DMC tax breaks be set aside for those making 80 percent of the area median income, a figure set by the federal government. 

Oswalt adds that more affordable housing is on the way for Downtown, pointing to projects such as 2nd Street Flats, being built by Elmington Capital, which specializes in more-affordable housing. Oswalt says new, affordable housing will also open soon in South City.

“We really do feel good about the number of affordable units coming along,” Oswalt says. “We continue to encourage that in any large development, we make sure they are growing both ends of spectrum. Our market study really does show that there’s an almost unlimited demand for affordable housing Downtown.”

Whitehead says Memphis has so many opportunities for infill development (building on vacant land or renovating existing buildings) in so many neighborhoods, “that I don’t foresee, in the future … our ranking as the most affordable city in America ever significantly changing.”   

“Is Midtown as affordable as it used to be?” Whitehead asks. “Part of me says you can still find apartments like I used to live in for less than $1 per foot. Are there as many? Maybe not.”

But, he says, many people are choosing the newer Midtown units, since they have more modern conveniences. 

Hey, where’s the porch in this place?

Fighting the Past and the Future

Take a drive around East Nashville. Tall, modern houses — seemingly hundreds of them — nestle among Cape Cods, craftsman bungalows, and mid-century ranches. It’s like an alien invasion, or Dwell magazine gone country.

It’s not yet the same in Memphis, but the new houses are here, popping up all around Midtown — not on the same scale as Nashville, but when you see them, the difference is jarring, like finding a Kenny G record at Goner. 

“We want a seamless transition, where you don’t turn the corner and go, ‘How in the hell did that get there?'” says Gordon Alexander, a longtime Midtown activist and president of the Midtown Action Coalition. “We just want something that looks pretty much like the neighborhood and blends in with everything else. Some of these things are hideous; that’s the only way to describe them.”

Memphis prides itself on its authenticity. Consider the Earnestine & Hazel’s slogan “ragged but right.” Some, like Alexander, fear that the new designs are an erosion of that authenticity, the slippery slope to Memphis becoming some bland, McDonald’s-land or (even worse) Nashville. 

Those new designs are a sign of Memphis’ growing pains — pains that have brought new money and new residents to town, but have also brought hours of angry comments at land-use and design boards meetings at Memphis City Hall. 

Many of the new designs come from developers looking to attract customers who want modern amenities, and who, just maybe, aren’t looking for that old-school, Midtown charm — or don’t care about it. 

Whitehead says much of the ire drawn by these new buildings comes from a single point — the garage faces the street. This type of new home construction was allowed because of the way Whitehead interpreted city code. As he read the code, garages could face city streets if they were set eight to 10 feet further from the street than the front door. Examples of this are numerous tall, new houses on Bruce, Blythe, and Carr in Midtown, each with a tiny covered porch leading to a front door next to a large garage door. 

Why is this a problem? Aesthetics, yes, but also porches. Memphis’ front porches are places to sit and be seen by your neighbors, places to say hi, to chat, to get to know your neighbors, and thus build a stronger community bond. Whitehead says he’s heard the complaints and is making a change.

Whitehead says his new deputy administrator Brett Ragsdale has dug into city code and the Unified Development Code (UDC), which was written by out-of-state consultants. Ragsdale found a section of code — totally separated from the UDC, Whitehead says — that prohibits garages facing streets unless that is the predominant style on the block. 

Whitehead says it’s taken nine years for his office to put together all the disparate sections of the Memphis zoning laws and code enforcement, and it is addressing that issue right now. His office is also tearing down a wall between the divisions that make zoning rules and those that review and enforce those rules, Whitehead says. All of this will refine the boundaries of future construction and align messages about it coming from city hall.    

The Citizen at McLean and Union

Can It Last?

That’s hard to say. Pellicciotti says the Memphis development community is “extremely conservative.” They’ve been watching as an influx of capital is pouring into town from around the country and world. The outside investors bring new ideas about the Memphis market — and the potential for a lot of fast growth, he says. “It’s something that everyone in the development community is monitoring and hoping to enjoy the growth curve, but also being cautious about how mature it is.”

Sowell says she’s watched the strong housing market soften a bit. “There’s a lot [of housing] that started at $330,000 or $315,000, but it needed a bit of work,” she says. “The agent probably thought they could get it, with the market just skyrocketing, but it wasn’t until it came down to under $300,000 that it sold. So, I think the expectation that I can get top dollar for my house even though it needs work is not as strong as it was about a year ago.”

