Access Memphis Editorial Team

Trash and recycling collection inside Memphis city limits is run by the City of Memphis’s Solid Waste Management Division, using wheeled carts collected on a fixed weekly schedule. Recycling is single-stream and collected every other week in a separate blue cart. Glass is not taken curbside. Fees appear on the resident’s MLGW utility bill, and … Read more

Memphis’s tap water comes from underground, not from the Mississippi River running past it. The city sits above the Memphis Sand aquifer, a layer of porous, water-bearing sand several hundred feet down, protected by a thick clay cap that keeps surface contamination out. Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW), the city’s public utility, pumps it … Read more

Most houses in Memphis get electricity, natural gas, water and sewer service from a single provider: Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division, known locally as MLGW. It is a division of city government, not a private company, and it bills for all three services on one account. What is MLGW? MLGW is a public utility … Read more

FedEx is headquartered in Memphis and operates its global air-cargo hub — the “Memphis World Hub” — at Memphis International Airport. It is one of the region’s largest employers, its overnight sorting operation is a major reason the airport ranks among the busiest cargo airports on earth, and its name is attached to civic landmarks … Read more

The University of Memphis is the city’s largest public university, a research institution with roughly 20,000 students, a law school housed in a former downtown customs building, and a role as one of the region’s largest employers. It anchors a Midtown-adjacent district, feeds the local teacher and health-care workforce, and fields the Memphis Tigers, whose … Read more

In December 2010, the Memphis City Schools board voted to surrender its charter, a move confirmed by city voters in a March 2011 referendum. Under Tennessee law that surrender forced a legal merger with Shelby County Schools, the separate district that served the suburbs. The unified system lasted one school year before six suburban towns … Read more

Memphis and unincorporated Shelby County are served by one large public district, Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS), while six suburban municipalities inside the county run their own separate school districts. Charter schools and a state-run Achievement School District add further layers. Which one a family deals with depends entirely on address. What is Memphis-Shelby County Schools? … Read more

Memphis is, by every major cost-of-living measure that tracks it, cheaper to live in than the U.S. average — mainly because of housing. Groceries, utilities and services run close to or slightly under the national composite, while Tennessee’s tax structure shifts the burden from income onto sales. The gap is real but not uniform across … Read more

Memphis’s job market is built around moving things and treating people: logistics, freight and distribution on one side, healthcare and biomedical research on the other, with a small cluster of Fortune 500 headquarters sitting on top of both. It is not a finance or tech economy, and wages generally sit below the national median — … Read more

Housing in Memphis is cheaper mainly because the region has almost no geographic limit on where homes can be built, population growth has been slow for decades so demand never outpaced supply, and area wages sit below the national average — which keeps the whole local price structure lower, not just housing. How much cheaper … Read more