Posted on May - 01 - 2010
Study will propose highest, best use for airport-area commercial corridors
Photo by Mike Maple // Buy this photo
Airways is part of a real estate study of commercial roads near the airport that development officials hope will help with planning a revitalization of the area.
Revitalization advocates have their hands full imposing order on a patchwork of businesses along the main corridors leading to Memphis International Airport.
What they don’t have is a cohesive vision for a landscape characterized by truck sales and service centers, used-car lots, adult-oriented businesses and aging shopping strips.
That’s where a Chicago consulting firm, Applied Real Estate Analysis Inc., enters the picture. The consultants started work this week on a $90,186 real estate market/feasibility study of the commercial corridors, including Brooks Road and Airways.
The study is expected to result in recommendations for highest and best land uses within the context of major investments in land and facilities already made in the neighborhood, officials said.
“If we said, ‘You own all this property. What are the best uses to put on it?’ I couldn’t answer that today,” said Dexter Muller, senior vice president of community development for the Greater Memphis Chamber. “We’re trying to give them a vision of how their property might be used for its highest and best use.”
The Memphis Airport Area Development Corp. hired the consultants as part of its push to spruce up and redevelop the neighborhood outside the world’s largest cargo airport and a Delta Air Lines passenger hub. The corporation is an outgrowth of a chamber-led initiative to marshal the city’s airport-related assets under the brand of America’s Aerotropolis.
Development corporation board chairwoman Jo Ferreira said, “Our view is we wouldn’t want to bulldoze the area and start again. We want to look at how the real estate that is there could be postured, and whether the people who own it would agree.”
The consultants began with interviews of neighborhood inhabitants such as Smith & Nephew, Medtronic, Graceland, businesses, hotels, restaurants and others.
In addition to real estate market analysis, they have been asked to consider tourist development and public transit, because the Memphis Area Transit Authority is building a transfer terminal at Brooks and Airways.
The consulting firm was one of five that sought the study contract, Ferreira said. The study is being funded by the development corporation, the chamber, MATA and the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“The company did similar work around O’Hare,” she said. “They have a lot of experience we thought was applicable, and they really understood the importance of the airport.”
O’Hare area projects included a land analysis that preceded an international corporate headquarters location, an assessment of retail uses at the airport and an evaluation of potential for industrial and air-cargo related development on publicly owned land.
The contract calls for the firm to present findings to the development corporation, city and county governments and a public assembly in the study area.
“We’ve got some great assets there,” Muller said. “There are some great anchors already there. We need to work with them to keep them strong. There are also some small parcels with deteriorated buildings, maybe vacant. The question is, ‘What can we do with some of those?’”
– Wayne Risher: 529-2874
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