Voting To Make Memphis A City Of Choice

Memphis is not a city that is retaining and attracting young people with choices.

That’s a critical problem, because if there is a mantra for cities today, it’s this: It’s the talent, stupid.

Because there are several million fewer 25-34 year-olds – the fuel for the knowledge economy – these highly coveted workers have never been more selective. It’s a buyer’s market, and city after city is courting them, and the competitive edge for the winners in this contest is a high quality of life.

It Shouldn’t Be This Hard

Today, talented, college-educated, young people are looking for cities that are clean, green, safe and is a place where they can live the life they want to live. In other words, these young professionals have clear expectations for a city where they decide to live and work, and most fundamental of all is that they expect the city governments where they live to get the basics right.

We mention all this because of the emotional emails and calls – on both sides of the debate - that we received following yesterday’s post about the refusal of the Memphis City Council to expand the area for the recruitment of city police officers.

We want to make sure there’s no misunderstanding about our point of view. We were disturbed by the vote by Memphis City Council because it’s fighting the wrong battle in the wrong war, and the vote suggests to young college-educated talent that we are incapable of getting the priorities right – safety first, politics second.

Choice Opportunity

Today, 25-34 year-old college-educated professionals are voting with their feet, and Memphis is the destination of way too few of them.

There’s really no secret why we are not attracting these talented workers to Memphis or keeping those that are born here. These young professionals have choices – all kinds of them – choices about where they can live and choices about their style of living.

If Memphis is to improve its lagging economic position among the 50 largest U.S. metros, it has to do everything it can to become a magnet for them. We are not now.

Real Big League Cities

That’s because these talented, young professionals are looking for the “markers” for big-league cities. Some of them are recreational, some are retail and others are social.

For example, they expect “real” cities to have a variety of retail experiences, they expect to have a highly efficient public transit system, they expect miles and miles of bike paths and running trails, they expect a green ethos, they expect a beautiful public realm, they expect effective public services, they expect high-quality universities, they expect a vibrant downtown, they expect walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and many of them, and they expect a culture that inspires creativity.

So, what precisely is Memphis selling these talented workers?

The Wrong Message

Our city is in effect telling them that while our crime rate is year after year one of the highest in the country, we are unprepared to take the kind of bold actions that addresses first things first – and the first thing is public safety.

Then, when we get public safety restored, then we can debate the lengths and to which we should go and the limitations that we should add to recruit new police officers.

To us, the vote by the Memphis City Council was tantamount to spraying water on the driveway while the house is on fire. It’s doing nothing to deal with the real problem.

That Sucking Sound

Most of all, Memphis frequently acts on a brand of parochialism that threatens our city’s economic future. It is emblematic of our fatal inward-looking attitude that seems to think we are the center of the universe and immune to the realities of the global economy.

The world has changed. Memphis, as a product, is not competitive.

If Memphis should be one thing, it is that we should be a magnet for young, college-educated African-American talent. But we’re not. Instead, that giant sucking sound we hear is the movement of these talented workers to places like Atlanta, Washington and Chicago. Too often, they leave Memphis first to be educated, and they never come back.

When we read an obituary or a biography of a prominent African-American professional in Memphis, we inevitably read the last couple of paragraphs that list the names of their children and where they are living. Memphis is a frequent omission from the list.

A City Of Choice

Failing to take strong action against the malignant crime rate makes us even less competitive. Ironically, the reason cited by some of those who voted down the resolution to extend the recruiting area outside of Shelby County was that they wanted to prevent flight from Memphis.

Besides being 20 years too late, the real fight is about building the kind of city that people want to stay in and the kind that people want to move back into. We won’t turn Memphis around by force and wishful thinking. We will turn it around by making it the kind of place where families, particularly young families, want to live because it has a high quality of life, good public services and a creative ethos that sparks new thinking and new ideas.

In some ways, we are too often like the Big Three automakers. We think we are not affected by world trends. We think we really don’t have to change our product. We think people will just continue to seek out our product because they once did. But things have changed, and we cling to narrow political agendas at our own peril.