Cooper-Young

 Community Project 

     Bounded to the west by S McLean Blvd, to the north by Central Ave and the Southern Railway Tracks, to the east by East Parkway, and to the south by Southern Ave, Cooper-Young is a neighborhood of barely 0.5 square miles, with a population of just under 2,500 residents. It encompasses an area of Memphis, Tennessee, where home-building flourished from 1881 through the early 1930′s. To this day, over 60% of the homes in Cooper-Young were built before 1939. 

     Cooper-Young was a lovely tree-lined neighborhood of single family homes and businesses in the heart of Memphis for several decades. By the 1970's, however, many of the once beautiful homes were in a dismal state of disrepair and most of the area businesses stood empty due to the rise of suburban-ism and the phenomenon known as “white flight”.

     Cooper-Young began to rise back to its former glory after the formation of the Cooper-Young Community Association in 1976, when residents became activists to stem the tide of decay left in the wake of the exodus to the suburbs. Currently, it is considered to be one of the nations "Ten Greatest Neighborhoods" by American Planning Association,  the educational organization for the country's planners. The "historically hip" Midtown neighborhood made the list after its four-decade-long "renaissance" that relied on existing neighborhood assets. 

(Photo is of the corner of Cooper and Young in 1945, facing east along Young) 

     While Cooper-Young is often lauded as being a 'diverse' area of  Memphis, demographics show that it is a majority white, middle-aged, middle-class neighborhood. 

     The racial demographics in Cooper-Young are almost the reverse of the rest of the City of Memphis, where the percentage of African-American people is 63%, and the percentage of White people is 30%. The gender distribution is almost exactly 50/50, with 51% of the residents being male, and 49% female. 

     The median age in Cooper-Young is 35.5, slightly older than the city's median age of 33.3 years, with 46% of the neighborhoods  residents being between the age of 25 and 49. 

     As far as household breakdown goes, 85% of the households in Cooper-Young contain fewer than 3 people, and only 21% of the households in Cooper-Young have a member under the age of 18. 

      The median household income in Cooper-Young is 48,000, outstripping the nearby neighborhoods to the south, west, and east, as well as overshooting the median household income of Memphis by over 10,000. Over 10% of the households in Cooper-Young earn over 150,000 a year. Of the neighborhoods surrounding Cooper-Young, the only one close to its income potential is Overton Square, where over 17% of households earn over 150,000 annually. 

     One area in which Cooper-Young is commonly viewed as being diverse compared to most of Memphis, is that a significant population of LGBT individuals take residence there. Considering the total LGBT population of Memphis is approximately 20,000 (or 3.1% according to a Gallup poll from 2014) a majority of the LGBT who claim Memphis as home cannot live in the 0.5 square miles of Cooper-Young, but the neighborhood is still considered to be one of the most open-minded and welcoming ones. 

     Part of the reason for this impression of less social stigma towards LGBT people may be the level of education of the area, which can boast that 92.8% of its residents over the age of 25 have a high school diploma, and 20% of the residents have a Masters or greater. In contrast, in Memphis as a whole, just 30% of the residents over 25 have a high school diploma, and only 9% have achieved an advanced graduate degree. 

     Cooper-Young is a vibrant, quirky, well-off neighborhood in Memphis, Tn. Its highly engaged and largely homogeneous population, as well as its significant financial resources from its residents and its large business district allow the neighborhood to prosper in a time when the surrounding neighborhoods are suffering the effects of crime, low education and income, and blight. 

     Widely known as being 'hip' and 'cool', the neighborhood is attracting new residents, in contrast to many other areas within the city limits of Memphis, and its high ratio of owner-occupied homes helps insure that those who live there have pride and investment in their neighborhood. 

     One example of how the residents constantly work to 'protect the Cooper-Young vibe' was their efforts to prevent a newly built Dollar Tree from shifting the highly walk-able urban landscape that characterizes the neighborhoods charm. This is just one example of the new businesses that are hanging their shingles up in the Cooper-Young neighborhood, but most of them are significantly less prosaic than Dollar Tree, often small and family-owned, and suit the style of the 'historically hip and timelessly trendy' area. 

     The future of Cooper-Young seems bright, and its patterns of community activism and pride may become an example that can transform other neighborhoods in Memphis and across the Mid-South.