PD calls out the CCC and the City for its’ overemphasis of Downtown.
I have been watching the Panhandling and Single Beer Sales Ban Ordinances battle for a few weeks. I keep hearing numbers like $5 billion invested over the past 10 years, 20,000 people live downtown, 60,000 people are employed there, etc, etc. Now I am not going to call the Center City Commission liars, but they have an expansive definition of Downtown. Downtown is primarily 4 census tracts, you can throw in Mud Island but living on Mud Island isn’t the same as living Downtown. Those census tracts run from EH Crump to the south, Auction to the north, Danny Thomas to the east, and the river to the west. What happens is that the CCC’s turf and the Medical District’s turf overlap east of Danny Thomas. So I figure the CCC is poaching some of those job numbers to pad their stats and including Mud Island in the population numbers. I just wanted to cast a bit of a critical eye on those tossed around numbers. Over at West Tennessee Liberal, there has been a great job done examining all that “studying” the CCC has done and their heavy reliance on a policy out of Seattle. To say the CCC is cherry picking data from that policy evaluation would be considered pushing the boundaries of the proper usage of the term “cherry picking”.
At this point you are wondering what does this have to do with the title of this blog post. Well, here we go. What was promised when all this downtown redevelopment started and was embraced as development plan by local government, was that by bringing downtown up it would raise the whole city. Let me say now that has proven to be a failure on an epic scale. It is true those 4 census tracts have gained population over the past 10 to 20 years. Woohoo, 20,000 people live in “downtown”. Well in the past 10 years the city as a whole has lost 50,000 and we’ve lost even more over the past 20 years when you factor in all people we added through annexation. There are about 160 census tracts in the city, about 2/3s of those have lost population, the biggest losers being the census tracts closest to downtown. Compounding that, much of those 100 census tracts have poorer people living there today than 20 or even 10 years ago.