CNBC rang an alarm last month as it tweeted, “Thinking of buying a house? Read this first: These 40 cities may be on the brink of a housing crash.” CNBC said a firm called GOBankingRates “evaluated cities based on multiple criteria: percentage of homes with mortgages in negative equity, foreclosure rates, delinquency rates on mortgage payments, homeowner vacancy rates, and rental vacancy rates” and ranked them. Yep, Memphis was one of those cities (ranked 35th).

There’s some comfort in the knowledge that cities across the country are growing, just like Memphis. And just like Memphis, they have the same growing pains and the same worries about the future. 

“It is some respite to know that we are no better or worse off than anybody else,” Whitehead says. “Although, because of our relatively slow growth, I bet we don’t have as many pains as some other cities. I mean, just look at Nashville.”

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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Midtown’s Building Boom

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

The new “Memphis sound” is the chug of diesel engines, the high whine of power tools, and the relentless thwack of air-hammers. 

Memphis is growing, like it or not. And, make no mistake, some do like the building boom, while others hate the change. Call it growing pains. Most of that growth is happening in the city’s core — Downtown and Midtown. Developers say they’re simply following the people — the market — as they seek urban living experiences. 

Memphis is not growing outward; Memphis is filling in. In fact, city leaders recently de-annexed some outlying parts of the city and cut off new sewer taps to unincorporated areas of Shelby County, meaning no new construction is likely in those areas.

Justin Fox Burks

The Midtown Action Coalition in a meeting at Howard Hall

Developers are turning old buildings into something new. Think Crosstown Concourse, Central Station, or the myriad cotton warehouses Downtown converted into apartments. Developers are also doing “teardowns” and building something new on the site. For example, older homes in Cooper-Young are being razed and the lots are being filled with two or more “tall skinny” houses.

This is called infill development. And. It. Is. Hot. How hot? Historically hot.

“The renewed interest in the core over the past few years has been the most sustained and intense since the founding of the city,” says Josh Whitehead, planning director and administrator of the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Planning and Development (OPD). “I believe a renewed appreciation for urban living is driving these projects, much like is found in many other cities around the country.”

Is This Really “It”?

What’s happening in Memphis is a version of the same story that’s played out in cities such as Austin and Nashville. The city got “cool” (possibly due to its low housing costs and music cred), attracted cool people, and got all the cool-people accoutrements — lofts, bike-share and bike lanes, coffee shops, craft breweries, and, most recently, those Bird scooters.

When developers see markets get hot, they jump in and ride the wave. 

But Austin and Nashville have something Memphis does not — lots of new people; around 100 people move to both cities every day. And those figures are down slightly from where they were in 2016 and 2017.

From 2010-2016, 8,729 people moved to Memphis, or about four people per day, according to census data. In that same time, 36,854 people moved out of the Memphis area. 

The U.S. Census Bureau has not yet released its most-current, city-level data sets, so current figures on Memphis’ population shifts aren’t available. But, looking at what we have, the city’s population is stagnant at best. So are we really an “It” city?

Something certainly feels different. Consider another “It” metric: Home prices in Memphis rose 14 percent from May 2017 to May 2018, according to Chandler Reports. The average home price here in May 2017 was $169,540 and rose to $192,883 12 months later. Why? Because finding houses is getting harder.  

“Low housing inventory in Memphis and Shelby County is pushing home sales prices to record highs,” reads the report. 

In May, 1,779 houses were sold for a total of $343 million. That’s up 14 percent from $300 million in May 2017, according to Chandler Reports.

Developers must be reading the tea leaves, right? They wouldn’t take out loans, hire architects, and go through the city hall permitting process if they didn’t think their project — probably with some spiffy, millennial-attracting name — would be profitable. Thousands of people now want to live close to the urban core.

“People who are graduating from colleges and schools, they don’t want to own houses,” says Brenda Solomito-Basar, owner at Solomito Land Planning. “If they are empty nesters before children, or are empty nesters after children, you’ve got people who want low-maintenance. You have people who want to downsize.”

