Bringing Gentle Density to Memphis
Memphis, Tennessee, is working hard to do the improbable: turn away from suburban expansion and reinvest in long-stagnant inner neighborhoods. One of America’s most spread-out cities, with the land area of New York City but less than a tenth of the population, Memphis has adopted policies in recent years that encourage this 180-degree turn, including a recent, pioneering overhaul of building codes to remove unnecessary barriers to incremental infill development.
But it won’t happen without private developers to do the building. Fortunately, Memphis is also one of the most inspiring places for incremental development anywhere on the continent right now. And that’s because of people like Andre and Curtis Jones.
The brothers Jones are longtime home builders in Memphis who have become pioneers and evangelists of this shift toward infill. Most recently, they are the developers of Malone Park Commons, a new residential community just north of downtown Memphis. When completed, it will contain 35 homes on a city block in the Uptown area, encompassed by North Main Street, Saffarans Avenue, North Second Street, and Greenlaw Avenue. Phase 1, an eleven-unit cottage court, is complete and has been leased since June 2021. As of this writing, Phase 2, a series of live-work units in fourplexes, has been started and framed. The Joneses had to wait for lumber costs to dip from recent spikes in order to proceed.
Malone Park Commons when it was under construction.
Andre Jones told me, “My brother and I started out in the late 90s just like every other fledgling single-family home builder, trying to get rich out in the suburbs.” They pivoted to infill after becoming involved with a HOPE VI project in Uptown. (HOPE VI was a federal program to redevelop “severely distressed” public housing along vaguely New Urbanist lines, in low-rise, mixed-income communities, in contrast to the stark tower projects of decades past.) This spurred the Joneses to start learning more about missing middle housing and small housing products like tiny homes and accessory dwelling units. After the development code was revised in 2011, they built the first accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in Shelby County.
In 2014, Andre Jones attended the first workshop of the nascent Incremental Development Alliance, held in Duncanville, Texas, and became plugged into a growing network of incremental developers and revitalizers across the country.
Jones’s focus now is close to home. And he has ample skin in the game: Malone Park Commons will be, literally, in his own backyard.
“I sold my car last summer, and my plan is to only work on projects that are within a 20-minute bike ride,” he told me. “There's a lot of opportunity for redevelopment in the walkable neighborhoods that ring our downtown. We also have a new ride-share service implemented by the Downtown Memphis Commission and the Memphis Medical District Collaborative called the Groove Shuttle. It's a $1.25 a ride and I utilize it on not-so-great bike-riding days.”
Jones is bullish on what incremental development can do for walkable urban neighborhoods in Memphis. He believes that housing diversity and small-scale “gentle” density (Jones and his brother are building 35 homes on land originally designated for just six) can help attract more grocery and retail businesses to Memphis’s near north side, which has long been a food desert.
Jones believes his project also fills a vital niche in terms of affordability, that of “what I call attainable housing.” The area boasts new subsidized apartments for low-income Memphians, built with Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), and large-scale redevelopment underway just to the South, in the Pinch District. The modest units in Malone Park Commons, ranging from 500 to 1100 square feet, will be, at market rate, affordable to households earning 80% of the area median income.
The Malone Park Commons cottage court.
Enabled by Code Reforms
For the later phases of Malone Park Commons, the Jones brothers are taking advantage of the recent Large Home Amendment, a series of building code reforms that I wrote about in January which allows structures of up to six units to be built under the residential, rather than commercial, building code. (The previous limit, and the limit in virtually every other US. city, is two.) Andre Jones describes the Large Home Amendment as “a miracle for us.” Its lifting of fire sprinkler requirements intended for much larger buildings allows huge cost savings not only up front, but also on long-term maintenance. In addition, the project team will save thousands of dollars per building by no longer needing to have mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and structural engineers each submit separate drawings. Plan review fees and building permit fees are also considerably less.
Jones is pioneering something unorthodox—at least in recent memory—in this part of Memphis. “People were very concerned about the cottage court,” he says, “because we built them on piers—another thing we had to get code enforcement to help with. As they were under construction, people were saying, ‘It looks like a trailer park.’ But once it’s done, everyone just loves it. You just have to see it. You have to see the right product in the right place, and it will make a whole lot more sense.”
The Malone Park Commons cottage court.
Subtle code issues still bedevil efforts to restore a more diverse housing mix than single-family detached homes. The local water utility still considers buildings with more than two residential units to be commercial, despite the building code update. This resulted in a surprise in 2017 when the Jones brothers and their plumber learned they were expected to install a backflow preventer in each of their live–work fourplexes at Malone Park Commons, which were considered apartment buildings. Andre Jones believes the utility can be persuaded to alter their threshold for “commercial” development to align with the city and county’s new building code standards.
Another issue involves property taxes. The state of Tennessee stipulates different residential versus commercial tax rates, and any residential building with more than one rental unit in it is considered commercial. This means it has its taxes calculated with a 40% assessment ratio instead of 25%. This burden falls hard on small-scale rental buildings such as fourplexes.
Yet a third sticking point for gentle density in Memphis (and many other places) is appraisals. The Jones brothers have built accessory dwelling units on for-sale homes, but not as many as they would like to, because appraisers are not familiar with ADUs and are not always willing to appraise a home with one at a level that makes it possible to finance. (Generally this means calculating the value of the ADU based on its rental income potential, not on comparable sales in the neighborhood, which may not exist.)
Curtis and Andre Jones, along with their niece/job-site supervisor, Taquita Jones.
The Future of Incremental Development in Memphis
Andre and Curtis Jones are part of a bigger story. There has been a great effort in Memphis to build a community of emerging developers who are doing neighborhood revitalization and missing-middle housing. The late Tommy Pacello helped bring the Incremental Development Alliance to Memphis to do workshops. The Urban Land Institute also has helpful programs in the region, including a Real Estate and Diversity Initiative (REDI) training women and people of color to become developers. As in South Bend, Indiana, which I wrote about in 2021, the small-scale developer cohort in Memphis reflects the demographic diversity of the city, and many of the participants are committed to lifting up neighborhoods that have been redlined, disinvested, and left behind by large, institutional capital.
I asked Andre Jones what would help him scale up the kind of work he wants to do. He says one of the biggest issues he is now focused on is finding compatible, replicable templates and plans for missing-middle or small apartment buildings that fit comfortably into a traditional neighborhood. In the past, the dramatic growth of pre-automobile American cities was based in large part on missing-middle housing forms (before they were “missing”) that could be easily replicated, tweaked, and repeated block after block by locals with basic construction know-how. Today, these templates are known to us as beloved vernacular forms with names like the triple-decker, brownstone, two-flat, or shotgun house, or even the famed Craftsman bungalow, the parts for which could be ordered from a catalog. But there aren’t good modern equivalents of these templates that would spare a developer like Andre Jones the need to hire an expensive architect for every project—let alone are there stock plans that would bring high quality design and respect for the historic character.
“That stuff,” says Jones, “would make it so much easier to get some of these surface lots, missing teeth in our neighborhoods built.” That’s the development culture that today’s small builders are working hard to revive.
(All images for this piece were provided courtesy of Andre Jones.)
In honor of the season, here’s a short adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which illustrates the damage that zombie projects — large, ambitious projects that drag out for years or never get off the ground — can do to a place.