Here's Memphis, Tennessee: The Poorest, Most Dangerous Place in the South

Memphis is maybe the scariest place you could visit.

Generally, the phrase “don’t start none, won’t be none” is a phrase you can apply to just about any situation in Memphis and make it out unscathed at the end. It means yeah this place is rundown and really dangerous, but you won’t get into trouble unless you look for trouble.

That’s exactly why I drove through the most dangerous and rundown part of Memphis at 7 in the morning. There’s no getting into trouble that early, right?

So that’s what I did. I got up early and left downtown and headed into the south side of Memphis. It was a bright crisp morning in late November of 2021.

As I began the drive, I saw two police officers parked in a lot just on the fringes of the hood we’re going to see. They both looked at me with blank expressions as I headed in along Florida Street. They were probably thinking I was lost and wondered why I was headed in the direction I was.

The neighborhoods we’re going to drive through are called Riverview, Riverside and Mallory Heights. Collectively, they are known as south Memphis. Here’s the map of the route we’ll be taking. We’re gonna see kids making their way to their buses among burned out and abandoned buildings and trash piles that are 5 feet high in places. I saw sheriff deputies knocking on doors before the sun was even up. There are police cameras on every block. I can only imagine how bad it is in here at night.

I found it to be one of the worst parts of any town I had ever visited. And I’ve been to a lot of bad places.

Now this neighborhood is indicative of just how bad Memphis has become. It was the most dangerous city in the nation last year when you measure everything from violence to robberies. And since this is the most dangerous hood in Memphis, you could say this is possibly the most dangerous neighborhood in the nation. Memphis residents might say Frayser is the most dangerous hood here but it’s pretty close.

The violent crime rate in Memphis is up 21% since last year, and the MURDER rate here has spiked 38% since last year. That’s just unbelievable. This is a place where there were 327 murders and 18,000 reported violent crimes. And that’s just what’s REPORTED. That’s 50 violent crimes a day - or more than two every hour. And keep in mind, Memphis only has 650,000 people, so 327 murders is a LOT. City leaders have plans to control the violence here by hiring hundreds of additional police officers, but that’s been tough. Memphis is reportedly offering $15,000 signing bonuses to aid in the recruitment effort.

Of course, I’ve talked about it a lot. There’s a huge connection between poverty, drugs and crime in America. Here in Memphis, 28% of the population lives in poverty, and I’d estimate 80-90% of the homes we’re going to drive through live in poverty. And what’s really sad is that 28% makes Memphis only the 9th poorest city in the nation. Detroit’s poverty rate is 10% higher.

In some places, Memphis is still a pretty city with lots of history and culture. But the crime rate here has quadrupled, and a lot of the poor kids don’t go to class.

Now as we drive through this hood, you’ll probably be wowed by the way it looks and wonder how a place can get this bad. I mean at one point, this place was on the upswing, and was growing faster than Nashville. This was the birthplace of the blues and the birthplace of Elvis after all. But Memphis has always been pretty dangerous and poor. It’s along the Mississippi Delta, which is the poorest part of the country, so It’s not like the place was a southern utopia or anything. You could say the same thing about Chattanooga and Knoxville, too.

But while the rest of Tennessee’s large cities are getting better, Memphis is getting worse and worse. This is the America we live in today though. We see once proud cities crumbling, as people leave for nicer suburbs or a new start, instead of remaining to help fix things. It’s easy to blame mismanagement from former leaders, but ultimately, it was the residents themselves who elected them, and who have failed to enact change.

After driving around for an hour on this side of town, I could see this whole part of town one day just disappearing like what you see in places like Detroit. Just wiped off the map. Is that what’s going to happen to these people? Will they just go away like so many other folks in places like this? Where will they go and will it be any better when they get there? Cause I can’t imagine it could be worse.

#Tennessee #moving

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