Tag: Tall Skinny houses

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom

CREDIT: Jean-Luc Ourlin

For 20 years, I drove from Midtown to Downtown, five days a week, on Vance Avenue. The Flyer‘s offices were on the bluff near the Tennessee Brewery, and Vance was the most direct route from my house. It was a thoroughfare that had seen better days. There were still remnants of those days — a couple of big Victorian mansions, a once-posh-looking apartment building — but the street was scruffy, worn out. The only businesses were a small market plastered with “We Take EBT” signs and a couple of faded funeral homes.

As you neared Downtown, you passed Foote Homes, the city’s last public housing project. It always seemed to be the one place full of life on Vance, the yards and front stoops filled with people and activity. It had been rehabbed in recent years and seemed like a stable, family-friendly place.

When the Flyer moved its offices to Union and Front more than a year ago, I stopped driving down Vance and hadn’t seen it in months — until last Friday night, when we were headed to a friend’s house in South Bluffs.

What a change. Foote Homes is gone; a large, grassy vacant space is all that remains. Nearby, new apartments have sprung up on Vance, and new houses are being built just to the south. These are basically instant neighborhoods, homes created to house people of “mixed incomes,” we’re told. They look nice.

So where did the Foote Homes residents go? Scattered over the city, I suspect. The operative urban renewal theory being to break up “pockets of poverty.” So, eh, too bad if you live in one of the pockets. You gotta move.

The building boom is everywhere, especially in downtown and the center city. Near my house, a giant sign reading “The Citizen” now illuminates the night sky, proclaiming the presence of a new apartment complex at McLean and Union — with more apartment buildings to come in nearby blocks. A large, barn-like apartment building is provoking controversy and protest near Overton Square. “Tall skinny” houses are popping up like mushrooms in Cooper-Young, often to the dismay of neighboring home-owners. “Boom, boom, boom, boom,” as John Lee Hooker once sang.

Jean-Luc Ourlin

John Lee Hooker

So who’s moving in? And who’s being forced out by higher housing prices and disappearing single-family homes for rent? You can probably guess. It’s the age-old balancing act between encouraging investment and not displacing people from their homes — the gentrification dilemma. City leaders will increasingly have to deal with this problem as developers continue to jump into the now-hot Memphis market.

We have only to look 180 miles east to Nashville for a perfect case study. According to a recent affordability study by Numbeo.com, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in center city Nashville is now $1,529 a month. In Memphis, it’s currently $901. (That’s right.) That latter number will no doubt change as gentrification spreads, forcing lower-income folks to the margins — unless we do something about it. I suspect this issue will become a significant one in the 2019 mayoral contest.

The current administration’s Memphis 3.0 mantra is “Build Up, Not Out.” I get what they mean. The city has been hurt badly by urban sprawl. It’s geographically too large for its population. But Memphis leaders, now and whoever they may be in the future, will need to continue to pay close attention to make sure the gold-rush to redevelop the city’s core doesn’t come at the cost of forcing long-time residents out, and infesting established neighborhoods with make-a-quick-buck, poorly designed housing.

We should encourage and welcome the developers and investors who are putting their money into Memphis. Fresh financial resources are an important part of making a city vibrant. But the investors’ influence should align with the needs and wishes of the city’s residents. Their developments should respect the architectural integrity of our neighborhoods. And care must be taken to avoid chasing away long-time residents who have “paid their dues,” so to speak, by anchoring those neighborhoods before they became “investments.”

Unfortunately, too often those with the big bucks are the ones directing our cities’ urban revivals. We need to look to other “it” cities like Nashville and learn from their successes — and their mistakes.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Welcome to It City

CREDIT: Lawcain | Dreamstime.com

A few short years ago, once you got south of Earnestine & Hazel’s on South Main, you entered a barren urbanscape of abandoned warehouses, dusty railyards, and weedy, empty lots. Now the streets are lined with row after row of apartment buildings. Hip restaurants like Loflin Yard and Carolina Watershed are repurposing old industrial spaces in creative ways. South of South Main is booming, inhabited by thousands of mostly young Memphians who live, work, and play Downtown.

Will it last? Can a neighborhood built on young folks wanting to live Downtown sustain itself? Well, it can, but only if there is a steady stream of fresh young folks wanting to live there in the coming years. Here’s hoping there is. Otherwise, well, that’s a lot of apartments to fill.

That’s because as those young Memphians grow older, they’ll form relationships and maybe — as tends to happen — decide to have children. At that point, they’ll usually want the customary accoutrements of family living: a house, a yard, a mutt.

The closest neighborhoods to Downtown are already feeling the pressure of the influx — from Downtown and from older suburbanites moving in. If you want to buy a home in Midtown, East Memphis, Cooper-Young, etc., you’d better be pre-approved for your loan and be ready to pounce when a house you like comes on the market. Memphis’ core is a hot housing market right now.

In recognition of that, developers are moving in, buying distressed properties, doing teardowns, and putting up two or more new houses on what were once single-family lots. These new homes are often what are called “tall skinnies,” because, well, that’s what they are. Another name for them is “infill homes,” and they are going up all over Cooper-Young and elsewhere in Midtown. (The Flyer‘s Toby Sells has done numerous stories on infill housing, with more to come soon.)

