Fighting for Safe Streets in America’s Most Dangerous City
Memphis, Tennessee, was ranked the #1 most dangerous metro area by Smart Growth America in 2024. That’s not stopping Kelsey Huse, a safe streets advocate and grad student studying city and regional planning. She’s tackling the problem head-on by analyzing car crash sites, helping launch a city-wide advocacy coalition, and raising awareness for safer infrastructure online.
Today, Kelsey joins Tiffany to share the inside scoop on Memphis’ dangerous design and how she’s working to change it.
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Tiffany Owens Reed 0:00
Tiffany. Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed, coming to you from very hot Waco, Texas. I hope wherever you are, wherever you're listening to this, that you are enjoying much cooler weather than I am. It's August here, which is the month of true character formation. I've learned that the way to survive Texas is just to embrace that the summer is a season of hibernation. It's just one of those things that you have to get used to. I think our guest today will understand, because she's actually from the Texas, Oklahoma area, so I'm sure we can bond over that.
If you don't know, this is one of three different Strong Towns podcasts. So there's the Strong Towns Podcast with Chuck, there is The Bottom-Up Revolution with me, and there's Upzoned with Abby. We always like to say that this show is sort of the case study show where we don't get too bogged down with technical explanations or analysis, because we really want to focus on telling stories of ordinary people who are working to improve their communities from a grassroots, bottom-up approach. When I first started hosting the show, the purpose of this podcast, one of the reasons why it exists, is because we really want to make sure that we're reminding our audience, our supporters, people who are just discovering us, that you don't need to be an expert to get involved in your city. You don't need to be an expert to start advocating for your city to become a stronger town. I know that might sound crazy, because so many of the issues we talk about are pretty complicated, like infrastructure and housing and zoning policy. It might sound very fancy and like you need to have a degree or be a professional or technical expert. And yes, those are complicated issues, and it takes some time to really learn about all of them. But I think one of the bright lights of the Strong Towns movement is that anyone can be involved in those conversations. Anyone can be involved in policy and making our streets safer and allowing cities to build more housing. I think there's this idea that cities belong to people and that we should all be part of building the places where we live and places that we love.
So today's conversation is with Kelsey Huse. She is a grad student at the City University of Memphis, where she is studying City and Regional Planning. She's also an advocate for safe streets, as the creator of Memphis Urbanism, which is an Instagram account where she raises awareness on the need for safer pedestrian and bike infrastructure in her town. So I hope this conversation inspires you if you're thinking, "I want my city to be better," but feeling a little bit overwhelmed and feeling maybe that you should leave it to the experts. I think today's conversation might persuade you otherwise. Kelsey, welcome to The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.
Kelsey Huse 2:55
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
Tiffany Owens Reed 2:59
I'm excited for this conversation as well. I think you understand what I mean by the Texas hibernation coping strategy I fully embrace.
Kelsey Huse 3:07
Yes, and I was living in Austin before I moved to Memphis, and I was either inside all the time, or I was going to a pool and I was cooling down. So I get it.
Tiffany Owens Reed 3:19
Yes, I feel like that makes sense. Like there are kind of two mindsets you can have. Actually, the second summer I lived here, I actually got around by bike the entire summer and by walking. Which sounds crazy, but I feel like there's almost this other school of thought where it's like, "if you can't beat it, join it." Just find ways to cope with the crazy weather, the crazy heat. Actually biking, I've always found, even in hot cities, can actually be quite enjoyable, contrary to popular belief.
Kelsey Huse 3:49
I agree. Yeah, especially I had an e-bike in Austin, and that was a game changer.
Tiffany Owens Reed 3:55
I got to ride my first e-bike recently in Charleston, and it also was a game changer. After two days of walking around that city in the heat at seven months pregnant, the last day, I finally got an e-bike, and all was well.
Kelsey Huse 4:13
Wow, I can't imagine.
