New Market     

Nonetheless this was all background and scenery for very important discussion and hard work for a diverse and exciting group of activists, academics, and seekers from Memphis who had come together at the call of Professor Ken Reardon of Memphis University and Professor Katherine Lambert-Pennington of Rhodes College to discuss as the agenda signaled:  “Building a More Just and Democratic Memphis through Grassroots Organizing.”  I had been honored and overjoyed when Ken had reached out for me some months ago and asked if I would be willing to help “facilitate” the discussion of this group trying to struggle with the how’s and why’s of whether or not it made sense to support building a community organization in Memphis.  All I could think of was what a great opportunity for a great city!

The group included a mixture of professional and academic urban planners from the universities as well as from multi-county agencies around Memphis and design centers.  There were also community leaders and activists from the Vance Avenue, savvy and sharp young men and women with a group called BRIDGES that works with various youth cohorts pushing the limits of the schools.  There were other groups of  community based organizers and advocates from the 30 year old Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, along with a collection of other activists from the music scene, housing projects, and community.

The “meat and potatoes” for the first day were two sessions, one on the “role of power in producing and maintaining uneven patterns of development” and the other on “how poor people and their allies get power.”  This was a razor sharp, wicked smart crew so they kept me on my feet and dancing.  Outside of the academics it was still somewhat surprising to an old cynical organizing hand, how the analysis of many of the others was so deeply alienated.  If these were the youth that jumped behind the “hope” of Obama, they had climbed to the roof and then walked back down to the basement to find their perspectives on the future.  Several of them pitched a couple of tents to enjoy the last of an Indian summer in the mountains, which I couldn’t help dubbing “Occupy Highlander.” The challenge in organizing south Memphis where so much of the conversation centered will be to build an organization that both has the potential to build and wield real power and can actually be fierce, feisty, and focused enough to convince its actual base that its work is crucial and matters.  It was an education for me, because I could read the time and the clock for the poor and powerless had somehow turned back to the anger I remembered in the streets in the 60’s and 70’s.  This recession is putting steel beams in the ceilings above people blocking any view of the future.

The other surprise I found during the day in listening to what drove the academics and others into the circle at Highlander were tales of almost unmatched arrogance from public and private interests around Memphis development that are almost unheard of in the framed and packaged programs of the 21^st century.  Painstaking processes of creating plans with community engagement that were insultingly dismissed by city planning agencies with announcements that stated flatly that it was the essentially the city’s job to plan and the citizens job to like it.  These were stories of a government unaccountable, anti-transparency, and out of control.  All cities play footsy with their citizens and pretend that input is the same as influence or impact on their decisions, but few of them take the time and trouble to then rub the people’s noses in it.  Not Memphis!  One true story after another seemed to carry the theme, “stop us if can, and to hell with you if you can’t.”

That may be a dare that is going to be called in Memphis.  I sure hope so.

Memphis

By early Monday morning there signs of stirring in the hinterlands.  A couple of alumni emails and some phone calls hit the university president’s office and were referred over for handling.  The press office was drafting various responses.  The campus police were mentioning they had a SWAT team.  There were two interviews with local TV stations and the local paper, so who knew what to expect.

No one was around when we showed up at the auditorium, but before the start we heard there were a couple of Tea Party demonstrators with homemade signs out on Central Avenue.  Most of the signs were riffs on the theme of “Commu-nuts!” which I thought was creative, cute, and meaningless, but whatever.  Once speaking I noticed we had some outliers that started drifting in and sprinkling themselves in the crowd who didn’t fit the general study body type, so I assumed these were some of the protestors coming in from the misty cool of the Memphis evening.

The remarks went well enough, but as usual I was most interested in hearing the questions and continuing to gauge what was on the minds of people trying to grasp the impact of organizing.

The first guy was a roofing contractor who believed that his workers took off from October through December to make sure they got their Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) without any trouble.  I asked him if hunting season had anything to do with it, but he didn’t appreciate the comment.  It was hard to believe his example, but no sense in arguing about his experience.

A number of questions focused on real estate and pushed back around the role of CRA.  These were some healthy readers of the CRA low-income family conspiracy to explain the greed of Wall Street and sub-primes.  The real conspiracy is a blood boiler, so it’s not easy to understand why my friends on the right want to blame their neighbors rather than the multi-gazillion dollar beneficiaries who caused and collected the spoils.

Talking afterwards to some of the interrogators was interesting.

One who was most convinced that getting full access to benefits would create dependency was unemployed with a hard luck story that included an older brother with a meth addiction.  It was very important to him to believe that “people chose poverty.”