Ed Apple, of City Cottages, the company that’s planning to build small, single-family homes in Cooper-Young, says there’s a lot of demand for apartments but many of the city’s current apartment buildings are less than ideal. “I wouldn’t want to live in them,” he says.

“With new, comes excitement,” Apple says. “Memphis is an affordable city. My children both want to come back here, and I’m excited about that. I’m starting to see my friends’ children come back. There are just more opportunities than I’ve seen in the past.” 

But as developers scout sites for new infill projects, they’re hunting in old neighborhoods, areas where often not much has changed for a long time and residents like it that way.

Invasion of the Tall Skinnies

Patrick Durkin arrived at his Cooper-Young home on Bruce Street one Friday evening to find a crew demolishing the house next door. He’d had no warning. No nothing. After some digging, he learned that Memphis-based JBJ Properties Inc. planned to build four, “tall skinny” homes on the lot. 

Tall-skinny houses are modern, two-story structures, narrow enough to fit two or four side-by-side on traditional Midtown lots.

The new tall houses often loom over the single-level bungalows nearby. In Durkins’ case, the homes’ upstairs balconies meant an end to any privacy he’d had in his backyard. One house is now built so close to his, Durkin could reach out his window and ask for a bottle of Grey Poupon.

“This is ultimately destroying our neighborhood and destroying the characteristics of what Memphis is,” Durkin says. “People come to Cooper-Young because it’s fun and friendly. If I saw this [motions to the tall skinnies], I’d think, well, it might as well be Nashville.”

Nearby, on Carr, Rodney Nash agrees, as he looks up at another tall-skinny looming above the street, a JBJ Properties sign planted in front of it. One day, he says, “they just came and leveled everything with a bulldozer and a backhoe.”

“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are bothered by this development,” Nash says. “It’s coming from just a few people who are basically trying to make a lot of money off of the hard work that we’ve been doing in Midtown for years. They’re coming in, once the property values have gone up, and [to them] it’s worth it to do this [motions at the new building].”

No one from JBJ Properties responded to interview requests for this story. The company owns 77 properties across Shelby County, according to the county Assessor of Property website — including 10 properties on Bruce, where Durkin lives. JBJ Construction, which shares the same address as JBJ Properties, pulled 13 building permits for new homes in April, making it the top builder in the area that month, according to Chandler Reports. The average price for those 13 homes was $175,769.

Gordon Alexander, longtime Midtown activist and president of the Midtown Action Coalition, says tall, modern homes on streets with traditional homes makes you think, “what in the hell is that doing here?”

He says Cooper-Young’s reproduction antique street lights and many front porches give it a “Southern, homey feel.” Gordon calls the tall-skinnies, “atrocious, hideous-looking buildings.”

“If you don’t live in Midtown, I guess it’s hard for people from outside to understand,” Alexander says. “They don’t understand. They say this [motions to the tall-skinny] is progress. To us, this is not progress.”

Michael Fahy, president of Prime Development Group, which has represented JBJ Properties in several public hearings on projects, says, with “this new surge of growth, comes growing pains.”

“Change to a neighborhood with new homes can be confrontational,” Fahy says. “And each new development brings site-specific conditions that make each project unique. With new homes, comes a new benefit to neighbors with increased property values, updated or new homes, and new families.”

So, who wants to live in new homes in old neighborhoods? Plenty of people, apparently. Paul Morris, past president of the Downtown Memphis Commission, spelled it out plainly in a short speech showing his support for a new development in Central Gardens to the Land Use Control Board (LUCB).

“I believe there are more people that want to live in our core city and yet some people don’t choose to live in historic homes,” Morris said. “They want new construction. I think having that option available in Midtown is really important, because we can attract new citizens to our city.”

Whose Voice Gets Heard?

When Lisa Toro looks out the window of her City & State coffee shop on Broad, she can see the future — and she dreads it. Across Broad, where an old warehouse sits low, under street grade, a massive, modern-looking apartment complex is slated to be built. 

3D Realty, a conglomerate of Loeb Properties and M&M Enterprises, has planned a $51 million project for the north side of Broad that will raze the warehouse and put in its place several four-story buildings that will house 414 apartments.

Toro, who also co-owns The Liquor Store restaurant with her husband, Luis, says she welcomes all the new people as possible customers, but she fears a massive change is coming to the street that she and other independent business owners built with risk, sweat, and hard-earned money. The massive change feels completely out of her hands, she says. 