Tiffany Owens Reed 4:15
Yes. Well, you started to tell us a little bit about your story, but I would love it if you could just tell us a little bit more about yourself. Maybe you can tell us, like, where you grew up, a little bit about your professional background, and then tell us how you came to be interested in issues like safe streets, housing, all those fun things that we love to think about at Strong Towns.
Kelsey Huse 4:33
Yeah, so I definitely feel like I'm just an ordinary person, like you said earlier. I grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, which very few people have heard about. It's about 50,000 people in the town. And something my sister reminded me of the other day is that, in her words, it's my human nature to walk around the town. So when I was three years old, one day, I just walked out the front door, walked across this huge field, two blocks turned to my grandma's house all by myself. And so I've been a pedestrian for a long time, and I yearned to be a pedestrian.
Tiffany Owens Reed 5:13
That's equally terrifying and impressive. So I don't know, Kelsey, does this really make you an ordinary person? The world's earliest pedestrian advocate.
Kelsey Huse 5:27
I have this innate sense of like direction and place, I think. So maybe I'm a little special in that regard. But otherwise, yeah.
Tiffany Owens Reed 5:38
So you mentioned living in Austin and now you're in Memphis. Tell us a little bit about that journey.
Kelsey Huse 5:45
So I moved to Austin because I was a software engineer, so I got a job there. I got a job eventually working at realtor.com and so I started that job March 2020, which was a special time. And after starting that job, I realized that I didn't know much about real estate, and thought "let me educate myself." And so I read "the color of law" by Richard Rothstein, which is a book about how segregation in the US is not just people's preferences. There were all of these systems and laws in place that caused it to happen, and a lot of those were housing and transportation related. That just opened my eyes to the built environment and why things are the way they are. And I feel like that was my radicalizing moment. I couldn't live life the same way anymore, knowing what I knew.
Tiffany Owens Reed 6:42
While you were in Austin, you got involved with the efforts to stop the expansion of I-35. We've had people from that organization on the show a while ago, which was great. Tell us about that experience working with them, and what did that teach you?
Kelsey Huse 6:57
So part of the book in "the color of law," they talked about how the interstates were built directly through black and brown neighborhoods to segregate them off from different parts of the city and to enable people to commute into town. So the design of these highways wasn't really logical in terms of efficient transportation. And so then I saw that they were expanding. I-35 to 22 lanes. And what really stuck in my head as I saw a picture of the highway next to this diner, Stars Cafe, and they had drawn a pink line on the ground of how far the highway would go out, and it was right against the building, and just imagining it that massive, and all of the local businesses that were going to be destroyed and the people displaced again, just broke my heart, and I felt like I had to get involved with something. And so I found Rethink 35. Rethink 35's mission was to reroute I-35 around the city, rather than going right through the heart of the city, and this would require significantly less money, because that highway already existed. And then when you route the interstate around the city, you have space where the interstate used to be that you can free up and make into a boulevard with affordable housing, with local businesses, concert venues, biking and walking infrastructure, and really reconnect the city together.
Tiffany Owens Reed 8:30
How long were you in Austin and how did that segue into moving to Memphis? And I guess what I'm what I'm curious about, is kind of, how did you carry over that experience or those insights thinking about infrastructure to your new city once you moved to Memphis?
Kelsey Huse 8:47
I was in Austin for about six years, and I think I was volunteering with Rethink 35 for two to three years of that. So it was a lot of time. And my sister lives in Memphis. She's lived in Memphis for 10 years, and she had a baby two years ago. So I was visiting more frequently, and every time I was flying back to Austin, I had this feeling at the airport, like "I'm meant to be in Memphis." I think it was a divine calling, and I hated that voice talking to me, and I was like, "No, I'm not meant to be there," even though every time I went to Memphis, I had such a good time with my sister, the food was amazing. Like we always did stuff that was fun. And eventually I really disliked my job so much in Austin that I thought "Okay. Let me just look what Memphis has." I found the masters of City and Regional Planning at University of Memphis, and I really liked what the professors were studying. I saw topics like storytelling, working with local nonprofits and communities, and I felt like, "Okay, this is a reason for me to be here." So I applied and got in, and then moved last summer.
