Ted Evanoff

ted.evanoff@commercialappeal.com

U.S. 51 rolls out of the Tennessee countryside and into northwest Memphis like a big road with someplace to go.

Four broad lanes trace back to when Highway 51 and the nearby Illinois Central railroad tracks were the fast routes into the city and the north side factories, plants so big that if you had just come for the first time from a Delta town like Lula, Mississippi, or Cotton Plant, Arkansas, they were about the biggest thing you’d ever seen.

The road was important and well known. Mention the highway and most everyone, especially in the Delta, knew of it as an artery to Memphis and the north, like the line in pianist Curtis Jones’ 1938 tune -- “And if I should die baby, before my time, bury my body on 51 highway right down below the Frisco line.” His song title: “Highway 51 Blues.”

Today, U.S. 51 spans 1,286 miles between New Orleans and Lake Superior. Ten miles of it in northwest Memphis, a part of the city known as Frayser, lead to an ancient question: How do you keep your town from dying?

Despite its breadth and luster, if U.S. 51 were a river, today it would be a barren stream at Frayser trickling through a valley of stubborn entrepreneurs. They run used-tire shops, transmission garages, tote-the-note car lots, tax return offices, dollar stores, flea markets. Some work in half-empty shopping centers, a few chain diners.

Typical Americana

That point rose last Monday for Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland at a community meeting in Frayser. Memphis officials are ramping up a new city comprehensive plan and are going into the neighborhoods to gather ideas. In Frayser, they talked about where the community, and the entire city, goes from here.

Few parts of the city have felt more neglected than Frayser. Memphis is known nationally for affordable housing. This is certain in Frayser, a leafy, hilly area of about 90,000 residents where a sturdy 3-bedroom brick ranch now sells for about $27,000.

Investors bought thousands of the houses after the 2008 financial crash pushed out homeowners, many of whom have hardly recovered from the recession. In Frayser’s ZIP Code 38127 area, the number of people in the labor force declined 7 percent to 21,115 between 2011 and 2014, bringing average household income down 2 percent to $34,617, far below the $66,395 average for the 490,000 households in the entire nine-county metropolitan area, U.S. Census reports show.

It wasn’t always this way. When you hear Memphis was once home to sawmills, International Harvester, Firestone tire and robust manufacturing, this is where many plants stood, a place that once powered the city tax base. Frayser was the bedroom community. Today on its side streets, ample 1950s brick homes are set among tall trees. The factories were located to the south in an urban district named North Memphis and separated from Frayser by the wild and forested Wolf River bottomland edging the Mississippi River. U.S. 51 united Frayser and North Memphis.

“This is a very typical American community that until the 1970s had pretty productive and lucrative jobs,” longtime Frayser advocate Steve Lockwood said, adding, “We’re smart, big and talented as a city but we can’t find a Japanese manufacturing business that wants to move in here.’’

Almost all the North Memphis factories are gone, part of America’s broader deindustrialization. Yet the forest, homes and highway remain, along with hundreds of acres of empty industrial parcels still connected to Memphis Light Gas and Water Division utilities. Despite the available parcels in North Memphis, big-dollar investment went to less worn parts of the city, leading developers today to contend Memphis and Shelby County are running out of undeveloped space for new factories and distribution centers.

Of the $2.5 billion worth of office and industrial investment supported by city-county PILOT property tax breaks since 2011, one major project went into Frayser. It was Nike’s massive freight depot. Another went into Kimberly Clark’s old North Memphis paper mill modernized by Canadian manufacturer Kruger.

Kruger made the mill a north side success story – products include White Cloud toilet paper sold nationwide by Wal-Mart. But it is one of the few successes. Near the mill stands a “North Memphis Industrial Park” sign and phone number that rings to a recording that says out of service.

Memphis 3.0

Despite the line in Curtis Jones’ tune, Frayser is not a burial ground.

But it is a place with a deteriorated tax base and a sense of neglect. There was some relief Monday afternoon when about 75 people were on hand to meet with Strickland about the proposed comprehensive plan called Memphis 3.0.

The plan is to be a blueprint of where the entire city goes from here. It’ll be completed in 2019 on the 200th anniversary of Memphis and is supposed to take direction from ideas culled at neighborhood meetings across the city. The “3.0” refers to the city beginning its third century.

Frasyer’s session, in the Ed Rice Community Center, was the first Memphis 3.0 neighborhood meeting anywhere in the city. One speaker, identified as insurance salesman Akeem Smith in The Commercial Appeal, linked crime and poverty citywide to the absence of black-owned businesses.

"And when you don't have flourishing businesses, you have a lot of poverty,” Smith said. “And when you have a lot of poverty, you have a lot of crime."

It's a mystery

Smith’s equation sounds accurate. But the mystery is how to get the businesses to move in.