On the plus side, more housing is being created in core city neighborhoods, meaning a bunch of fresh residents, bringing more businesses, new restaurants and retail, and, hopefully, new students for neighborhood schools. On the down side, there is a danger our old neighborhoods will lose their historic charm as older homes get torn down, trees get removed, and residential parking gets more difficult. Try finding a parking spot around the new Nashville export, Hattie B’s, on Cooper.

In fact, if you want to see where all this could be going, drive up to East Nashville and behold the glut of tall skinnies on street after street. Behold the young hipsters with strollers. Behold the bicyclists and coffee shops. Behold the new urbania. It’s coming, for better and for worse.

In Memphis, all the attendant paraphernalia of an “It City” — the bike lanes, the bike-share program, the Bird scooters, the moving of musicians here from Austin and Nashville, the booming South Main, Overton Square, Crosstown, Broad Avenue, and Cooper-Young entertainment/restaurant districts, the Railgartens and Urban Outfitters and Hattie B’s — it’s all developing under our very noses. Something’s happening here, Mr. Jones, and we’d better pay attention.

Case in point: We’re increasingly seeing plans for new apartment buildings springing up in Midtown, with the city offering the usual PILOT plans to “encourage” developers by allowing them to avoid taxes for an agreed-upon period of time. Whether or not those deals make sense is an open question. What shouldn’t be in question is a requirement that in order to get a PILOT, developers should have to build structures that reflect the character of the surrounding neighborhood.

Traditional Midtown apartment buildings — the Gilmore, the Kimbrough, the Knickerbocker, the apartment buildings along Poplar near Overton Park — seamlessly integrate with the cityscape and their neighborhoods. In contrast, many of the new apartment designs being given PILOTs are stark, cheap-looking boxes, seemingly built only to take advantage of the housing boom with no consideration of the visual impact on the character of our historic streetscapes.

Again, go visit Nashville — specifically, the Gulch, just south of Downtown — if you want to see how quickly these cheap-looking boxes can redefine the character of a neighborhood. Memphis needs to put serious design restrictions and guidelines in place before giving out tax breaks to developers.

If we don’t do it, “It” is going to do us.

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News The Fly-By

Infill Frenzy: New Developments in Cooper-Young

CREDIT: Toby Sells

The city’s urban core is a lava-hot market, but as some developers rush to cash in, some long-time Memphians worry that some of their projects are “destroying the characteristics of what Memphis is.”

Infill development projects, those built where something else once stood, are not new to the core, said Josh Whitehead, director of the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Planning and Development, but this recent trend is something new.

“The renewed interest in the core over the past few years, however, has been the most sustained and intense since the founding of the city,” Whitehead said.

But some new developments concern many who chose urban living and Memphis’ unique neighborhoods long before they became trendy, like Patrick Durkin, who chose Cooper-Young nine years ago.

He came home one Friday to find a demolition crew razing the home next door to his. No note. No nothing. He later found that JBJ Properties Inc. planned to build four, “tall skinny” homes on the corner lot.

Toby Sells

Patrick Durkin (left) and Olivia Wall and their “tall skinny” neighbors

The homes are modern, two-story (tall) structures, narrow enough to fit four of them side-by-side on a traditional Midtown lot (skinny). In short, they look nothing like Cooper-Young homes.

“This is ultimately destroying our neighborhood and destroying the characteristics of what Memphis is,” Durkin said. “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.”

But a new set of laws may make it harder for developers to build whatever they want in Cooper-Young. The Land Use Control Board and the Memphis Landmarks Commission both approved rules creating the Cooper Young Historic Landmark District.

The designation would regulate demolition, new construction, and residential add-ons in the neighborhood. It only now needs approval from the Memphis City Council, which is slated to vote on the matter in the coming weeks.

Developers are also looking for council approval for another controversial project in Cooper-Young. City Cottages wants to build 10, small, pre-fabricated houses on a now-vacant lot at Tanglewood and Elzey.

The homes are between 576 and 726 square feet, built in Osceola, Arkansas, by Little Custom Homes. City planners said the homes are “similar in concept to modular housing,” homes fabricated somewhere else and assembled on site.

Midtowners on the Preserve Cooper-Young Facebook page, which Durkin and his girlfriend, Olivia Wall, established about nine months ago, say the tiny homes don’t fit the neighborhood, are “inappropriate,” and won’t even provide construction jobs here.

While the type of project may seem new, the council already approved a similar project for the same lot back in 2009. City Cottages says that precedent helps their cause and further precedent could help them bring the tiny homes to a spot close to the Highland Strip.

Precedent like that worries Brantley Ellzey, a Midtowner, artist, and one-time, full-time architect.

“The bottom line is that all of the power is with the developers now,” Elzey said. “If you’re a citizen and you’re against [any new development], you’re somehow seen as automatically against development and against progress when, in reality, you’re for all those things, you’re for them being done a better way.”
“Infill Frenzy” is an ongoing series looking at developements that will shape our neighborhoods.