Tiffany Owens Reed 10:10
Okay, so I want to ask you a couple of things about that. One, you had just gotten this sort of, like grassroots experience in Austin, and then began pursuing this option of going to grad school. Can you tell me about what that's been like for you? Because I have gone back and forth on going to grad school, and I know maybe some of our listeners have thought "I could be so much more effective if I went to grad school and really studied this and got all the reading and read all the papers." What has that experience been like for you? How do you think about it, and then, how do you kind of reconcile seeing what it's like to take this grassroots effort with what you're learning in school? And just thinking about how cities navigate the planning conversations and the planning processes within the context of local and regional government and all that. You can take that wherever you want to go.
Kelsey Huse 10:57
Yeah, that's a big question. Okay, so I decided to do my master's because I felt like I was already spending so much time learning and researching, and that's what I really like to do, and that's what makes me feel alive. So I think I chose doing a master's simply for the joy of learning. And I wrote in my application, that I have no idea what I'm going to do after, and I was okay with that, and I still don't completely know what I'm going to do, and I'm okay with that. Um, what was the next part of the question?
Tiffany Owens Reed 11:36
Share with us about your experience. Like, what has it been like? I think my hesitation with getting a master's in anything related to planning has been that the content will be organized around the status quo of how planning works in our cities. The design standards, the compliance standards, you know, we have to do the study, or we have to do the long range plan, or we have to do this particular model of community engagement. I think I've always been a little bit suspicious of that, because I feel like a lot of those things just don't work, and they're not really well suited to creating resilient, agile, beautiful places. I'm just disclosing my bias, and I'm just curious what your experience has been like.
Kelsey Huse 12:31
I think I approach it similarly to you, because in classes, we study a lot of the existing plans for Memphis. So for example, there's the green Green Print plan, which what is a network of like bike paths and walking paths. And there's the Memphis 3.0 plan, which is the comprehensive plan, and that has a lot of amazing visions for what the city could be. And plan after plan after plan. And I look at these plans, and I think, "Okay, this was written 10 years ago. How much progress did we make on this?" I don't want to be a part of making these kind of plans that don't get implemented. Like that breaks my heart. That's not motivating. It's not interesting to me. And so I'm more interested in being a part of the political side that pushes to try to get some of these plans implemented. And I think in terms of politics and being in a master's program, you're going to have a mix of different students and what they want to do. So some people, they do want to go work for the city and type up the reports and do the community engagement and follow things by the book, and that's perfectly fine. And what I found is that having connections to those people is so invaluable, because I can ask them, "what are people saying behind the scenes? What does the city want to do about this? What is my opposition saying about things?" So being in the master's program, I have the connections to the people who give me the information I need. Maybe I shouldn't say this on a podcast. It's fine. I think everyone knows.
Tiffany Owens Reed 14:18
Well, I appreciate your mindset, because it's showing that there can be a collaborative way of thinking about how to advance our cities towards a more resilient future. It doesn't have to be either-or, like either it's all tactical and bottom up and organic, or it's all top down through the plans and studies and the consultants et cetera. I think you're right that there could be more collaboration between the two. When you saw what was coming out of Rethink I-35 and now with your work in Memphis, which we'll talk about a little bit more, do you still find yourself kind of wrestling with the tension between the more political, formal way of doing things and the more grassroots, bottom-up way of doing things? How do you think about the relationship between those two sides and process that?
Kelsey Huse 15:10
I'm always going to be a grassroots person, and I think there's such an imbalance. We don't have enough grassroots people pushing for safe streets in Memphis. And to be fair, there are a lot of amazing people who are doing that, and sadly, there's been a lot of people who have done that and had to leave because there's just not enough economic opportunities in Memphis. So I feel like I'm continuing a tradition of advocates in Memphis.
Tiffany Owens Reed 15:39
So let's talk about Memphis a little bit. What was it like when you arrived to live there? What were you noticing about the infrastructure in particular?
