- (female announcer)   Production funding   for Behind the Headlines   is made possible in part by   the WKNO Production Fund,   the WKNO Endowment Fund,   and by viewers   like you, thank you.

- The transformation of a building and a neighborhood tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[dramatic orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes, with The Daily Memphian.

And thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Archie Willis, President of ComCap Partners.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you for having me.

- Also Roshun Austin, CEO of The Works, thank you for being here again.

- Thanks, Eric.

- And Bill Dries, Reporter with The Daily Memphian.

So you all bought a building and it's not just any building, it's the former Northside High School, what, some 300 square feet of space give or take something.

- Two hundred and seventy thousand.

- Two hundred and seventy thousand across eleven acres, with very big plans for what can happen there.

You're not turning it back into a school.

It was ended its life as a school in 2016, after I think 45 years or something, forty-some years at the point.

- Mid, mid-1960s it opened.

- Had 1,200 I think we wrote that it had 1,200 students at its peak, but now it's gonna take a new life and you hope, I think also be an anchor for the neighborhood talk, who wants to go first in terms of the vision, Archie, the vision for Northside High School and its redevelopment?

- Well, it is a, a great vision and Roshun can elaborate more on the greater vision for the neighborhood, because it is a, a integral part of a greater revitalization effort for Klondike.

But Northside itself will be a mixed-use, adaptive for use of the building, as we said earlier.

So with 270,000 square feet, it's a traditional school.

So they have a huge gymnasium, a huge auditorium, and obviously a classroom space.

One of the more interesting elements, design elements though, is it has a courtyard.

So literally in the middle of the school is a courtyard.

So it provides a great opportunity to create an amenity for the residents.

So we're looking to redevelop it into commercial uses, office uses, and residential uses on the third floor.

So it's, it's evolving, the design is evolving.

We're pretty much settled on where we are going now.

And we'll have a multitude of uses that we can elaborate on shortly.

- Yeah.

- But it's a great project.

It'll be a great asset for the community and hopefully be a great stimulus for additional economic development and revitalization in Klondike.

- And we have some renderings and, and some drawings and such of, of some of the potential uses and concepts that we'll show, to give people some concept, some, some context for the building.

I mean, it is a little bit, and maybe you said this to me at some point Roshun, it's, there's a Crosstown feel to this in some ways that you take a building that has been empty Crosstown for much longer, but that, that is at the heart of a community.

And can it be transformed into a new use that brings people together and does everything for residents as Archie just said, all those different uses is, is that coincidental or is that somewhat the inspiration or part of the inspiration?

- I mean, I think we can say it's part of the inspiration, but it's because it's the largest anchor in the Klondike neighborhood, and since it's, it was built in the '60s, it's definitely, the school has been the anchor Northside High School.

And so it's Crosstown-ish [laughs].

About a third the size of Crosstown, but we have some larger goals which Archie alluded to in the Klondike neighborhood, which was specifically developed for African-Americans in the late 19th century.

And you know, one of our goals we like to state is that we want to experience zero displacement of the people who are there today,   and we're expressly   rebuilding a neighborhood   for African-Americans.

- Yeah, and we have   a photo of the front   of Northside as it is   now, a bit overgrown,   but you get some sense of the   scale of the, of the building.

I think we'll also show some   drawings in a second that kind of show the scale of the building inside the auditorium, the basketball courts, the, you know, classrooms and all those different things.

But before I bring in Bill, it, it is interesting.

Well, let me talk about this for people who you, you both have been on the show numerous times, your background Archie, briefly, I mean, and, and you've done some pretty transformative work in this city with others, but you've been at the, the head of transformation of public housing and, and other things, and, and Roshun as well.

But Archie first, a quick, your background and how that led you to this.

- So my background includes, actually, a foundation in real estate that I got when I worked with my dad for the first eight years of my career, unfortunately he passed away at a relatively young age and I had to transition, and then I transitioned into public finance.

So I gained a lot of experience dealing with public finance, capital markets.

And then I decided to really try to bring together the economic development, real estate development and the finance.

And that's when I launched ComCap 20 plus years ago.

