Douglass neighborhood is working hard to live in a blighting free community

30 September 2021

When Kathy Yancey-Temple returned to her Memphis neighborhood in 1999, she didn't expect Douglass to have changed as much as it did. ¨ The community had a butcher, a grocery store, a shoe cobbler. We had a couple of farmers here that brought in fresh fruits and vegetables. It was a thriving, healthy, economically viable, self-sustaining community,¨ Temple said.

She was out of town for only 16 years, but everything had changed. The grocery store closed, the Douglass High School had been shut down and most of the homeowners had left.

Lack of security, high crime, and drugs motivated her and her partner Robert Perry to take action themselves. So in 2011, they start picking up trash from the street, looking for a change. By 2015, other residents joined them and they started a neighborhood association called The Time is Now Douglass that got funding from the City of Memphis to do street and community cleanups. Now, they are a nonprofit organization where Temple is the executive director and Robert Perry is the board manager.

Photo 1. By Kathy Yancey-Temple

Thanks to this money, they can hire people from the community, cut the grass of the blighted properties, they started a couple of orchards and they even help neighboring communities like Hyde Park and Hollywood. ¨ We do reach out to the communities around us to see how we can help and how they can help us. We are neighbors, so whatever happens in Douglas affects Hyde Park and Hollywood,¨ Temple said.

This non-profit organization, like others, works with the Blight Authority of Memphis (BAM).

In April 2021 they launched the pilot of a new program called the Land Deposit Program. Executive director Leslie Smith defines it as ¨a short term redevelopment incentive that will look to part to build the capacity of nonprofits that are interested in redeveloping vacant property by leveraging these incentives to catalyze development that would be supported by the community.¨ What this means in that with this program, organizations like The Time is Now Douglass will be able to purchase blight properties and BAM will keep them in their records legally so nobody else could buy them until they are ready to renovate them. Right now, Temple's organization have 12 vacant lots.

¨We also bought up homes that are open. No one's living in them, but it discourages drug activity and people from sleeping in the vacant home,¨ Temple said. Her idea is, eventually, to renovate the houses so that they are viable for low-medium income families.

Another program that BAM developed was Neighborhood Blight Support in which they collaborate with neighbors, community organizations and developers to intervene and address long-term problem properties, as their website said. ¨Essentially we are a land bank, but we are also a friend and a partner to the community,¨ Smith said.

One of her goals for the fourth quarter of this year is to launch the application they are working on, which will allow people to apply to purchase properties and participate in different programs. "That process would make it a lot easier for us to kind of work on the back end and track progress on the what's been made on those individual approved or not approved property applications for the land deposit program," Smith remarked.

Photo 2. Kathy Yancey-Temple in the picture

Terrey and her community also have plans for the short-term future. They want to plant more trees and orchards so Douglass can become self-sustaining and have healthier food. ¨Douglas was full of fruit trees that grew naturally. But since the home ownership left, a lot of those trees have died off because there's been no one to keep them up,¨ Terrey said.

Regardless, both Smith and Terrey remain positive. Smith is realistic but also optimistic that they are going to function as a landing. Temple agrees with her and also stays positive, ¨ I'm very confident in the direction that we're going in and we'll achieve these goals,¨ although she said they still have a long way to go.