When Rebecca Matlock Hutchinson and her husband decided to purchase a home 17 years ago, they settled in Soulsville.

Hutchinson knew the neighborhood well. Her family's history there stretched back decades.

Before Hutchinson was born, her mother, now 90, had been among the first residents of the LeMoyne Gardens public housing complex when construction ended decades ago, although her mother lived there only a short time. And as a child, Hutchinson grew up attending services at the Metropolitan Baptist Church on Walker Avenue.

So, when she and her husband were ready to buy their house, McLemore Avenue running through the center of Soulsville was the only place they could see themselves.

"We made the conscious decision to invest in this community," she said.

Nearly two decades later, the Soulsville Hutchinson knows today is vastly different from the one she moved into in 2002. She bought her home before the Stax Museum of American Soul Music opened, before the Memphis Rox rock climbing gym and the surrounding town center, before LeMoyne-Owen College built its dormitory on Neptune Street.

With the long lens that Hutchinson has into the neighborhood's past, there is no doubt that development has transformed the area. Still, Soulsville has yet to see growth reach a critical mass.

The physical embodiment of Soulsville's battle between growth and persistent blight can be seen along the McLemore corridor, the half-mile stretch of McLemore Avenue between Mississippi Boulevard and Interstate 69/Interstate 240.

On one side of the street, tour buses line up as Stax welcomes about 60,000 visitors per year to its pristine campus at 926 E. McLemore Ave. But at 925 E. McLemore Ave., a building at least a half century old sits empty with structural beams visible through a gaping hole in its roof.

"A lot of economic development has occurred since we moved here," Hutchinson said. "We saw all of this development coming up around us, and we live right in the center of it... But yet, you still have the poverty. My question is: Why do we have poverty at the level that we still do, the low levels of education at the level that we still do? We have a four-year liberal arts college in the middle of our neighborhood and we have a multi-million dollar international museum right next door, two major anchor institutions. Why is that?"

Prosperity to poverty

Soulsville is bound by South Parkway, E.H. Crump Boulevard, Bellevue Boulevard and Lauderdale Street which becomes Willie Mitchell Boulevard.

The South Memphis neighborhood is more than 90% black. Most of its residents live in the 38126 ZIP Code, where U.S. Census data shows the median annual income is just above $14,000 with 61% of residents living below the poverty line. Soulsville also stretches into the 38106 ZIP Code, where median income is about $23,000 and about 41% of residents live below the poverty line.

But look far enough into the past and a prosperous Soulsville can be found.

Back in the early 1900s, the neighborhood was thriving, according to a 2015 report created in partnership with the Urban Land Institute and Community Lift, an organization that opens access to capital in neighborhoods that have long seen disinvestment.

Led mostly by black residents and entrepreneurs relocating to the neighborhood, Soulsville had about 44 businesses along McLemore Avenue at its peak, the report said.

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By the 1960s, even as businesses started to disappear and the residents started to earn less, Soulsville's position as an influential powerhouse of music and culture was undeniable. The music was such a part of the fabric of the neighborhood that its name was even born from it. It was dubbed Soulsville USA after musicians at Stax Records put the name on its marquee in response to Motown's Hitsville USA sign in Detroit.

But as the decades rolled by, the neighborhood started to decline. The street car connecting the neighborhood to Downtown Memphis stopped running, and a wave of residents left the city center for suburban sprawl.

By 1990, there were only nine businesses left along McLemore, the report said.

Among those to disappear was the original Stax Records building that was sold off after a bankruptcy in 1975 and later torn down in 1989. The lot sat empty until the museum, which nearly ended up on Beale Street, was announced in 2000 and opened in 2003.

"Before we built the museum and the (Stax Music Academy), this was like a war zone, I mean barren," said Tim Sampson, communications director for the Soulsville Foundation, which operates the Stax Museum campus. "There were burned-up school buses and drug houses and across the street there were buildings that looked like they had been half knocked down... We came in to try to not only build a shrine to Stax Records and a school for kids in the neighborhood who needed positive energy but to try to help revitalize this neighborhood too."

New vision for Soulsville comes with challenges

Years after the museum was complete, Community Lift's 2015 report and the subsequent renderings created by Memphis architecture firm brg3s mapped an idyllic version of what that stretch of McLemore could be.

It envisioned a bookstore and coffee shop near the Neptune Street intersection, a farmers market and grocery store near Mississippi Boulevard, an outdoor amphitheater along with renovated studios for artists and a restaurant across from Stax and a food truck park closer to the interstate overpass, which would have hanging from it a massive sign welcoming visitors and residents to Soulsville USA.

With few developers or small business owners stepping forward to bring the plan to life, most of those ideas have yet to make it past the rendering. But two projects are now underway in the area.

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The first is Al's Tasty Burger restaurant. Owner Terry Peete plans to open his second location of the restaurant near Stax at the corner of College Street and McLemore.

The inside of the restaurant is already complete. Peete received a $25,000 forgivable loan from the Economic Development Growth Engine of Memphis and Shelby County in May to help finish the outside. Rain delayed construction by several weeks but the restaurant is expected to open this summer, Peete said.

