CEOs seek thriving street life, population
Want students to learn and live there
The nine anchor institutions of the Memphis Medical Center are job-rich with 16,000 employees, wield the spending power of $1.2 billion a year for goods and services and get a charge from the youth and brainpower of 8,000 students.
But the district has just started a big, multiyear project to acquire what it sorely lacks: A pulse after dark, a healthy number of people living in houses and apartments, a sense of place, shops, restaurants and energy on the sidewalk.
The institutions’ chief executive officers may consider some extraordinary incentives to entice businesses, employees and students to move inside the medical district.
“The new twist on it I find intriguing is they want us as the anchor institutions to focus some of our overall spending on supplies and services, to be directed within the medical district, or incentivize businesses to move into the medical district,’’ said Gary Shorb, CEO of Methodist Healthcare.
The “they’’ he referred to is U3 Advisors, a national consulting practice hired by the anchor institutions: University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, Regional One Health, Methodist University Hospital, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital/ALSAC, Memphis Bioworks Foundation, Baptist College of Health Sciences, Southern College of Optometry and Southwest Tennessee Community College.
Those employers may also consider giving employees financial incentives to move into the district.
“It was done in Detroit,’’ Shorb sa id , refer r i ng to U3 Advisors’ similar project in Midtown Detroit.
“Incentivizing employees to live in the medical district by structuring some type of stipend or way to help with a down payment... We’ve got to look at that.”
The anchor institutions also may create a new organization whose mission is to improve and enliven all the public spaces between the institutions.
U3 Advisors has started work to help create a comprehensive plan to breathe life into the area generally bounded by Danny Thomas on the west, Cleveland on the east, North Parkway on the north and Peabody on the south.
Leading the work for U3 Advisors, based in Philadelphia and New York, is principal Omar Blaik, a former University of Pennsylvania vice president who helped leverage Penn’s economic clout to revitalize an adjacent neighborhood, University City. Contracted to work with Blaik and U3 vice president Alex Feldman on the Memphis project is Tommy Pacello, formerly with the city of Memphis’ Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team.
U3 specializes in advising how to leverage the jobs and purchasing power of medical and educational institutions to improve the communities in which they operate.
U3 Advisors recently made a presentation to the Memphis Medical Center CEOs about the state of the district. In addition to counting 16,000 workers, 8,000 students and operating budgets totaling $2.7 billion a year, the consultant found that the number of people who live in the district has plunged from 36,000 in 1970 to 15,000 in 2014.
U3 found the district’s land is used this way: 575 acres for large-scale institutional use, 270 acres for parking and 460 acres for housing that suffers from vacancy, crime and lim- ited stock.
The “visual landscape’’ of the district includes gated access to some institutions, drive-thru fast food restaurants, fences (“defensive investment’’) and auto orientation (including surface parking in front of businesses and parking structures built at prominent intersections).
U3 found that just 2.7 percent of the 16,000 employees and 6 percent of the students live within the medical district. As a result, the district is built for commuters and their automobiles. The district has 18,000 parking spaces with 10,000 more planned.
“The Memphis Medical Center has become institutionally dominated with limited residential and mixed-use parcels,” U3 states in its slide presentation.
“The institutions are acting defensively a nd are not coordinating planning and growth in the district.’’
The consulta nt a lso found that the hundreds of millions of dollars the institutions spend yearly on goods and services are “not being significantly captured in Memphis.’’
The way the medical district has developed over the years is not unique to Memphis, Blaik said.
“Core urban locations that are owned by universities and hospitals, they expanded over time and it happened at the time when there was flight from the cities to the suburbs,” he said during a walking interview in the district.
“Real estate beca me c he ap a nd ava il a ble . Sometimes you buy it because you are expanding. Sometimes you buy it because you are defensive about it. And eventually you end up in a district that is largely controlled by the institutions a nd t here is very little else ot her t han the institutional work,” Blaik said.
“Here, the gap is big be- cause there isn’t really a concentration of housing and retail and amenities and office space ... So our sense is there is an opportunity for all that to change,’’ he said.
Blaik and Feld man walked around Health Sciences Park with a reporter at 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday. The sidewalks surrounding the park — along Union, Manassas, Madison and Dunlap — and the paths within the park were all but deserted.
Even two of the district’s newest resea rch buildings, across Manassas from the park, were designed to effectively turn their back to the sidewalk and Health Sciences Park. Neither building has doors that open to the sidewalk.
The buildings’ designs illustrate a chicken- oregg challenge for the district’s new aspirations. The street life is dull because so few are comfortable to spend time in the public spaces; the comfort level would rise if a critical mass populated the public spaces.
Among the first things i nstitutions ca n do to breathe life in the public spaces is to program, Blaik said. Employers can create events that get employees used to and comfortable with being in the green spaces a nd sidewalks. Instead of having award lunches inside, hold a picnic in the park. Organize runs, walks and other festivities outside, he said.
Near Penn in Philadelphia, Blaik said, once the comfort level rose, property owners started to adapt their buildings to sidewalk life by punching open doors and windows.
“It was surgical, block by block,’’ he said. “Figuring out how do you not turn your back on public space and how do you make that your front door rather than making most of the entrances to the building to the courtyard on the inside.”