Kelsey Huse 15:49
I was very scared at first to bike in Memphis when I moved here, because I knew it's a driving city. There's a lot of big roads. I didn't know if there was any bike infrastructure, and from joining the Memphis Social Bicycle Club, which has a Thursday night weekly ride, I learned that there is some infrastructure that's great, and it was built probably five to 10 years ago, but it's still useful today, and it's been surprising how much easier I can get around by bike than I thought. Not that it's easy and not that anyone can do it, but I feel like I can get anywhere in midtown and downtown relatively safely on my bike. One thing that really surprised me about Memphis compared to Austin, is the highways. So in Austin and in any Texas City, every single highway has to have an access road or the feeder roads.
Tiffany Owens Reed 16:52
Frontage roads.
Kelsey Huse 16:53
Ye, frontage roads, yeah. So the width of crossing a highway in Texas is, to me, unbelievable, and it was terrifying. And I would plan every single trip around where the safest interstate crossing is for me. And that's very limiting. And so when I moved here, that's not a thing in Tennessee, and you know, for better or for worse. But on bike, there's a lot of interstate crossings that I can use that are two lane, there's no one entering, there's no one exiting there. And I can kind of safely cross the interstates here because the lack of the frontage roads.
Tiffany Owens Reed 17:33
For people who've never been to Memphis, can you just paint a picture of the city? When you're getting around by bike, what are you seeing? What does it feel like? Because I'm curious how those experiences that you've had have informed the advocacy work that you're doing. I actually have spent time in Memphis. My dad's from Memphis, I grew up there for a little bit, and I've gone back to visit several times, but it's been a long time. So I don't know that I have the most current picture in my head. Maybe you can bring that to life for us a bit.
Kelsey Huse 18:12
So Memphis is an interesting city because it's right on the Mississippi River, and because of the river, they couldn't sprawl in all directions. So they mainly sprawled to the east. So we have downtown, and then we have midtown, and midtown is kind of the streetcar suburbs. That's where I live, and there's a pretty connected grid of cute little houses there, not dense housing, but it's not like people have huge yards like suburban development. So in Midtown, I can get around pretty easily. The only barrier are these huge arterial roads that were widened so that people commuting from far east Memphis can get into downtown as quickly as possible. And these roads are terrifying. So the most well known dangerous road in Memphis is Union Avenue. It's six lanes. There's no turning lane. It's just three lanes in each direction. And I think the speed limit is between 25 and 35 but you would see people going 40 to 60 miles an hour, generally. And I think my first week here, Google Maps routed me to cross Union Avenue on a painted sidewalk right outside the Chick fil A. But there's no traffic light there, and there's no traffic light for like a quarter mile in either direction, and you can't go into the turning lane in the middle and wait, because there's no turning lane. You just have to wait for a break in traffic or walk across and hope that they stop for you, which legally they're supposed to. And what's really sad to me is that on the other side of this crosswalk is an elementary school, and that's the infrastructure.
Tiffany Owens Reed 20:01
I'm pulling it up on Google Maps while you talk. So it's interesting, because when you first type in Union Avenue into Google Maps, it takes you to the historic part, which is a street car corridor. But then I looked, I saw the Chick fil A, and it's definitely became like a stroad. So you can almost kind of see this progression from a design perspective over time of like how we used to approach street design to how we approach it now, interesting case study.
Kelsey Huse 20:25
Yeah, and that's another one where there is a complete streets plan for Union Avenue to reduce it to two lanes on either side, put a tree lined median in the middle. And where are we with that plan? I don't know.
Tiffany Owens Reed 20:40
Right? So tell us about your Instagram, Memphis Urbanism. What's the story behind that? How did you get started and tell us a little bit about the content you're making and what you're hoping to achieve.
