The bluff came first. Everything else followed.
Memphis and Nashville are both Tennessee music cities about three hours apart, and they are routinely presented as two versions of the same trip. On the published numbers they are not close to each other — not in what they cost, and not in what they are. The cost gap, on published figures Memphis Nashville … Read more
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
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
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
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
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