“Fifty percent of Broad Avenue is about to change,” Toro says, “and not making that a community-based effort is a huge disservice to the businesses that have been here for years.” 

Independent business owners worked hard for many years to make Broad what it has become, she says. She thinks developers want to cash in on the organic, eclectic energy they created, and that they could destroy it in the bargain. 

Bob Loeb, president of Loeb Properties, told The Daily News in May that he and partner James Maclin chose Broad “because the neighborhood is diverse and eclectic.” He told the paper he’d owned the warehouse since 1993 and they were waiting for the south side of the street to pop.

“The neighborhood is often viewed as a barrier to development, but yet the neighborhood is why those developers want to come in,” says Pat Brown, co-owner of T Clifton Art Gallery on Broad. “That’s what makes Memphis unique and why tourists want to come. If it’s not, why not just be Nashville or Atlanta?”

Toro and Brown say they were in talks with 3D Realty for months about everything from traffic and safety to greenspace. The developers listened, they said, but didn’t really heed any of their suggestions.    

Maclin, principle owner of M&M Enterprises, says “conversations with neighborhood partners are absolutely ongoing” but provided no other comment on neighborhood concerns. Maclin adds, “We look forward to continuing our commitment to be good neighbors in the area through 3D Realty’s [Historic Broad Avenue Arts Alliance] membership — [Loeb Properties owner Bob Loeb] and I are already members — as well as our active community participation.”

If the project is built (and there’s little doubt that it will be), Toro says property values on Broad Avenue may rise, raising rents on those independent businesses, and even driving them away. 

Brown wonders if there’s not a better way to give communities a voice when developers come knocking. That’s especially true, she says, when developments get millions of dollars worth of PILOT tax breaks (as the apartment complex did — $12.6 million, to be precise) from public sources.   

“An Easy Decision”

Neighbors can sometimes influence the decisions of developers. On Madison Avenue, Fahy’s Prime Development Group and others plan to build 230 new apartments in four buildings on the vacant lot next to the P&H Cafe. 

Bar owners Matthew Edwards and Robert Fortner worried the development would have gated off the one-way alley that runs behind the P&H and limited access to their business. Last month, the developers heeded their concerns and agreed to build a private alley off Court Street to retain the access. 

In Cooper-Young, neighbors complained about the density Apple’s City Cottage project could bring. Originally, the company planned to build 10 roughly 1,000-square-foot rental houses on an empty lot at the corner of Elzey and Tanglewood. 

Apple says he could have fit 18 homes on the lot, and he says he might have gotten it approved, “if we’d gone and fought it.” But, after listening to neighbors and looking at the site, he settled on eight homes, and says they “look really good there.

“At the end of the day it was an easy decision,” Apple says. “It was what was right for the property and what was right for the neighborhood.”

However, when dealing with infill projects, Apple urges neighbors and activists not to “poke the bear.” Some showed up to public meetings about his project with ulterior motives, he says; others were “spreading misinformation and half-baked truths … and trying to stir the pot.

“I love when people from the community say, ‘I’ve got a problem with this and here’s why,'” Apple says, “as long as it’s well thought-out and not just a personal smear. You get a lot more with honey than with vinegar.”

Solomito, who has guided dozens of projects through the public process, says developments can be improved and modified by the community, if residents are willing to negotiate.

“Lots of people think they shouldn’t have to negotiate,” she says. “Well, you know, A) Never move next door to vacant land; and B) Nothing ever stays the same. Property changes hands, and the best you can do is think of [new development] as an opportunity.” 

Stopping Development

Listen to residents and neighborhood activists long enough and they’ll eventually say something like, “I can guarantee if they’d tried to build something like this in [a developer’s or local lawmaker’s] neighborhood, they wouldn’t get away with it.” Consider the case of Ivy Grove in upscale Central Gardens: 

Ivy Grove was a project in which Germantown’s Kircher-Uhlhorn Development wanted to tear down a 106-year-old home and build nine new houses on the old home’s two-acre lot. 

Neighbors said Ivy Grove would increase density, congest traffic, sap the neighborhood’s historic qualities, and lower property values. It didn’t help that the developers were from Germantown and planned to list the homes for between $650,000-$750,000.