So, what we have really focused on is trying to bring real estate development, community development, affordable housing, and take advantage of all financing tools that are in the marketplace that may not typically be available and accessible to inner city, urban, low-income communities.

So that's really kind of the foundation.

And that's what led me to the projects you just mentioned, and obviously this project as well.

- Yeah.

And we'll talk more about some of the South City being in huge construction, and we'll talk a bit about South City like you, you, how you got to this, what The Works has done.

Again, people who watch the show regularly have seen you talk about other things you've done, but.

- So, so The Works was founded in '98 as an affordable housing developer and specifically in south Memphis at that time.

And so my career I've spent in community development for the most part with some time in the mortgage servicing industry.

So it's still around housing, The Works expanded its vision and included more comprehensive services for residents and neighborhoods with housing still being the base of that.

So we're in the food space, health and wellness, and do a lot of work around community engagement.

What brought me to Klondike, probably Archie.

We have a history of probably about 27 years, and my introduction to Archie was with a lending institution and his work in finance.

And then we call, we partnered on a couple of deals where we served as co-developers on affordable housing deals.

And so I came over partnering with another smaller CDC, the Klondike Smokey City CDC, to do both some community engagement work with, to also assist homeowners with their homes, and then to do some rehab work with them and have some tenants, low income rentals.

And so I got drafted into the Northside based on our experience as an organization, because we had experience doing tax credit deals.

We've not done a New Markets Tax Credits deal, but we've done low income housing tax credits.

- We'll talk more too about how some of this stuff is funded, but let me bring in Bill.

- So, so this is going to start unfolding very soon.

The timeline you've outlined for the County Commission and for the City Council shows that this is about to start transforming.

So the financing is in place for this, or just about-- - We're working on the financing, what's interesting about this project is the total budget for Northside is right now about $70 million.

We have a very, very large commitment from philanthropy to the fund that.

So we're actually going to start construction later this spring, utilizing those funds.

As Roshun referenced, we're working on a New Markets Tax Credit element, and just based on how that whole process works, that will put us to a financial closing on that toward the end of this year, because of the timing associated with new market tax credit, it's a whole 'nother world, and it's just, you know, kind of crazy, but you gotta kind of adapt to their rules and regulations and timelines.

So we have funding commitment from philanthropy to get started.

We'll get some conventional debt to go along with it.

And then we'll close on the new markets later this year to tie up the, the whole financing package.

- And there are tenants lined up?

- We have several tenants we are in discussions with now, actually our real estate brokerage consultant, Universal Commercial is working with potential tenants now with letters of intent, we hope to get probably, I think I looked at it last week, about 60% of the building committed in the next in 30 days.

And we do have two larger facilities, the gymnasium and the auditorium, which will not be necessarily tenant driven.

So we're working on program elements and organizations that can help us operate those components as well.

- A lot of times in projects like this, we talk about the, the bones of the building, and I'll get to that in a second, because this was built in the '60s when windows were possibly seen as taboo and that, [everyone laughs] that will change in all of this.

But I wanna talk for a second about the bones of the community, because I was in Northside from time to time when the high school was in its prime, not as a student, but when bussing started, my high school was paired with Northside.

So they took us on a tour of the school.

And I was absolutely floored by what I saw in this massive complex that was so much bigger than the high school I went to, Westside in, in Frayser.

But what also impressed me was the bones of the community.

At that time, that was a thriving community.

And so I, I think what you've talked about that you've both seen here is that this is not going to be a community that arises in an area where there is nothing that your hopes are to revive that community and, and see that community flourish again.

- Yes, that's right.

I think the development of Northside is just not a singular project, we, it's lockstep in, in concert with development of housing and other community amenities.

And so we can't do one without the other.

- Right, and Quincy Morris with Smokey City CDC has, has been doing a lot of this work too.

So this will link up with, with what the CDC is doing.

- Yes, she's in partner.

The CDC is in partnership with our effort involved in the Northside decisions, as well as the larger neighborhood decisions.

- Okay.

So the outside of the building now doesn't have a whole lot of windows, that's going to change in all of this.

- That is going to change in this, you made the interesting comment.

And I frankly don't understand it, in that era, a lot of the schools that were built, Northside, Melrose, Hamilton, had one small window in each classroom.

