Memphis, explained
Access Memphis Editorial Team 
Moving to Memphis from out of state generally means lower housing costs than most metro areas of comparable size, a car-dependent daily routine, a city split between Memphis proper and unincorporated Shelby County, and a utility and water system run by a single public provider. The adjustment is mostly logistical, not cultural — the harder … Read more
Tom Lee Park is a mile-long public park running along the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, between the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and the area near Beale Street Landing. In 2023, it reopened after a multi-year redesign that replaced a mostly flat, tree-sparse lawn with a landscaped park built around the site’s seasonal flooding, led by the … Read more
What is Frayser? Frayser is a large residential district in North Memphis, once an independent community, annexed into the city of Memphis in 1958. It grew rapidly in the mid-20th century around industrial employment, then lost much of that base after the 1970s. Today it is one of the city’s largest neighborhoods by population, and … Read more
Orange Mound is a residential neighborhood in southeast Memphis, developed beginning in the 1890s on land that had been a plantation and then was subdivided specifically to sell to Black buyers. Local histories and the neighborhood’s National Register of Historic Places listing describe it as one of the first communities in the United States platted … Read more
Living in Memphis without a car, long term, is workable in a handful of central neighbourhoods and genuinely difficult almost everywhere else. The city was built around the automobile from the mid-20th century onward, its bus network is limited outside a few corridors, and most jobs, groceries and clinics sit at distances that assume a … Read more
The Memphis rental market is large, geographically varied, and cheaper on average than most U.S. metros — but it is also a market where a high share of households rent rather than own, where single-family homes are rented at unusual scale, and where there is no rent control to shape what a landlord can charge. … Read more
Memphis handles severe weather through a layered system: the National Weather Service issues watches and warnings, Shelby County’s emergency management office coordinates sirens and public alerts, MLGW restores power after storm damage, and local school districts and the city government decide on closures. There is no single “storm plan” — it is several agencies working … Read more
When people say Memphis is changing, they usually mean three overlapping things at once: a physically rebuilt riverfront and downtown core, a population that is moving within the metro area rather than simply growing or shrinking, and a set of institutions — schools, city government, policing — still working through changes set in motion more … Read more
Memphis is governed by a mayor and a 13-member city council, and it sits inside Shelby County, which has its own separately elected mayor and a 13-member county commission. The two governments run in parallel, each with its own budget, taxing authority and set of services, and neither is subordinate to the other. This is … Read more
Memphis’s healthcare picture is built around a cluster of large hospital systems concentrated in a downtown medical district, a nationally known pediatric research hospital in St. Jude, a public safety-net hospital that serves as the region’s Level I trauma center, and health outcome measures that, by the account of independent tracking programs, have long lagged … Read more
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