Kelsey Huse 20:57
When I moved here, I knew that Instagram is where I would find different groups to join, events to go to. I didn't have an Instagram account at the time, but right before I left Austin, I met someone who had just moved to Austin, and they created an Instagram account called Austin Urbanism. And honestly, I was inspired and just copied him, and I thought, "Okay, I'm going to be the Instagram account for Memphis to talk about walking, biking, affordable housing, etc." And because of my account, I've been able to connect with so many people and make a lot of friends, and that's been really nice, because I was afraid I wouldn't make friends in Memphis, which is funny, because it's actually pretty easy to make friends here in my experience. But most recently, I've tried to post at least one video a day on my account, and some of them have gone viral. So it's been really fun to see people interacting with my account, because what I'm seeing is that a lot of people want safe walking infrastructure in Memphis, but they don't know who's leading that political charge, or how many other people want that, and so now they're reaching out to me, and that's been really rewarding.
Tiffany Owens Reed 22:19
Can you tell us about the content you've actually been making? I'm assuming it has a lot to do with biking and walking. So are you just taking videos of yourself as you're engaging in those modes of transportation? And what are you pointing out? Like, what are you hoping your audience takes away from those videos?
Kelsey Huse 22:35
A recent one that went viral is that I walked with my friend at this newly redone intersection that's in Germantown, which is the suburb right outside of Memphis. They expanded this intersection to, I think it's eight to 10 lanes on every single side. And this project took two to three years, and so it has three turning lanes in one direction.
Tiffany Owens Reed 23:03
Oh my gosh.
Kelsey Huse 23:04
So the intersection is Germantown Parkway and Wolf River Boulevard, if you want to look. And I thought it would be fun just to see what it's like to use the pedestrian infrastructure there, because they have nicely painted crosswalks. They have the pedestrian beg buttons. And so we went there, and we walked all the way around, and we documented it, and we talked about it. And my friend works in apartments, and so she knew that there was a senior living apartments on one corner, there's apartments on another corner, and we could barely walk across at a regular pace and meet the countdown of the crosswalk. What I hope to gain from that video and other videos like that is just to get people thinking about and questioning, "why are we building the things we're building, and what does it encourage?"
Tiffany Owens Reed 24:02
Right. Because I know you mentioned this when we were just connecting and talking about the show, but you mentioned that Memphis is one of the most dangerous cities in terms of infrastructure and road design. I think it mentioned a study or a report that you saw. Can you tell us about that?
Kelsey Huse 24:19
Yeah, so Smart Growth America puts out a report, I think, every year, every other year, called "Dangerous by Design." And the report highlights how traffic crashes fatalities are preventable through safe infrastructure design. And Memphis was number one for the last report. So we have a really bad pedestrian fatality rate, and I attribute it to our infrastructure, absolutely, and want to be a part in changing that.
Tiffany Owens Reed 24:50
Yeah. And this has affected you personally as well, because you have a lot of friends who bike and walk around, and unfortunately, this this has affected some of your friends. Can you share about that?
Kelsey Huse 25:01
So Memphis recently repaved a street called Vance Avenue, and it's only like a two lane street. It's not a big street or anything. It's a street that a lot of us cyclists take to get downtown, especially now that it's repaved, because it's really smooth and it's nice. Unfortunately, last month, someone in the biking community, Don Gaines, he was biking down Vance, and a car ran a stop sign at the intersection and hit him, and he had to go to the hospital. He had some broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung, but overall, he is recovering. I heard he finally went for a bike ride the other day. That's exciting. But it's heartbreaking, because that shouldn't be normal. And it didn't even make the news.
Tiffany Owens Reed 25:56
That's crazy. So outside of Instagram, you're also getting involved, showing up to meetings, and truly seeking to advocate, in addition to informing people through your channel. What does the advocacy side look like for you, in terms of showing up to those conversations and getting involved in local government?