So I don't know what architects thought that was a good idea, but obviously it wasn't.

And we have to retrofit that.

So we're gonna bring, introduce a whole lot of additional glazing to the building to bring in natural light and to open up the building for the benefit of all the tenants that will move there.

So that's, that would be a major component.

We also will have on the west side of the building, we will have a glass tower is what we're calling it, because it will actually be the, one of the primary entrances to the west where the parking will be, and it will have the elevator tower there.

So it'll be a glass structure and you'll enter from there and then take the elevator to the basement or one of the three floors, depending on where you're going.

So it'll be a dramatic change on the exterior particular front elevation and the western elevation.

A lot of the other elevations will remain the same, particularly the, the north elevation because that's where the gym is.

And that's where the auditorium is.

So none of those elevations will change.

- The school was built with an 1,800-seat auditorium, which was, which was pretty unusual even, even for the time.

And it turns out that's actually a little bit too big for what you want to do in terms of performing arts and that type of thing.

- That's correct, that's just way too big.

And I've not seen, I went to White Station High School, and went to Melrose for one year and had not seen an auditorium that size in my career, similar to comments you made.

So it's way too big in terms of what we want to create as a more community-based performing arts space.

So this will be for organizations that can't afford to go to, you know, the premier event centers in our city, you know, Orpheum, GPAC, Cannon Center, et cetera, et cetera.

But so therefore we don't need that, that large scale.

So we gotta make it smaller, which is actually a challenge we're struggling with.

How do you actually make that happen?

From a design standpoint, we have some theater consultants that are working with us and we've gone through three iterations already on how to actually make that work.

And we're still trying to work through that, but yes, it'll end up being around 5 to 700 seats, but still have state of the art of, of sound and state of the art lighting.

- And let's just, we'll bring up a render kind of map of the drawing here   that, that this there's   some labels on here,   and I'm sorry to   interrupt you Bill,   but there's some labels   on here that are changing.

This has all been   a work in progress,   but it gives people the scale.

I mean, you've got up   to the right there,   you've got that, some,   an auditorium space to the   left is where the gyms,   they are currently gyms   and they will continue   to actually be gyms.

And you kind of talk   about that courtyard,   the glass that kind   of opening it up.

So people kind of, again, this   is not specifically correct.

It's been an evolving   process over some years,   but gives people a   bit of the scale.

- I think a lot of   the uses are there.

They may not necessarily   be in those spaces,   but those uses are there.

- Yeah, I'll go back to Bill.

- So talk about   the ripple effect in the area as dirt starts to move on this, so to speak, other people are gonna see other opportunities in the general area, right?

- Ideally that that would happen as we do some of the subsidized development outside of Northside.

We're hoping that it stimulates the market and small developers.

And we're really targeting black, small developers in the area, whether they're residential developments, developers, I'm sorry, or small business owners.

And so we are trying to address the business corridors as well as the residential areas in concert with Northside.

- The area formerly had a lot of small businesses, corner grocery stores and, and things like that in, in a residential area.

So it, is that a model that has changed over the years or, or is it something that can come back there?

- We're hoping that small businesses come back, you know, our organization is working with the Klondike Smokey City CDC, to establish some programs that you see in other areas like in the Seabed or in the Medical District Collaborative where we do facade improvement grants with small businesses and very low interest loans to get them back open and operating.

- Why did they close?

What, what happened?

What happened to the Klondike area?

Northside, and why was Northside closed?

A lot of schools around the city had been closed, but did, did Northside close and then the neighborhood went down or was there, were there problems in the neighborhood that reduced attendance and so on.

- So you start to see a decline in population, which is very common in core neighborhoods.

And so there was flight of the middle class.

And people generally talk about cities, they talk about white flight, but there was a middle class flight of-- - Of black people.

- Of blacks that lived in Klondike and they were seeking better opportunities for their families, a different housing stock, because this neighborhood was built in the 19th century and then zoning made it difficult to build something that, for a growing family.

And so you start to see that population shift.

Older people remain for whatever reason, maybe because they retired and didn't have the discretionary income.

And so school-age children and families were no longer there.

