Aug. 15, 2024
Throughout the small towns of middle and western Tennessee, residents can point to the quiet, two-lane roads or the gravel paths leading to slightly sloping hills and stately oaks as reasons why they love living there. But a new arrival in Stanton, Tennessee, a rural town of a little over 400 people northeast of Memphis, may soon reshape and reimagine its very landscape.
BlueOval™ City is a six-square-mile, 10-million-square-foot complex where Ford Motor Company and South Korean SK Innovation plan to build electric F-Series pickup trucks and advanced vehicle batteries when it opens sometime in 2025. And the ripples of this giant factory's arrival — not to mention its 6,000 future employees — will be felt across the region in new housing, stores, hospitals, malls, and roadways. They will stretch out from the factory like roots from a tree in Haywood County, where Stanton sits, affecting its roughly 18,000 residents in a multitude of ways.
"This community has been primarily agricultural, and agriculture had its best days in the past," says Van Turner, a former Memphis mayoral candidate who's leading the charge for a community benefits agreement with Ford. "A lot of businesses have closed, and people have moved out of West Tennessee. This represents a rebirth."
The preservation of the community's history and the success of BlueOval aren't mutually exclusive. The vision is to maintain the area's rural aesthetic and not impede the region's character during this once-in-a-century change, while welcoming growth and job opportunities. The approach planners are taking also isn't novel — with recent examples just down the road from Stanton.
A vintage Ford truck sits parked on a gravel road across from the Blue Acres RV Park, which offers lots for workers building the massive Ford complex near Stanton, Tennessee.
Memphis-based LRK, a planning and architecture firm, was tapped to help the West Tennessee region respond to this growth and present a vision for the future that knits together some common elements from the patchwork of city and county efforts. The firm was recruited shortly after the announcement of the new plant in September 2021 by Tipton County executive Jeff Huffman, who had worked with Memphis-area governments and LRK in 2022 on RegionSmart, a tri-state economic development initiative (the firm also did a regional parks and greenspace plan in 2018). LRK sought to engage the community to coauthor guidelines and mission statements about the future of their home. "There's a magnetism to the small-town square that can be hard to protect in the face of rapid expansions of strip malls and prototypical retail development," says Frank Ricks, one of LRK's founding principals.
LRK collaborated on several regional planning processes and on more specific small-area plans for regions of Jackson, including downtown and lower-income communities near an abandoned shopping center. "No one was saying, 'stay out,'" says Jonathan Flynt, AICP, an LRK senior associate. "It was seen as an opportunity to focus inward, and an aversion to greenfield sprawl. Everyone wanted this new opportunity."
All these efforts sought to direct the firehose of new development and lay out a roadmap to encourage gentle density mixed with rural preservation.
Shelton Merrell, the city planning director for Brownsville, Tennessee, is one of several planners in the area trying to balance the new development opportunities while staying true to the small-town character of the community.
Anticipating regional housing pressures, Brownsville planners must thread the needle to respect the area's rural character and current residents' housing needs while steering denser residential and commericial development to designated areas.
"We're just trying to keep [out] bottom-feeding developments happening around the world, barrack-type housing, and things of that nature," says Shelton Merrell, a planner in Brownsville — a Haywood County municipality that was the first to pass the Haywood Next land use plan earlier this year. "We don't want to look back in 10 years and realize we made a mistake."
Rapid growth brings good and bad
The U.S. is amidst a manufacturing resurgence and reshoring boom, with a trio of big-ticket federal laws — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act — directing billions of dollars of support and subsidies toward projects like BlueOval. Roughly a quarter of these investments have been in rural counties, in states like Georgia and Tennessee, and more than 80 percent of impacted counties have below-average wages and graduation rates. Many also don't have extensive experience planning for such projects, often leaving those communities, local leaders, and planners to fend for themselves. That's why LRK was brought into West Tennessee.
"Some communities lean into planning, and some communities want to stay status quo and pretend like the development isn't coming," says Sarah Houston, executive director of the Memphis-based environmental nonprofit Protect Our Aquifer, which is engaged in regional natural resource issues stemming from the new plant.
In the Southeast, a region dotted by a significant number of new auto plants and construction sites for future EV plants and battery factories, this kind of sudden industrial arrival isn't new. Houston notes that it's common for communities in and around Tennessee — like Memphis, Jackson, and Brownsville — to have to welcome a new facility with open arms when they didn't have much of a say in inviting them, and then figure out how they're going to deal with it.
"It's almost like this spontaneous combustion that you can't stop until you get enough people to say, 'OK, I guess we can try to balance the good and the bad,'" says Ricks.
Planners are working out transportation needs related to the Ford plant — both in Stanton, near the development site, and in neighboring areas like Brownsville and other Haywood County communities. Courtesy of the Tennessee Department of Transportation.
By May, when this photo was taken, the electric vehicle center assembly plant at the site was entering its final stages of construction. It is set to open sometime in 2025. Photo courtesy of Walbridge/Ford.
For decades, LRK has worked on these kinds of projects, collaborating with municipalities on rural stewardship initiatives, starting with projects in Collier County, Florida, in 2004. One of the largest challenges was in trying to communicate (and grapple with) the positives and negatives of growth. Flynt explains it as a dichotomy between rural beauty and modern convenience, and of what you value and what you need. More shopping can be valuable, but not when a string of strip malls and convenience stores ruin your town.