“People want a lot of different kind of investment in this neighborhood,’’ Lockwood, president of the Frayser Community Development Corp., a nonprofit redevelopment agency, said after the 3.0 meeting. “We’re not a food desert, but people want apparel stores, more sit-down restaurants and services.”

Other than supermarkets, dollar stores, drug stores and fast-food restaurants, few national or regional chains invest in Frayser. Lockwood figures low incomes deter them, although he says Frayser’s cash economy is stronger than national chains realize.

People fix windows, mow lawns, do other tasks for cash and use federal Earned Income Tax Credits to stretch the income reported on tax forms. “The income people have in low-income neighborhoods is often underestimated,’’ Lockwood said.

His agency has a window into the Frayser economy. It buys, fixes and sells worn houses. He cites a success story: Homeowners in one small renovated area, called Grandview North, pay a total of $119,000 per year in local property taxes on houses that were blighted a few years ago.

“Right now I’m inundated with banks trying to loan in Frayser,’’ Lockwood said, identifying 10 banks led by Regions, even though house buyers these days are mostly investors, many located outside the Mid-South.

Having more residents with steady jobs would spur home sales and in turn shore up the crumbling tax base and attract new retailers. But no broad city strategy was ever sustained to bring back Frayser after the factories closed.

“It just falls to guys like me, which isn’t right,” Lockwood said. “I don’t think this city has been very good at strategic planning, yet I’m uncharacteristically optimistic about the 3.0 plan. I’m hoping our philosophy of finding really productive places to invest in – I’m hoping that outlook will infuse Memphis 3.0” across the city.

“My mantra on this thing is it can’t just be a wish list. If we can tell the city and the powers that be what’s good about Frayser -- that we can show it’s a solid investment that’s good for the entire city to invest in Frayser,” Lockwood said. “We have land here. And if you talk to Reid Dulberger, which I do, he would tell you this city is in short supply of industrial land.”

Shrinking PILOTs

“It’s not that there is no industrial land left in Shelby County. What we don’t have are large new large-scale business or industrial parks,’’ said Dulberger, head of the EDGE Board, the city-county economic development agency.

That’s one reason PILOT tax cuts handed out by EDGE have declined. Property tax breaks have been applied to $71.3 million worth of industrial projects in Memphis and Shelby County so far this year, down from $178.7 million last year, $461.8 million the year before, $483.1 million in 2013 and $660.7 million in 2012.

Part of the decline in investment traces to a national trend. Companies are holding back on capital spending. Part also reflects the rise of Memphis’ suburbs. New industrial parks built in largely undeveloped Mississippi counties are attracting distributors and manufacturers, a trend expected to accelerate when the Interstate 269 outer loop is completed next year just south of Memphis.

Many in the city, including commercial real estate broker Larry Jensen, former chairman of the Greater Memphis Chamber, call suburban growth natural for metropolitan areas as commerce spreads away from the core city. At the same, Memphis city officials have considered potential industrial parks along Tennessee 385, an urban expressway on the east side. But there’s been little public talk about reclaiming North Memphis’ old industrial sites, a subject known as brownfield development.

“Brownfield development is clearly an opportunity,” Dulberger said. “But most or many firms want to be located beside other new facilities. They want that new industrial park smell.’’

New parks look manicured and signal the companies in them look successful. It’s almost always less expensive to turn raw country land into a new industrial park than repurpose a brownfield site, even one close to existing MLGW services and U.S. 51. Because of the cost difference, Dulberger said, federal grants are essential to level the expense for developers, particularly on property whose soil is contaminated by chemicals and oils leaked at the old factory. Reclaiming the land often requires removing or covering the hazardous soil.

Highway 51 revisited

So there’s Frayser.

It contains affordable housing, willing workers, vacant acres. Like many other neighborhoods in this cash-strapped city, it lacks the resources to make much use of its assets.

“It’s going to take a range of assistance projects, not just industrial,” Dulberger said. “We need to tap into the overall strength of the community” in Frayser and other neighborhoods.

There are businesses and entrepreneurs ready to step up if encouraged and open shops and stores in the neighborhoods. EDGE earlier started a loan program for use across the city and county.

Now, Lockwood is looking for Memphis 3.0 to identify more roll-up-your sleeves programs like his, bring more resources to hand.

In all this, Frayser has one asset most neighborhoods are missing – a U.S. highway.

U.S. 51 offers truck drivers in Frayser quick access to Interstate 40 and nearby Interstate 55, which replaced Highway 51 as the north-south artery running up the country’s spine long after Curtis Jones wrote his mournful tune.

"It's always more complicated to redevelop old land," Lockwood said. "The same is true of housing. It's why we do urban sprawl so well. But in the long run it's going to be less expensive for Memphis to bring back these neighborhoods and invest in them. For a whole lot of reasons, I think we have no choice but to go back and reclaim that land."

Ted Evanoff, business editor of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.comand (901) 529-2292.