This is What We Can Do Together
Broad Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee could have been any of thousands of avenues in dozens of American cities. This mixed-race, mixed-income area sports a historic business district with an attractive row of old buildings that line the sidewalk. But the commercial strip went mostly belly-up after the 2001 extension of a parallel elevated highway diverted nearly all through traffic away from the street.
It's a familiar story, one of how we've sapped the prosperity of our historic neighborhoods in pursuit of rapid new growth out on the edge of town, in the process leaving people behind in ruined places and accruing unpayable liabilities. It's America's destructive Growth Ponzi Scheme, and it hit Memphis as hard as just about anywhere.
But fortunately, Broad Avenue in Memphis isn't just any of thousands of similar avenues. It's one that has turned a corner, and in a remarkable way that should stand as a model of what the Strong Towns approach can achieve.
Experiment. Learn. Iterate.
Broad Avenue had the first thing that every place in need of a comeback must have: devoted citizens who love it, who rallied to reverse the street's fortunes. How they did it is the antithesis of the mindset and approach that brought us the abandonment of this street—and thousands like it—in the first place.
A demonstration project put together in 2010 by advocates including Livable Memphis (now called BLDG Memphis), the neighborhood association, local businesses, and Dallas-based renegade placemakers Better Block, sought to demonstrate what a revitalized Broad could be. For a weekend, volunteers painted bike lanes and crosswalks, installed public art and hosted pop-up businesses in vacant buildings.
A Smart Cities Dive article from the time of the event describes it:
Inspired by the Better Block Program in Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas that crowdsourced a weekend demonstration of what a downtown street should be like, Memphis hosted their own last November. Located on Broad Street, the event, "A New Face for Old Broad", attracting 13,000 attendees.
Pat Brown, co-owner of T. Clifton Art Gallery on Broad, sums it up nicely, "It's easier for any of us to envision what the future can be if you can see it, touch it and taste it as well. Instead of looking at a piece of paper, we want people to experience it."
(If you want a lot more detail on the Better Block demonstration project, AARP has a great write-up with photos.)
The makeover was temporary, though some aspects, like the bike lanes, were popular and made permanent. But the vision of what Broad Avenue could be stuck, and today the area has become a thriving destination, with increased foot traffic and successful businesses. Today, rents are up 50%, 29 buildings have been built or renovated, and there has been over $15 million in new investment. This in a corridor that is only about 4 blocks of a single street.
This is a bottom-up revitalization, catalyzed by modest projects that could be implemented in a cheap, trial way by Broad Avenue's own entrepreneurs and community members. The ones that were successful, the city later adopted and made permanent. This is an iterative development process, something akin to the rapid prototyping popular in the technology industry. You get to success by steadily expanding on what has proven to work, resulting in a place that has grown organically into something that reflects a whole lot of local trial-and-error.
The initial bar to entry to begin this kind of work is low, almost nonexistent. This is a model that could be replicated in not one or two other neighborhoods but dozens in Memphis alone, and thousands across the continent.
A Revitalized Avenue in a City Turning the Corner
We kicked off the Strong America Tour in Memphis in October 2019, celebrating the book launch of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. Memphis is symbolic and inspirational for us, not just because of Better Broad but because of some seriously visionary leadership at the top that is working hard to turn around the city’s past mistakes by focusing on its residents, its core neighborhoods and their needs.
Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn made a point of paying a visit to Broad Avenue to take some photos and video. Enjoy this highlight reel of the remarkable transformation of a once-blighted corridor:
This Is What It Looks Like to Co-Create Our Cities
It's been so long since bottom-up change—where the primary people improving your neighborhood are actually your neighbors—was the norm that many of us have forgotten that it's possible. We're trained to think of development as something that some external "they" do to us. And this breeds feelings of cynicism and powerlessness, and opposition even to change that could make us better off, and our cities' futures more prosperous and secure.
At Strong Towns, we hear every day from Americans, in rich and poor places alike, who are troubled by that nagging sense of powerlessness. We also hear every day from Americans who aren't sold on the idea of incremental development, who don't believe bottom-up solutions are possible or adequate to the scale of our problems.
But building a productive place from the bottom up is not only viable; in the long run, it's the only way that works. The Strong Towns approach is a guide to how to do it. And the community of local advocates, businesspeople, builders, elected officials—doers of all stripes—that make up the Strong Towns movement are the best resource each other could ask for to get started.
Do you appreciate this community and the change we're lighting the way toward? If you're in a position to support Strong Towns, please become a member of the movement today.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.