And so you mean, so the school population plummeted after a certain period.

You saw a lot of decline start in the '80s and go on through the '90s.

And by the 2000s, it was very declined.

- And then the, and I'm not casting blame, but I would assume, and this is purely me speculating.

Then when the school closes those, some of the families that have school-aged population, well, we're gonna move to closer to a school, right?

I mean, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is not, I, I, don't not judging the decision to close the school or not, but I assume all that stuff just feeds on itself.

- It does.

It does.

And so a lot of those families with school choice were already choosing other, and that was a high school.

And so they were choosing different elementary schools or preschools even before elementary.

And then there was not a middle school that was squarely in the neighborhood.

The closest middle school was Humes.

- Yeah.

- Two other things that kinda impacted that was the closure of several employment centers, International Harvest and Firestone.

There were several others that they weren't necessarily in the neighborhood, but they were close enough for folks there to get, you know, blue collar jobs and, you know, reasonably well-paying jobs for that time period.

And then the other thing that had an impact as Bill referenced is bussing.

You know, bussing literally turned the city upside down in terms of how people moved and where people moved to and how people migrated from different neighborhoods for various reasons, as Roshun said.

So all these factors came into play and over time just started to, the neighborhoods, started to decline, and there was lack of reinvestment in the neighborhood, so it just was a cycle.

- It, it is interesting.

I'm sitting here thinking that, you know, my kids who are 22, 23, if you say bussing, I mean, they've read about bussing.

They don't know bussing.

Right?

And, and I think that's true.

So I, I do this to Bill.

This is a funny one, but it's not funny for people who don't, who, or don't know what bussing was, and you were in the midst of it as a student.

- It was court ordered desegregation efforts at integrating the schools had, had really not worked the court case continued.

And so there was a plan drawn up.

It was called Plan Z, as a matter of fact, and you went down a list of schools and said, all right, students who live within the attendance zone of this school, these parts of that attendance zone will now go to this school.

As in the case of my school, Westside and Northside, Westside also had a junior high, the junior high school was paired with what was then Humes Junior High School.

- And these were historically, or by definition, historically black schools, white schools.

And it was a forced integration of them.

- Well, it, it.

- In effect?

- It was not forced.

It turned out that most of the black kids who were bussed did ride the buses to those formerly white schools, but a very small amount of white students did the same and, and integrated those white schools.

At my high school, there were maybe less than a dozen, dozen white students who made the trip to Northside.

And, and by the same token Westside, which had been a 100% white student school became a 50-50 racially integrated school in the space of one summer.

- Yeah.

And again, I don't mean to be like, sort of trite about this because, but I do does strike me that we are we're, although we are not removed from the effects of bussing and it was a national program and there's lots of this discussion and academic and, and so on about the, the, all that came from that.

But there is a generation who just don't know what the heck we're talking about when we talk about bussing.

I mean, it is kind of odd.

I'm wondering about other neighborhoods.

Well, I could get really far field on bussing and let's not do that.

But I did think-- - I think, I think it happened to every core neighborhood.

I mean, I was at the tail end of the bussing, in the '70s.

- Yeah.

- When I was moved from a north Memphis area from Hyde Park to Frayser to Grandview when Shannon was around the corner.

And so I ended up back at Shannon, but so my generation experienced that tail end of bussing, but it destroyed the neighborhood school.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And I was in the same group with Bill, I was at Melrose sophomore year at Melrose and got bussed.

That's how I got to White Station.

I was bussed to White Station.

We lived in the area where we were bussed and literally on Parkway, the other side of, of my street, literally my next neighbors on the other side was sent to Central.

So my side was sent to White Station, the other side was sent to Central.

But again, the whole notion of literally moving out of your neighborhood, and we literally drove by Messick and East to get to White Station.

Literally!

- Right, right.

- We have just five minutes left.

We need a whole other show on bussing and, and so on, honestly, but, but because it is integral, as we're saying to the kinds of things that you all work on, the work you've done in public housing in transforming now, I think the 9th or 10th of the really big, historic, I wanna say 1940s, '50s era, and we've done shows.