Kelsey Huse 26:19
Right now, my involvement has mainly been in the community with other people making connections, and I'm just trying to learn how things are right now. Unfortunately, there's just not a lot of walking and pedestrian things happening at City Hall, so I actually haven't spoken at an official government event about pedestrian safety. I have spoken about xAI, which is in Memphis, and they have a lot of polluting turbines in South Memphis, which is a historically polluted neighborhood. So I've spoken about that, but I hope to speak more on pedestrian and cycling safety in the future. And on that note, I have something exciting to share, which is that I'm part of a brand new effort called Street Fair. And Street Fair is an advocacy coalition focused on safe, affordable and connected mobility in Memphis, so we're just getting ready to launch. I'm excited about what it can mean for the city, and you can find us at streetfairmemphis.org and Street Fair Memphis on social media. I'm really excited. This is part of my fellowship with the University of Memphis, working on this with a with a nonprofit in Memphis.
Tiffany Owens Reed 27:39
So I used to work in journalism, and whenever I would turn in some article, one of the edits that you could get back, that you didn't want to get back, would be "burying the lede." So I feel like, Kelsey, you just buried the lede a little bit.
Kelsey Huse 27:52
I did? Oh.
Tiffany Owens Reed 27:55
That's really exciting, that that this coalition is coming together. I know you said you said you haven't really been talking about it or giving comments and stuff about it yet, but what's your sense of where things are politically? I feel like the grassroots advocacy scene is more established in Austin. You know, it's bigger. This type of language around bikeability and infrastructure and walkability might be more familiar to Austinites. I don't know. Do you feel like it's newer in Memphis? And what has that been like for you? Going from like a city where this type of work is more understood and more established to Memphis where it seems like you're kind of more on the front lines of bringing that type of conversation to your town.
Kelsey Huse 28:46
I think I am on the front lines of making a city wide group of people advocate for street safety. I really don't want to minimize what other advocates have done in the past, because there's been some amazing projects that people have got done for specific neighborhoods. So one example is Broad Avenue. Some local business owners did a tactical urbanist project to reduce the car lanes and make that area more walkable. And it's been a huge success, and people really like that area, but we need to bring it to the entire city somehow. And so that's going to require a huge vision, and I'm up for the challenge. We'll see how that is going to happen. It's daunting. I think maybe that's why people haven't done this yet, but I was fighting TexDOT, which is this billion trillion dollar machine. I feel like I could take on anything after that.
Tiffany Owens Reed 29:52
True, that's a good perspective. One thing I'm picking up from your story is, that one of the effects of the built environment and sprawling us all out is that it's kind of sprawled us all out politically, too, and the sense that it's harder to know what your neighbors care about. And that's why I think social media can be so powerful. And you're probably experiencing this because it's finally giving people a way to learn about things, but also to say, "Hey, me too. I also really care about this." Finding a way to bring those collective voices to the table when these types of decisions are being made is so powerful. You're pushing back against not just the sprawl of the environment, but also the way that it separated us from each other and made it difficult to function as a true political body. Not political red-blue. I'm talking about political like making decisions about our place.
Kelsey Huse 30:51
Absolutely. On the note of sprawl, one fact that I learned from school is that Memphis has roughly the same population as Detroit. We have double the land area of Detroit, so that means we are spread out from each other. We have way more roads to maintain. There's just all of these reasons why sprawl is challenging, and you see it in Memphis, you really do.
Tiffany Owens Reed 31:21
Yeah. Are you feeling optimistic? Talk to us a little bit more about this coalition you just announced, in terms of bringing this perspective to local government. What's your sense of things there? Like, are you feeling optimistic about it?
Kelsey Huse 31:42
I'm kind of an eternal optimist, so I'm always going to be optimistic for things that I really care about. But I do believe that politicians need a separate body of people to push them. So even if someone in city hall, even on city council really cares about pedestrian safety -- maybe they exist, I don't know -- if they don't have a group pushing them and justifying the decisions that they're making with city ordinances, they're just not going to do it. It's not possible. So I'm excited about the proposition of our group of people, pushing them to do things in a collaborative way, maybe not collaborative at times too. I think it's needed, and they probably want that. And then I'm really excited, because I think now is the perfect time, because next year is the Shelby County Commission election in the Shelby County Mayor. So this is a time where we can start pushing candidates to take Safe Streets up on their platforms.