“The developers behind this project could care less about Central Gardens or Midtown,” Central Gardens resident Jan Willis wrote to city planning officials. “It’s utter greed. It’s not growth, it’s pure profit for the developers.” 

The neighborhood resistance was enough to cause Kircher-Uhlhorn to halt the project for a month. The company came back to the Land Use Control Board (LUCB) in March with a new plan that included saving the existing home and building two fewer houses. But the changes didn’t win the Ivy Grove project many more fans.

“Central Gardens is a neighborhood with a huge tax base because of its historical relevance,” said Barbara Sysak at that March LUCB meeting. “If we destroy this, bit by bit, the neighborhood will eventually lose its unique character.”

It was hard to know if anyone on the LUCB was actually listening and considering what neighbors were saying. Then, Margaret Pritchard spoke. She’d said she’d heard “the wonderful comments” from the “passionate people who live in Central Gardens.” Pritchard sits on the LUCB and chairs one of its committees. The day of the Ivy Grove vote, she said of the Central Garden residents in the chamber, “I’m their neighbor. I live on Harbert.” 

Pritchard worried Ivy Grove would cause parking issues and said that she didn’t “like the precedent” it set for the neighborhood, and wondered about the “violations to the guidelines.” But, mostly, Pritchard said, drainage was the reason to reject the project. Heavy rains made the intersection of Barksdale and McLean impassible. Pritchard said she’d once seen a picture of a car floating there in The Commercial Appeal.

Pritchard and nine other LUCB board members voted against Ivy Grove. The board rejected a project, even though the developer changed it, based on community feedback, and even though the city planning staff approved it. That doesn’t happen often at Memphis City Hall. 

At the vote’s final tally, a burst of applause and “woos” rose up against the banging gavel of the LUCB board chairman Jon McCreery, who was one of only two members to vote for Ivy Grove. 

Will It Last?

Three years ago, countless articles touted the trend of “Americans Returning to Cities” the “urban renaissance.” But recently, new stories, like this one from Fortune, are emerging: “Why Millennials Are About to Leave Cities in Droves.” 

New Census data for the first seven years of this decade predicts a population shift back to the suburbs, especially as older millennials make more money and get ready to have children, according to analysis from the Brookings Institute.

“If these shifts continue, they could call into question the sharp clustering of the nation’s population — in large metropolitan areas and their cities — that characterized the first half of the 2010s,” wrote Brookings’ senior fellow William H. Frey. 

So, what’s next for Memphis?

In terms of crystal balls, Solomito’s is probably clearer than most in Memphis. Here’s her prediction about the next wave of big-time development:

“East Memphis is done. Downtown is getting done. Guess what? It’s the middle part of the sandwich [in Midtown]. I think it’s coming there.”

Buckle up.

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Cover Feature News

The Life and Afterlife of Edward Perry

CREDIT: Courtesy of Memphis College of Art

Ed Perry isn’t famous. He died, a complete unknown, of congestive heart failure in 2007, in the toxic environment of his cluttered home and studio in Stephensport, Kentucky.

“They say he died of congestive heart failure, but there was so much wrong with him you can’t keep up with it all,” says Memphis songwriter Keith Sykes, who met and became close friends with Perry in the 1960s. “Ed was relentlessly cruel to his body his whole life,” Sykes adds.

At the time of his death, Perry’s only source of income was a small Social Security check. He died penniless. All he left behind was a mean parrot named Jake, a filthy house overfilled with furniture parts, old wood, and electronics he’d collected for the creation of future projects. He also left an uncommonly unified body of work, much of which had never been exhibited due to Perry’s deep mistrust of the commercial art world.

Although he despised the gallery system, many of the large, meticulously constructed pieces Perry built, mixing painting and sculpture while skirting the boundaries of fine and folk art, were painstakingly labeled, with notes regarding size, weight, construction and, when appropriate, wiring schematics. Many pieces were boxed and stored, as if awaiting their invitation to gallery shows that were never booked. So they sat for decades, gathering mildew and parrot dung, like dirty brides left waiting at a shabby alter.

“Contaminated” is the word Sykes uses to describe his old friend’s living environment at the time of his death. “He must have worked for two weeks to just make room for us to move around,” he says recalling earlier, happier visits. It fell to Sykes to salvage, store, clean, and painstakingly catalog his friend’s work. “If you were sensitive or had any kind of allergies at all, you probably couldn’t go in there at all,” he says. “We finally got stuff out with masks and gloves on. Because over the years all the nicotine and all the sawdust and all the moisture had conspired together to make it just pretty damn deadly.”