Off McLemore but still only about a quarter mile north of Stax, Diane Terrell and Heather Jamerson plan to open in August Radical Tacos, a nonprofit restaurant on a small lot at 939 Walker Ave.

Before these two restaurants were announced, The Four Way was the only place to sit down for a meal in Soulsville.

Terrell said she hopes to see even more in the future.

"One thing about neighborhood redevelopment is that people looking at it from the outside think once you get one of something, you move on to the next something," Terrell said. "We’re all sitting around saying, 'Why don’t we have five restaurants here? Why aren’t there three gyms, one with a rock climbing wall and two others? How do we get three book stores?'

"We’re not content with being one of the few things that the neighborhood entertains. There’s this notion that we can’t or we're not interested in building that kind of thriving dynamic economy at a neighborhood level when we absolutely are."

Still, Jamerson said the challenges of opening a business in Soulsville can't be ignored.

Their restaurant, which they initially planned to open in April, was delayed several months because of a problem determining property lines after their lot had been repeatedly bought and sold in tax sales over the decades, Jamerson said.

"Absent of being a nonprofit with a mission to bring food and opportunity to Soulsville, it would have been a very difficult development project," she said, adding that if they were private restaurant developers, that kind of delay could have pushed them out of Soulsville into a more established neighborhood.

'If you can't make McLemore work, God help you'

The challenges of development in Soulsville stretch beyond one-off property line disputes.

To understand the snail's pace of neighborhood growth, Eric Robertson, president of Community Lift, finds it is helpful to look at another neighborhood that has seen its business district explode: Binghampton.

For Robertson, Binghampton's Broad Avenue shows what's possible along McLemore but also highlights some of the major differences that slow progress.

Broad Avenue is no stranger to disinvestment.

The once thriving business district watched its customers disappear when construction on Sam Cooper Boulevard finished and the six-lane road diverted nearly all the traffic that once moved along the street. For years, businesses closed down, buildings sat empty and crime rates rose.

But about 10 years ago, a resurgence began. New businesses moved onto the street and ignited a new energy. They held community events, they painted the water tower and buildings, they added bike lanes. A popup shop program brought small businesses to the street.

The effort was a success.

About 75% of the businesses on Binghampton's Broad Avenue bring in more than $1 million annually, according to a draft of a strategic plan for the next phase of the street shared with The Commercial Appeal earlier this year.

That's the kind of transformation Robertson wants to see on McLemore Avenue. But Soulsville has challenges that didn't exist on Broad Avenue, he said.

Broad Avenue's renaissance was led by property owners, developers and business owners all with an economic stake in remaking the street. In Soulsville, property owners can often be difficult to find and even when they are found, they often aren't interested in redeveloping the property themselves but also don't want to sell to developers for what they see as lower prices than their land or buildings are worth.

Additionally, the popup shop program that brought businesses like Memphis Guitar Spa and the Five in One Social Club to Broad Avenue was sponsored by the city, which poured dollars into making sure the new businesses could test out a physical location with less risk.

While Soulsville has seen one-off loans and grants to fund small projects, it has not seen large-scale government involvement to spur development in the area.

County Commissioner Mickell Lowery, whose district covers Soulsville, said a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district could be part of the answer for the neighborhood.

A TIF measures the current tax revenue in an area and as future development raises the tax base, that additional revenue is used within the district to fund other projects. Lowery believes that with the help of a TIF, the success of smaller projects can be the catalyst that draws bigger ones.

"A TIF district incentivizes developers to have meaningful projects in that area," Lowery said. "People are starting to invest in Soulsville, but what we need are big projects."

Even with that kind of incentive, there may be challenges. To make it have any real impact, officials would have to draw the TIF boundaries carefully.

Community Lift's 2015 suggestions focused on McLemore Avenue, which was historically the neighborhood's business district. However, few businesses exist on the street and little more that would contribute to the tax base to raise TIF dollars appears to be on the way.

While there is no timeline on when a Soulsville TIF could become a reality, Lowery said any future TIF district would likely have to stretch beyond McLemore to be effective. In the meantime, the Soulsville Neighborhood Association is doing its part. Its members are working to keep the street corners clean, condemn crime, hand out plants to beautify homes and acknowledge residents who work hard to keep their lawns manicured.

To Robertson, the importance of Soulsville's development can't be overstated.

"If you can't make McLemore work, God help you for some of these other streets," he said, emphasizing the neighborhood features all concentrated around the street including Stax, Soulsville Charter School, the incoming Delta Preparatory Academy, Memphis Rox, LeMoyne-Owen College and the Memphis Slim Collaborative.

"With those kinds of assets, that street hasn't seen any development? What chance does Jackson have? Or Park in Orange Mound, who don't have this many assets clustered on one major thoroughfare? The lack of development in an area like Soulsville just speaks to how seriously hard it is without resources, leadership, vision and a plan."

Desiree Stennett covers economic development and business at The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached at desiree.stennett@commercialappeal.com, 901-529-2738 or on Twitter: @desi_stennett.