And with Paul Young talking about this many times over the years, the last of the big ones was, is now has been, was torn down is South City.

The second phase is being built.

This is basically to the south of FedExForum, to the east of, you know, the Civil Rights Museum in South Main, South Front, in that whole area.

How, how much, when will that be done?

At least the primary construction of the housing and so on.

And what I mean again, big question over the 20 years you've been doing transforming 15, 20-plus years, you've been a part of, or leading the transformation of these public housing.

What has worked, what hasn't and, and where are we?

- So we're, in terms of South City, we're actually hoping to close on phase five.

It's a total of 712 units.

So first three unit phases are complete.

Phase four is under construction.

We hope to close on phase five this spring, and we'll have one more phase.

Phase five will actually be a senior development.

So housing is coming along well.

We have the challenges that anybody in the real estate development business has today in terms of supply chain issues and construction costs, which are creating havoc on our overall budgets.

But we gotta figure that out.

By and large, I'd say we've done a very good job of creating better housing opportunities for people that were in public housing.

You hear many stories about the low number of people that move back and that's, it's, it's a reality.

And, but there are reason, a lot of reasons why people don't move back and choose not to move back.

But we've created a much better housing environment.

What we haven't done well, And I've had this discussion over the years with various folks involved with this project, is having a significant impact on the neighborhood around the public housing.

We've done a good job of transforming a public housing site to a nice mixed income housing.

We've not done a good job of impacting the neighborhood around it.

We're trying to address that in South City.

We have another empty school building, actually we have three empty school buildings in South City, MLK Transition Academy, Georgia Avenue Elementary, and Vance Middle School.

The school district has demolished Vance, it's a vacant lot.

I think we'll use it for redevelopment purposes down the road.

We're working with the group to acquire the old MLK Transition Academy.

It'll be a mixed youth development on a much, much smaller scale than Northside.

So we're working on that as we speak.

And then Georgia Avenue is kind of to be determined.

But those are three critical, significant assets in our neighborhood.

And what happens to those assets will ultimately have a lot of impact on what happens in the rest of the, the community.

- Well, when you talk about developments and then impact our neighborhood, you talked about that earlier, and that that's something you've, you know, you talked when you described to people, what you do, it starts with the housing and the redevelopment, but you early on The Works started doing all kinds of things, because you gotta build the neighborhood, not just, and if that sounded critical of Archie, I don't mean it that way obviously, but, but that's kind what, and I always say about you, if people don't know what you do, you go block by block, building by building, house by house, business by business.

That's the kind of approach it seems you take.

- It's family by family, and so a lot of times in, in our development world, we don't talk about the people who reside or use these buildings.

And so that's the critical component.

So yes, we have to address the larger neighborhood.

We have to partner with government to talk about infrastructure improvements, parks for recreation, and all of the anchor institutions you need in neighborhoods.

That will draw retail and stimulate development from the market.

But we have to address the people who live or work in these spaces.

- Just a minute left, I apologize Bill.

- And, and you've been involved in a project in Frayser, the Renaissance Apartments and that's up and running and, what's the latest?

- So we, we both were involved.

Co-developers on Renaissance at Steele.

It is operating at about 95% occupancy, and we do some other programming there.

So we have some site-based services for the people, we're partnered with Microsoft and doing digital skills training.

We provide them with low cost internet for free for a few months, and then they are paying about $10 a month.

They get laptops if they participate in the digital skills training.

And we'll bring some of our other programming to the Frayser site in the spring.

Our cycling, our senior walking groups, and some of the other things that we do to help improve the quality of life.

- We'll have you back yet again, 'cause I'm always fascinated by the work you're doing.

So thank you, and thank Bill.

I should always disclose that Roshun is a board member of Memphis Fourth Estate, which owns The Daily Memphian.

So she's one of my bosses.

So I should always disclose that.

Thank you both.

Thank you Bill.

Next week we have David Rudd, the outgoing president of the U of M, doing something of an exit interview, talking about his tenure at U of M, talking about the state of higher education and, and what's next.

So please join us then.

If you missed any of the show today, you can get it online on YouTube.

You can get it on WKNO.org, or you can get the full podcast of the show on the Daily Memphian site, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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