So who was Ed Perry? What is it that sets his work apart from so many other artists who collect their MFAs and never exhibit again? And what did this completely unknown artist do to merit two simultaneous shows of his work at the Memphis College of Art (MCA)?

Judging by his resume and correspondence, Perry self-identified as a “Visual Engineer, MFA,” and an “electro-optics engineer,” whatever those titles may imply. He was also an abstract painter and an obsessive builder. He was a chain smoker, a self-made scientist, and a 1972 Memphis Academy of Arts graduate. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he trained as a figure skater in Lake Placid, New York, where he met and befriended Olympic medalist Peggy Fleming. He was also a radical pacifist, a drinker of strong libations, and a boundary-defying conceptual artist working with found materials, spray paint, and state-of-the-art lasers.

Courtesy of Memphis College of Art

Ed Perry was a Pacifist but became enraged when diplomatic agreements resulted in the destruction of missiles he might have transformed into art supplies.

Additionally, the man collected in “Ed Perry: Constructions,” and “Ed Perry: Between Canvas and Frame,” was something of a stock character: the misunderstood genius, pursued by personal demons, uncompromising to the point of being commercially invisible throughout most of his semi-reclusive lifetime.

Perry was highly trained both as an artist and a laser technician. He shared studio space with groundbreaking artists like Sam Gilliam and frequently worked alongside Washington D.C.-based art star and fellow parrot-owner Rockne Krebs, to create massive, urban-scale laser installations. But he was an artworld nobody when he died in 2007. And it’s unclear just how much the MCA exhibitions can do to launch an unknown alum’s posthumous career, or give his elaborate, mixed-media constructions the happy afterlife Perry’s friends think they deserve.

Remy Miller, MCA’s dean of academic affairs and the driving force behind both Perry exhibits, thinks it’s too easy to sensationalize the lives of troubled artists, and he worries that doing so takes emphasis off of the work. “People tell these horrible stories about a guy who was falling apart and struggling to live,” Miller says, specifically referring to accounts of the life of action painter Jackson Pollock. “That’s really what you want to talk about in the face of this beautiful work?”

But even Miller succumbs somewhat to the temptation of a good story, comparing Perry to Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch painter whose post-mortem success is partly responsible for the enduring myth that nothing increases the value of an artist’s work like a difficult life and untimely death. But the van Gogh story, while relevant in so many ways, isn’t an especially realistic impression of how the modern art world works. Perry despised the business side of art-making, and although his resume lists a handful of shows, for the most part he seems to have actively avoided public viewings of his work.

“I asked him if he’d ever thought about making a coffee table book, and what came out of him was another Ed I didn’t know and didn’t want to know,” Sykes says, recalling a past dustup. “I just wanted people to see the stuff. He really hurt my feelings over that.”  

“I think Ed understood the work was really good,” Miller says. “Why else prepare all of that other stuff? Why bother to box it up? Why keep it? Write all those notes on it? I think Ed just couldn’t bear to sit through what was going to have to happen next.”

Gordon Alexander shared a house with Perry when the two were still students at the Memphis Art Academy (now MCA). He remembers a visit from his friend some years ago, on the night before several larger pieces of Perry’s work were scheduled to ship to Memphis’ Alice Bingham Gallery for a show. “Ed just says, ‘I’m not going to do it,’ and he didn’t. And that was it.” The pieces never shipped; the show never happened.

In some regards, because he has no exhibition history or records of previous gallery sales, Perry might as well not exist. He has no place within the established art world. And even if gallery people find the work compelling, they don’t really know what to do with it, because there’s no previously established value.

“It’s a kind of catch-22,” says Ellen Daugherty, the art historian who led an MCA class on Perry and contributed an essay to the exhibit’s striking catalog.

Art consultant John Weeden was enlisted to structure a logical value scale for Perry’s work. He couldn’t discuss the specific rubric, but he gave a general overview of how we might assess the worth of artwork created by a previously unknown artist.

