Archie Willis aims for affordable rent Downtown
Archie Willis III is in the odd role of being seen in some quarters as ushering poor families out of the center city to open room for well-off Memphians.
Just how he got caught up in the notion of gentrification reflects the uncertain era Memphis finds itself in.
We create jobs. We question whether the wages are enough. We send kids to college. We worry they won’t return. We build gleaming projects. We wonder if the poor have been neglected.
Among the civic leaders of Memphis, a city in which two-thirds of the residents are black, Willis’ pedigree stands out. Nearly half a century ago, he was told to attend class in a white school, a child caught up in the federal order to achieve racial balance in Memphis City Schools.
Willis, son of a black attorney who formed Memphis’ first integrated law firm, grew up to help cut the ribbon for the National Civil Rights Museum’s official opening and help organize a biracial slate of candidates to take on entrenched Memphis City Council members.
These days, at age 61, he heads a small Midtown firm newly renamed ComCap Partners. ComCap is itself a partner in South City, the title for a 882acre corner of Downtown slated for a monumental redesign.
South City
South City is intended to replace and improve on Foote Homes, the last of the five big Memphis Housing Authority apartment projects bordering the central business district.
Razing 78-year-old Foote Homes, moving out the poor residents and launching South City in its place, recast this entire side of Downtown. South City undoubtedly helped open way nearby for the proposed $950 million Union Row project.
Announced this month by Memphis real estate executive Kevin Adams, Union Row would include new residential, office, hotel and retail space rising on several barren blocks along Union Avenue and Danny Thomas Boulevard.
If built as planned, it would be the the city’s largest development in dollar terms after St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s $1 billion-plus expansion planned in Downtown’s Pinch District.
To say Willis has a hand in gentrification has a whiff of truth, but doesn’t quite convey the circumstances Memphis finds itself in. I caught up with him the other day, asked about the $210 million South City deal and the idea of gentrification.
“I get that criticism all the time,” Willis said. “Clearly, that’s not what we’re doing. We are eradicating housing that was not appropriate or fit for people to live in.”
Foote Homes
Hardly anyone alive today can remember the time before Foote Homes. Coming out of the Great Depression, a long-ago generation of Memphians put the apartment project on Downtown’s edge at a time when Memphis was thoroughly segregated, although rich and poor walked on Downtown streets.
At that time five housing projects edged Downtown. Main Street filled with people of all races. They caught buses and street cars. They attended the banks and offices, shopped in the stores. Whites went to white establishments, blacks mostly went to black establishments.
By the end of the 1990s, integration had mixed races together in schools and workplaces. Yet most offices, department stores, warehouses and banks Downtown had closed, shrunk or moved to East Memphis. Like a lot of U.S. cities, Memphis’ central business district resembled an urban desert, except for public housing, Beale Street nightlife and the new civil rights museum.
Drawn by the rise of tourism, and the opening of the FedExForum, well-off Memphians began investing in old center-city buildings. They turned empty warehouses and stores into condos and apartments, bars and restaurants.
Henry Turley, a developer, led the renaissance. He renovated office buildings into apartments and built hundreds of new apartments for well-off Memphians. McLean Wilson, an heir to the Holiday Inn fortune, stepped in, too. He took on the renovation of Central Station, now under way, into a boutique hotel. Turley, Wilson and Willis became partners on South City.
38103
Today, ZIP code 38103, which covers Mud Island and most of the central business district including South City and The Commercial Appeal building, is home to about 13,000 people. About 60 percent are white. Typical household income surpasses $62,000, a level about 50 percent above the average household income throughout the metro area of 1.34 million population.
Clearly the decisions to raze the five old projects aided 38103. Thousands of residents of the Memphis Housing Au-
thority were displaced and moved to homes throughout the region rented with federal Section 8 housing vouchers. As a result, fewer people were on the street and fewer of them were black. New residents began to move Downtown.
Is this racism? Deidre Malone, president of the Memphis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, says social progress between blacks and whites in Memphis remains, overall, about where it stood three decades ago.
True, though I’d contend what’s going on Downtown has more to do with economic stratification than racism. Black professionals are moving Downtown. So are white professionals who know Memphis is a majority black city. They are moving in because they sense Downtown is a unique and fascinating place to live.
Memphis is beginning to resemble major European cities. Almost anyone can live in the center of Frankfurt or Paris if they can afford the rent. In October, homes in Downtown Memphis sold for $252,000 on average, compared to the $177,000 average for all home sales in Fayette, Shelby and Tipton counties, reports the Memphis Area Association of Realtors.
It’s not as if poor residents are barred from Downtown. New developments replaced the projects. You see these homes near Crump Boulevard, Poplar Avenue and Second Street. They look like gleaming new subdivisions. Yet they are subsidized housing. People who were led out of the projects were given the opportunity to come back Downtown and live in new homes.
People with a Section 8 voucher or a single mother making $35,000 can’t afford a South Main loft. They probably won’t afford Union Row. But they could work there, or in Central Station, or the new convention hotel, apartments and offices planned on North Main. And they could live in South City.
“There’s not a lot available for working families Downtown,” Willis said. “At least we’re trying to make new housing available and encourage people to move back into the core city.”
What’s next?
A new generation of Memphis leaders is emerging. You see this in Lee Harris, a Yale law grad elected Shelby County mayor in August. Harris campaigned in favor of fixing up the many battered neighborhoods, much to the relief of Memphians weary of the focus on bigmoney Downtown projects such as the publicly financed $205 million Pyramid renovation for Bass Pro Shops.
Making neighborhoods nice is worth doing. You might want to tell Harris you think so, too, though I’d say fixing up Downtown is also worth doing. This isn’t gentrification, at least not yet, and it’s not racism. If we are to reverse the brain drain, get more smart kids black and white to return to Memphis, build up the professional class, we need the neighborhoods and a center city thriving with new business.
South City, Willis said, factors in: It will “promote the ability to connect Downtown and the neighborhoods.’’
Ted Evanoff, business columnist of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.