MEMPHIS, TN - Drive down Hollywood Street in North Memphis and you'll pass an apartment complex that looks like its' condemned. Most of the windows are boarded up. The ones that aren't are either shattered or hanging from broken frames. A mountain of trash litters the lawn and the parking lot. At least two old cars are up on cinder blocks, hoods popped, engines in pieces.
Then suddenly someone steps out from one of the units and you realize that people actually live in this depressing place.
"Ain't no lights," says 20 year-old Sherry Orange, as she gives us a tour of her sister's apartment. "They got lights on the ceiling, but there ain't no light. No electricity."
Sherry's lived here for just over a year. Her sister moved in three months ago into a unit that didn't even have the basics. She cooks on a wok because most of the appliances were not provided.
"She is missing her stove," says Sherry. "It was supposed to come with a stove but it didn't. And she had to go out and buy a refrigerator herself. And she pays $350 a month for this place."
The kitchen wall has a massive crack in it leading up to an even larger hole in the ceiling. Sherry says a drunk driver plowed into the apartment building last weekend and caused the damage. The apartment managers, she says with a shrug, have made no effort to repair it.
And it gets worse. Sherry says raw sewage backs up into their apartments every time it rains. She says the folks at the Health Department told them there's nothing they can do about it. And despite almost weekly visits by Memphis City Code Enforcement officers, the complex remains open.
Sherry admits it's a crummy place in a crime ridden section of Memphis, where blight and unemployment are a way of life. But it's all she and her sister can afford. Sherry's been out of work for a year. And her sister, who works at Home Depot, just found out they're cutting her hours back because of the bad economy.
"Look, a change has come," says Memphis City Councilman Joe Brown, who represents Sherry, her sister and all the other people who live in North Memphis.
Brown agrees that his district is struggling. At a sparsely attended town hall meeting at the Bickford Community Center on Monday, January 26, 2009, Councilman Brown and Memphis City Council Chairman Myron Lowery said the answers to what ails North Memphis will have to come from President Barack Obama's administration.
"We've got to be a partner with the federal government," says Brown, "to bring in jobs and revenue so we can make a difference in housing. You know, it's going to take that help. You just can't do it off of taxpayer dollars. You've got to do it off the dollars from the federal level."
"President Obama," says Councilman Lowery, "is recommending an economic stimulus plan. We have some projects here in Memphis and Shelby County that we're going to submit for this plan."
Brown says new housing is going up next to the new Manasas High School near Firestone. And the Klondike area is also slated for revitalization. Federal grants and private developers have been working together on the deal.
But Sherry Orange lives in the Hollywood section of North Memphis, where things are quickly going from bad to worse.
Change, she says, can't come soon enough for her. She's living in a place that looks like a third world country. She's out of work. She's out of money. And she's quickly running out of hope.
"I go out almost every day looking for a job," she says. "Ain't none out there. No jobs. Period. If I had the money to move, I would have been gone. I would've left. But no job, no money. And no money, no move."