Another who had raised a very pointed question about a position he claimed that ACORN had taken with HUD Secretary Cisneros during the Clinton Administration insisted we had lobbied against a change that would have impacted the “choice” of a family about where to live.  I said I didn’t know the exact letter he was referring to, but our position on fair housing was to oppose any dilution of the protections against discrimination.  We talked past each other for a little while.  Afterwards he told me that ACORN had sued him in Memphis in 1995 at a realty outfit where he worked because the advertisements were alleged to not be sufficiently diverse.  He claimed the suit was dismissed, which may have been the case.  It turned out the complex question was really about a specific situation of a mixed Filipino client of his that wanted to live in a specific community.  They had asked HUD for a fair housing clarification and 18 months later had gotten an answer which said they could represent the client in this area of “choice” discrimination, if they had a written request from the client.  This was my best understanding of the unique circumstances.  The bottom line:  he had a beef with ACORN and was glad to finally have the chance to catch me in the open field to have me take some accountability for his grievance.  Fair enough, I thought!

There were questions about illegal immigrants.  Nothing on healthcare, which surprised me.  Very little actually about ACORN.

People are out there searching, and they want to engage.

The paradox that underlies the controversy that seems to surround some of my visits to campuses these days is that the students love hearing the message and linking in with the passion for change and the call to organize, the community is intrigued, and the opponents are really delighted to have the opportunity to engage directly and have a chance to really debate their position with someone who is going to listen, respond, and pushback.  That’s a hard bargain to beat and frankly a public service that University Presidents should be pretty proud to offer in building bridges in these troubled, polarized times.

Memphis

Many themes returned again and again, but one of the themes that echoed so loudly that it was impossible not to hear was the way that developers were literally having their way with the City of Memphis and Shelby County.  A more than $100 million dollar giveaway of public dollars for one developer of the Memphis Fairgrounds was averted with no community benefits agreement asked or offered for the nearby communities.  Planners in the afternoon told me story after story of developers benefiting from 15 year tax incremental financing (TIF) districts in the by-and-by hopes of community benefits without any efforts to assure community benefits on the front end.  It was enough to make my head spin.

These were great leaders, well trained and experienced with a good grip on the issues and the nuances of Memphis, who needed a process to finally make a decision to re-engage resources and participation for this generation of organizations and activists to curb the excesses and try to wrest the city away from the developers and their public lackeys and back to the people.

The last point made by a well respected minister at dinner caught my ear.  A developer named Harold Buehler was being given 140 lots in a lower income, inner city area of Memphis, despite owing over $2 million in taxes for his previous developments.  People were outraged.  There was a roar of response about the “fix” being in with the County Commissioners.  It all seemed so wild and bizarre, I knew I would have to look under the hood to try and figure it out.

I found a squib by Jackson Baker in something called the “political beat” in the Memphis Flyer. Despite Baker’s bias in favor of Buehler and his contempt for Commissioner Henri Brooks, and anyone who opposes this project, his piece does confirm the facts behind the minister’s disgust and my new friends’ revulsion at this action:

Memphis Mayor Pro Tem Myron Lowery spoke before the commission on the premise that it would be folly not to develop the vacant lots Buehler sought title over (140 out of some 3,000 in the inner city, including many that were the result of arson and neglect). Antonio Burks, the former Memphis Tigers basketball star who was recently wounded by gunfire, showed up on crutches to extol Buehler for having provided Burks’ mother a rental home for the past decade.

Even a Klondike resident who had been featured in The Commercial Appeal as opposing Buehler rental property on style points was shown in a Buehler-produced video extolling the builder for having arrived at new designs. (Both the video and several posterboard displays of previous Buehler properties were stage-managed by Upton.)

Buehler opponents got up to speak, too, including one man who said,” We need to do a background check on this criminal.”

Besides Brooks, overt opposition on the commission itself was limited to another longtime critic of the builder, Mike Ritz, who succeeded in adding an amendment to Commissioner Steve Mulroy’s enabling resolution, one that required full repayment of Buehler’s delinquent taxes. Another Ritz amendment, which would have mandated approval of Buehler designs by community development organizations in all affected areas, was rejected.

In any case, Wednesday’s apparently definitive vote notwithstanding, Brooks announced that she intended to soldier on. “I’ve just begun to fight,” she said — though how and with what allies and to what end remained to be seen.

From this piece it looks like a “Hail Mary” pass forcing Buehler to pay up before he cashes in on these lots may have landed safely in the end zone, so I’ll have to check on that, but regardless of the pros and cons here, there’s no doubt that the community is increasingly clear that Memphis cannot continue to be developer heaven and community hell.  One dinner guest who lives near the development in Memphis caught my ear making the point that the area had housing, but “needed jobs!”  There were other comments that could not be missed about the need for people to have a “voice” again and the lack of equity and citizen centered priorities in Memphis.

It was great to be a fly on the wall and an excuse for some great people to get together who could make a difference in Memphis by deciding once again that “enough is enough,” and taking the next steps to make something happen again in this great city.