Memphis' suburbs across the state line in Arkansas are exceptions to the trend of growing suburbs near urban centers.
While Memphis' growth has been flat, several of its suburbs in Tennessee and several more in Mississippi have been developing.
Not so in Arkansas. Despite the "Welcome to Arkansas" sign on the Interstate 40 bridge leaving downtown Memphis, the suburbs on this side of the Mississippi River aren't growing or aren't growing as fast.
That's because historically the Arkansas suburbs have not been a big part of the Memphis area, and the Mississippi River and state borders have created physical and political boundaries, experts said.
The poverty level in Memphis has dissuaded businesses and industries from locating there, economists have told the Memphis Commercial Appeal in recent years. The city ranks toward the bottom in population growth among U.S. metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, the Memphis Business Journal reported.
In the Memphis metropolitan area of more than 1.3 million people, about 42,000 live in an incorporated area of Arkansas.
"I think in general that growth has tended to stay within Memphis and within Tennessee, and not really spill over into Arkansas," said Mervin Jebaraj, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Jebaraj said urban sprawl in metropolitan areas that cross state lines is hampered because of varying policies between the states.
In the Texarkana area, most of the growth has been concentrated in Bowie County, Texas. The Arkansas side of the city doesn't have incorporated suburbs, although there are a few small towns within a 30-minute drive.
Residents of Texas and Tennessee don't pay state income taxes, but Arkansans do.
That's one of the reasons Phillip Sorrell, director of the West Memphis Economic Development Office, believes the Memphis suburbs in Arkansas have a harder time growing.
West Memphis had an estimated population of 24,680 in 2017, declining by 5.9 percent since the 2010 U.S. census, when it had 26,245 residents.
The Memphis suburb of Marion in Arkansas' Crittenden County grew by 0.8 percent from the 2010 census to 2017 population estimates -- from 12,345 people to 12,440.
A similar thing happened in Gilmore, also in Crittenden County, which grew from 188 people in the 2010 census to 250 in 2017 population estimates, a 33 percent increase.
To pinpoint a cause for the population decline in West Memphis, one would have to find out which age groups are moving in and out, said Pam Willrodt, a demographer at the Arkansas Economic Development Institute at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Younger people generally want to stay in more urban areas, she said.
Sorrell said he thinks adding more amenities, like recreational parks and trails, and more bars and restaurants, would help West Memphis attract residents. The city recently completed $3 million worth of bike trails along the Mississippi River.
Such things tend to come with residential growth, Sorrell said.
"It's the old chicken-and-egg thing," Sorrell said. "To have one, you have to have the other."
Sorrell's focus is on attracting more businesses.
West Memphis has added infrastructure to support its rail distribution economy, and he hopes other infrastructure improvements will attract more businesses to the area, which is heavy on rail and shipping traffic. He also wants to focus on attracting manufacturing.
Sorrell said there wasn't one major blow in the past decade that caused West Memphis' population to decline, but a couple of manufacturing plants -- Temple-Inland packaging and a Simplot food-processing facility -- have closed.
West Memphis officials recently looked at data on the city's workforce and employment, Sorrell said. What they found, he said, is about one-third travel to West Memphis to work, about one-third leave West Memphis to work, and about one-third live and work in the city.
There's one big difference between Memphis' suburbs in Arkansas and its suburbs in Tennessee and Mississippi, and that's the largest river in the United States, Sorrell said.
Only two bridges cross the Mississippi River at Memphis. A third bridge connecting Memphis to Arkansas would encourage more traffic between the two areas, Sorrell said. That's been under study for decades, he said.
On the Mississippi and Tennessee side of the river, a person might have a difficult time noticing where one suburb city ends and another begins.
But 2 miles of floodplains separate Memphis from its suburbs on the Arkansas side of the river, Sorrell said.
"If we want to attract people to live on this side of the river," he said, "we're going to have to attract jobs."
Metro on 06/03/2018