“Commercial history and provenance are two of the leading factors in determining the general value of an artwork,” he says. “In the case of a largely unknown artist, the task becomes one of establishing a framework upon which an initial market for that artist’s work may be constructed.” Weeden also allows other considerations including the nature of the materials, the style of the pieces, the reputation of the artist, and the level of craftsmanship, labor, and design.

So finally, with two shows, a class, this story, and any other attendant press, Perry the artist finally has a public paper trail. His working relationship as an artistic and technical assistant to Krebs can be affirmed, and too late, maybe, an underappreciated artist gets his overdue recognition.  

MCA’s Miller doesn’t equivocate: “I wouldn’t be talking to you right now if I didn’t think that this body of work can stand up next to any body of work created in the later half of the 20th century,” he says. “I absolutely believe it’s as good as any body of that work made by any artist during that time period.” Miller’s not alone in that belief. Sykes and Alexander, both close to Perry since the 1960s, have made a strong effort to ensure that their old friend’s life work doesn’t pass unnoticed.  

Perry was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His father was a WWII vet. His brother Bill also went military. Perry, on the other hand, took classes at community college and trained as an ice skater before leaving for art school in Memphis in the fall of 1967. He was riding a Triumph motorcycle and wearing a flak jacket and WWII combat helmet the first time Alexander saw him pulling up to the Memphis Art Academy in Overton Park. The two young artists bonded early, becoming neighbors, first in the Auburndale Apartments, then housemates, when they moved, along with their friend Paul Mitchell, into an old house on Madison Avenue where Overton Square’s French Quarter Inn now stands.

By most accounts Perry was a good but not stellar student who worked hard when he was interested and sometimes flummoxed faculty. He would eventually become MCA’s student body president.

“I was in New York by then,” Alexander says, speculating that his friend must have been drafted into student government. “He hated titles.”

Always interested in technology, especially the artistic applications of lasers, Perry also took physics classes at Rhodes College (then Southwestern).

Alexander describes the Memphis Art Academy as being a creatively fertile environment and speculates that Perry was especially influenced by the work of three notable professors: Ted Faiers, who experimented with totemic “Indian Space” painting and 3D painting; Ron Pekar, the original graphic designer for Ardent Studios who worked in neon and designed the logo for Big Star’s #1 Record; and acclaimed color theorist Burton Callicott, who painted false shadows in his work and created colorfields that seemed to glow with their own internal light. Because he was exposed to so much 20th-century art, it’s difficult to call out specific influences, but it’s not difficult to look at Perry’s totem-like constructions and imagine all the ways they might be inspired by these mentors.

Alexander describes the house he shared with Perry as a mattress-on-the-floor den for starving artists. Work was always being made by someone somewhere in the house and painters, sculptors, and musicians were always coming and going.

“We didn’t even lock the house,” Alexander says. “I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.” Musician and occasional actor Larry Raspberry was an intermittent visitor. So was Sykes and a young Alex Chilton, who would eventually move in next door. Somebody was always playing music. When they weren’t, Alexander, an audiophile and music editor for the then-Dixie Flyer, Memphis’ original underground newspaper, was spinning records on the turntable.

It would be years before Sykes would co-write the hit song “Volcano” and hook up with Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. At this point he hitchhiked, pumped gas, worked the holiday rush at Sears Crosstown, and toured as a Dylan-inspired folkie on the Holiday Inn Circuit. He met Perry and Alexander when they were still living at the Auburndale Apartments and remembers being smitten by Ed’s work from the very beginning.

“Once you see an Ed Perry, you’ll always know his work,” Sykes says.

Like so many great college friends, Sykes and Alexander became separated and immersed in their own families and careers. They lost touch with Perry for 20 years.

Perry took his MFA at the University of Cincinnati, where he subsequently went to work for Leon Goldman, a dermatologist and laser surgery pioneer sometimes referred to as “the father of laser surgery.” Perry and Goldman co-created studies on laser surgery and published them in scientific journals. But when it was time to make art again, Perry moved on.

Krebs met Perry in 1974 at a laser safety certification class at the University of Cincinnati and almost immediately hired him as an art assistant with laser-safety training and advanced technical skills. This was the beginning of a decade-long working relationship with Krebs.

Perry eventually moved to D.C., where he kept an apartment and studio on the second floor of a warehouse co-owned by Krebs and noted color field painter Gilliam who, like Faiers, had been painting well beyond the frame.

