When “King Cotton” ruled, in the early part of the 20th century, Memphis was one of the nation’s most prosperous and rapidly expanding cities, offering employment opportunities in its sorting and grading rooms, trading floors, and warehousing and shipping districts. At that time, the city’s wealth was reflected in a number of impressive downtown buildings, including the Cotton Exchange, Peabody Hotel, and Claridge Hotel, which are still in (re)use today. In the period between World Wars I and II, when many cities experienced significant disinvestment and out-migration, Memphis continued to prosper with a diversified economy that included strong cotton, hardwoods, paper, rubber, retail, and transportation industries.

In the post-WWII era, large numbers of families moved out of the older, modest homes built on small lots in the residential districts surrounding downtown to occupy newer, larger homes constructed on more spacious suburban lots. Residents making the move to the suburbs were motivated by the desire to enjoy a more rural lifestyle, improve their housing, and reduce their property taxes. Aided by federal housing policies and encouraged by the mortgage banking and insurance industry practices, they also moved to distance themselves from the city’s changing demographics.

As the pace of suburbanization quickened in the 1960s and 1970s, fueled in part by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, the city pursued an aggressive policy of land annexation. While this strategy served to maintain the city’s overall population, it did so by incorporating low-density development at the city’s periphery. The investment required to service these new greenfield areas took place at the expense of the city’s older residential communities, resulting in building and property disinvestment and abandonment in these neighborhoods.

As signs of “blight” became increasingly visible within the city’s once thriving downtown, Memphis, like many other cities, began using federal highway, public housing, and urban renewal funds in an attempt to stabilize its downtown and nearby residential neighborhoods. Between 1959 and 1975, the city used federal Urban Renewal funds to clear more than 560 acres of land, displacing large numbers of African-American residents and businesses. While only 18 acres of the cleared land remained vacant by the early 1990s, the land uses within the city’s urban renewal areas had changed dramatically. Low-income housing, neighborhood-oriented retail, and local community and religious centers were replaced with high-end market-rate housing, large-scale commercial centers, and major civic and cultural venues, including a new City Hall complex and convention center.

The city was fundamentally changed by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had come to Memphis to support the struggle of local sanitation workers seeking union recognition and improved working conditions. Following Dr. King’s death in 1968, many long-time Memphians, fearing violence, moved their homes, businesses, and churches from the city to suburban communities to the east. By the 1980s, Memphis had become one of the poorest cities in the nation, suffering from high dropout, unemployment, poverty, and crime rates. Efforts to overcome these economic problems in the 1980s and 1990s were greatly complicated by the local municipal government’s reputation for ineptitude and corruption and the federal government’s cuts in domestic social programs, unfunded mandates, and devolution policies.

In the early 1990s, a new generation of civic leaders came of age within the city’s development, medical, higher education, architecture, and nonprofit sectors. With the support of Memphis’s influential corporate sector and the local philanthropic community, five important developments took place that signaled renewed hope for the city’s long-struggling downtown and older residential neighborhoods.

First, a group of visionary developers and architects transformed many of the downtown’s historic structures and vacant lots into attractive new residential spaces, inspired by New Urbanist ideals. These developments attracted approximately 25,000 new residents to the downtown.

Second, the city effectively used HOPE VI funds to transform four of its most severely deteriorated public housing projects into attractive and desirable mixed-use developments, offering former and current low-income residents improved housing along with an integrated suite of case management services.

Third, the leaders of the city’s major hospitals and health research centers came together to establish the Biomedical Research Center. During the past five years, the city’s hospitals and medical research centers have added more than 2.5 million square feet of new space within a crescent area surrounding the downtown.

Fourth, under the leadership of a new president, the University of Memphis adopted Ernest Boyer’s concept of “scholarship of engagement,” encouraging its students and faculty to connect their research activities to the ongoing community development efforts of local citizen organizations and municipal agencies.

Finally, the Community Development Council of Greater Memphis, a network of approximately 25 community-based development organizations, undertook an ambitious set of residential and commercial revitalization efforts that have successfully restored one neighborhood, stabilized several others, and reduced the impact of the recent home mortgage foreclosure crisis in many other areas of the city.