Kelsey Huse 32:49
Yeah, you're about to conduct a Crash Analysis Studio with Strong Towns. Can you tell us about that, about the intersection you're going to be looking at and what you're hoping to accomplish?
Kelsey Huse 33:01
Yeah. So in my planning theory class last year, I wrote about the Crash Analysis Studio model. It was just announced, I think, last year, and I was really excited about it because it's this no-excuses approach to what you do after a crash. Like, okay, let's get some people together. Let's look at why this might have happened. Let's change how that intersection or how that street is designed using as low cost things as we can, maybe like planters from Home Depot or paint or whatever it is. And let's not accept that a crash had to happen here. I've kept my eye out for crashes in Memphis, which is sad, but they happen all the time. And when Don was hit, I felt like "This is the one that we need to do it for." And so I've been gathering data. My friend and I sat out with a speed gun last week to do our speed study, we measured the width of the roads. One of the roads, or one of the lanes, is 19 feet wide, which is ridiculously wide. So I heard that the Tennessee DOT recommendation is 11 feet for a lane. So when you have a 19 foot wide lane, someone's going to feel comfortable speeding down it, which is what happened. And so I'm about done with the data gathering. I'm working with Tony from the Strong Towns team to come up with our presentation, and we've scheduled that Crash Analysis Studio for September 13. My hope is whatever recommendations come out of that, maybe the bicycle club that I'm a part of can help advocate for those improvements.
Tiffany Owens Reed 34:45
And I think, going back to what you said as well, hoping that this can be the type of thing that you're able to scale up and help whoever this gets in front of, whether that's local government or just the community at large. Hopefully, it can be the type of thing that people are able to see when they look at all of the city, and not just like this one intersection, and be able to ask themselves questions like "why are things this wide? Why are people moving so fast?" Because we need the specific case studies. But also, how do we take what we learned here and use that information to think about our city holistically and what movement looks like across this entire place?
Kelsey Huse 35:30
Exactly. I've had some people DM me recently about intersections near where they live in Memphis, and how it's dangerous, and hopefully this will give them the tool to kind of analyze why that might be what they can take from this one and, yeah, move to another place.
Kelsey Huse 35:48
Yeah, yeah. Very exciting. Kelsey, we're gonna wrap up with the same question that I asked all my guests. Tell us about your town. You told us a good amount, and maybe, what are a couple places that you like to recommend people check out if they come through to visit, to get a slice of local life?
Kelsey Huse 36:06
My two recommendations are number one, go to Lulus Cafe. So Don, our friend who was hit recently, is one of the co-owners. It is the only co-op local business in Memphis. They are totally vegan. They have delicious coffee, breakfast sandwiches, pastries. So I always point people to Lulus, especially right now because they're kind of hurting with Don having gone through this experience. But the community's been really nice supporting them. And then my second recommendation is to check out Overton Park. And Overton Park is the location where I-40 was supposed to be, but it was saved through a Supreme Court case. And Overton Park contains a golf course, an art museum, and my favorite part is the old growth forest with some trails through it. And in the summertime, when you're under the canopy of the forest, it's 10 degrees cooler, so it feels amazing. It's just like this breath of fresh air. So I always tell people to check out over Overton Park.
Tiffany Owens Reed 37:18
Sounds like a good case study in what what we can be doing with places that we are currently dedicating to highways.
Kelsey Huse 37:25
Yes, please.
Tiffany Owens Reed 37:29
Yeah. Well, Kelsey, thank you so much for joining me on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. Thank you to our listeners for joining me for another episode. I'll be back soon with another conversation. We'll put all the links to everything that Kelsey has mentioned in our show notes. There will also be a link there where you can nominate someone who you think would make a great guest for the show. I love reading the nominations. It's how we find out about a lot of people that we bring on. And yeah, I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.