Krebs had a cranky parrot named Euclid, and Perry acquired a cranky parrot named Jake. Studio visitors sometimes had to use trash can lids as shields to avoid a ferocious pecking.

Courtesy of Rockne Krebs Estate

Heather Krebs, Rockne’s daughter, remembers Perry well. She says she had to pass by his studio whenever she visited her father’s. “He was always in there working,” she says, remembering his creations, like the decorated envelopes he made for her to use, but which she kept instead.

Heather suggests that Perry might have benefitted from his proximity to both her father and Gilliam. Clients coming in and out would have seen his work in Krebs’ studio or in his own. She wonders if steady work meant he didn’t feel pressured to show.

Courtesy of Rockne Krebs Estate

Ed Perry and Rockne Krebs unload one of their urban-scale installations

Krebs created large-scale laser and solar installations for the Omni International Building, now the CNN Center, and Perry consulted and assisted. “Omni was billed as the greatest premiere in Atlanta since Gone With the Wind,” Perry wrote excitedly to Krebs, describing the 1976 opening.

“The stuff shirts oohed when Tony Orlando took the microphone,” Perry continued in his letter. “And moaned when he announced he would not sing.”

Perry moved back to his parents’ farm sometime around 1986, and that is where he either built or completed many of the constructions on display in “Between Canvas and Frame.”

Ellen Daugherty thinks that, for all of his training and expertise, Perry’s work sometimes resembles folk art. “Ed builds this stuff that has a kind of similarity to some folk artists,” she says, citing his approach to construction and his use of available, affordable materials like old fence boards and discarded Shaker furniture parts. “But when you look at the stuff, that ain’t folk art,” she says. “It’s highly trained. And extremely visual and abstract.”

Courtesy of Rockne Krebs Estate

A laser diffraction photo by Ed Perry given to laser artist Rockne Krebs

The backs of Perry’s constructions are often as lively as the fronts. Electronic pieces include a full-sized drawing of the wiring plot. Many pieces include obsessive notes about what kinds of materials have been used, when the canvas was primed, and so on. He also makes diary entries marking everything from Halley’s Comet arriving in conjunction with the first Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to notes about the Mississippi River flood of 1993.

The two Perry shows are the culmination of a sprawling buddy adventure that launched in Midtown in the 1960s and is now coming home to roost.

“In the late 1990s me and Gordon started talking,” Sykes says. “We should go see Ed. You know he’s going to be like he always was. Not taking care of himself. Working all the time. Forgetting to eat. Forgetting to sleep. If we didn’t go see him, we thought we might not ever see him again.” So the old friends went to visit their buddy in Stephensport. After the first trip, they continued to visit as often as possible. They helped their friend when they could, and they watched him fall apart.

“He made bird houses that looked like Frank Lloyd Wright designed them,” Alexander says. Further blurring the lines between fine art and folk art, he also carved beautiful, realistic duck and fish decoys, and built majestic weather vanes.

Even at his folksiest, Perry never stopped surprising his friends. “We were sitting around one night and it was dark,” Sykes recalled. “Ed says, ‘Y’all watch this.’ And before you knew it, there were laser beams running all around the house. He had mirrors set up here and there, and that light doesn’t degrade.”

After Perry’s death, Sykes took charge of Jake the parrot and as much of the artwork as he could, with a goal of getting it seen. A veterinarian said it was normal for older parrots to be cantankerous, adding that Jake would be fine once he was weaned off the alcohol. Getting the artwork in front of people proved to be trickier, but Mark and Becky Askew loved the work and agreed to show it in the Lakeland offices of A2H architects.

Miller says he initially had no interest in viewing the work. “I figured it would be the couple of good pieces on the invitation and maybe some unicorns,” he says. “But I went. And I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of a body of work. It was just amazing. So consistently good. So complex. So beautiful and so interesting. I immediately started bringing people out to see it.” Now, with the two MCA exhibits, he’s inviting the rest of Memphis to look.

One big question remains. What would Perry, who took such pains to stay out of the spotlight, think about his posthumous closeup? “Well, for starters, we’re not taking a commission,” Miller says, addressing one of Perry’s primary complaints.

Alexander takes things a little further: “If he was going to be anywhere in the world, Memphis or Spain or wherever. I think he’d want to be at the Art Academy. Back in Memphis, where it all got started.”