Ricks and LRK have experience with the two very different directions these kinds of projects can take. In 2007, the firm worked on a project for Bolivar, Tennessee, a rural stewardship initiative that came out of a plan to reenergize the historic downtown after a number of antebellum buildings burned down. That opportunity, coupled with the Courthouse Square Revitalization Pilot Project Act of 2005, which included millions of dollars of state funding for development, was paired with a new growth plan that focused on redeveloping downtown businesses with streetscape improvements and increased density to funnel tourists to nearby sites on the Hatchie River.
But without that kind of foresight, sudden growth can look more like Spring Hill, Tennessee. The city, which welcomed the Saturn car plant in 1990, greeted the new economic investment with insufficient planning, including a lack of transportation planning and little zoning. The resulting patchwork of development led to sprawl (the town's own future land use plans identify strip mall developments and poor transportation as major issues). Ricks, who grew up in the area around Spring Hill, says the resulting growth ruined the region's character. Strip malls and subdivisions webbed out wherever water and sewer lines could be connected. Over the years, distinct neighborhoods and the town square dissolved into a blob of stereotypical low-density development.
"It was just wide open, do-whatever-you-want-to-do development," says Ricks. "They just didn't have a playbook around different housing types."
Frank Ricks (left) and Jonathan Flynt, AICP, of the Memphis-based firm LRK, are involved in helping the West Tennessee region respond to the rapid growth the development will bring.
Staying true to the community
Typically, the LRK team suggests working in stages. Hold community meetings and adopt a comprehensive planning document that reflects a consensus view of development, a process that can take up to a year. Then, follow it up with updated zoning rules to provide guardrails to developers and steer new projects in the right direction. And once that secondary development does start, devise financial models, partnerships, and new community investments that can multiply the positive impacts of this controlled growth. Ideally, Flynt says, these blueprints allow communities to keep what they love, while still getting the upside of new jobs and infrastructure investments.
"I tell people that there's nobody named 'inevitable' at the table. They're not a stakeholder, so I don't want to hear about it," says Flynt.
In Haywood and Madison counties, LRK helped residents devise larger design guidelines and community vision plans that focused on the types of new housing and commercial developments they preferred. The firm began holding listening sessions in July and August of 2022, with more than 300 participants. Merrell says the "volumes and volumes" of community input beat having a bunch of planners sitting in a back room trying to describe what the area should look like.
Since most residents don't understand floor-area ratios or building heights, LRK adjusted their language: homes, not housing units, and stores and small businesses, not commercial development. The team also used visual preference surveys to divine the community's goals and shape many of the interim design guidelines. They asked what kinds of parks or developments or landscapes community members want to see. And they focused on relationships, not numbers. These tactics are all part of their community engagement playbook.
Construction at the I-40 Advantage industrial park in Brownsville will accommodate the related automotive businesses drawn by the Ford plant.
New housing is under development in Stanton so that Ford's expected 6,000 employees have a place to call home.
"By the time we're done, their IQ from a placemaking perspective goes from zero to professional," says Tony Pellicciotti, an LRK principal. "They just know and feel it when they see it. And, so, part of our process is just to get them to think a little differently."
The vision was low-impact development and conservation subdivisions. Huffman said the message he and LRK heard from residents was about balance: gaining the amenities residents of urban areas have, but on a smaller scale, while conserving the "old town" feel, as well as the local aquifer and as much farmland as possible.
For Haywood, the planning documents focused on a community concentration and countryside conservation scenario, which seeks to confine growth within specific, already-settled areas or crossroads, preserving more open space and rural character. Flynt says one of the most important strategies to adopt was limiting and controlling infrastructure; by stopping the expansion of sewer lines and roadways, communities can effectively corral development where they want, instead of paving the way for sprawl. Too many communities facing these challenges make substantial new investments in these kinds of infrastructure projects and overlook the spaces and places that have already received investment and have been the focus of past efforts for growth.
West Tennessee planners hope to balance new development with the quaintness of places like downtown Brownsville.
Brownsville's current land use map will be updated by the Haywood Next plan, which was approved earlier this year.
In Brownsville, Merrell says the guidelines have already been a big help. There's been a "mad rush" for higher density residential projects, including quadplexes, along an area on East Jefferson Street and Highway 19. The plan helps steer those projects to designated areas — maintaining a small, quaint town with pockets of higher-density residential, including townhomes and condos, and a few commercial corridors — and established design guidelines have helped the city push multifamily developers to meet criteria for commercial projects.
"We want to have a beautiful city, not one that was done piecemeal with different types of housing with no rhyme or reason," Merrell says.
The next step for the communities engaged in these conversations is figuring out additional small area plans and enacting the zoning reforms needed to shore up the vision (in some cases by adding additional density to small town squares and encouraging a diversity of housing types). The TiptonTogether plan is waiting for local approval, while Haywood Next has been approved by Brownsville, with passage by other local jurisdictions expected later this year. The small area plans in Jackson, Flynt says, will enable surrounding municipalities to see what works and inform future zoning changes.
Meanwhile, the future of development around BlueOval City is far from finished. Just this May, local economic development officials announced their intention to find a tenant for a 400-acre site next to the plant, presumably a new factory or job site that would add more pressure on regional housing and commercial development. There's currently a larger battle around a community benefit agreement from Ford, and organizations like Houston's are fighting for more commitments to sustainability and environmental protections. Turner argues that the focus should turn to transportation and affordable housing, to help local workers remain and access incoming job opportunities.
"The big issue is, can you get the townspeople and the leadership to understand the magnitude of this moment?" asks Ricks. "If you take action, you'll be able to react to it. Otherwise, growth is just going to happen to you."
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