Does DeRenne Avenue have to be a dividing line? (Savannah: sales, city hall)

[Airforceguy]

As much as Tony Thomas may be a controversial figure, he is correct when it comes to this point. The city needs to invest more in the southside.

“There’s a disconnect in this city,” Alderman Tony Thomas said during the discussion about the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax at last week’s Savannah City Council workshop meeting. “There’s a dividing line called DeRenne Avenue, between the people that live north of it and the people that live south of it.

“The people that live south of it are getting the low end of the shaft for a long time on these projects and everything else,” Thomas added. “It’s time that we start getting our resources allocated out there.”

Thomas might be the most controversial political figure in the city, but he has maintained solid support from enough voters in the 6th District because of his frank and accurate statements like those last week.

Thomas is certainly not the first to call DeRenne a dividing line, and he won’t be the last.

The geographical and psychological barrier of DeRenne has deep roots. Unlike the older neighborhoods, Savannah’s Southside was developed in an era of automobile dependence and of single-use zoning.

https://www.savannahnow.com/business...-dividing-line

[bellhead]

Voted for Tony in the past & would vote for him again in the future, he has his warts but does as much as he can for his district despite city hall.

When you see just Broughton street getting $8 million for street scaping but the entire southside gets less than this, there is a problem. I pay $7k a year in property taxes but am stuck with crappy schools to where your kids have to go to private schools & a high crime rate due to the department being over a 100 officers short. The entire Truman on the southside is brand new but never received any money for landscaping, so it's all overgrown weeds.

[masonbauknight]

Originally Posted by bellhead

but the entire southside gets less than this, there is a problem.

No one holding the Chatham purse strings wants to invest in the southside. It's deteriorated too much. The number of "good" southside areas (proportionate to bad ones) has never been smaller. Just the violent crimes I've read about within miles of the home I grew up in are chilling: from the 1980s (woman murdered by two 16-year-old strangers from the neighborhood) to the 1990s (17-year-old shoots and kills best friend in front of his house, four doors down from our old home) to very recent horrors (jogger gunned down at 7 a.m.). All these people were white -- the gang-related murders in AA areas are also numerous. The southside's reputation has gone south, so "as much money as Broughton Street" is hard to win, even if you're as scrappy as Thomas is.

[TheDarkKnight]

Over the years, that line has pushed back further and further IMO. I believe Midtown now stretches all the way to Eisenhower, or Oglethorpe Mall at farthest (a lot of businesses next to Oglethorpe consider their locations Midtown).

These days I'm more inclined to call anything Southside on the other side of White Bluff and Abercorn as the dividing line (so basically anything from Best Buy onward. I can also see some people using Montgomery Cross Rds as a dividing line as well.

Really, Truman has changed those geographical lines IMO.

[Newsboy]

Originally Posted by TheDarkKnight

Over the years, that line has pushed back further and further IMO. I believe Midtown now stretches all the way to Eisenhower, or Oglethorpe Mall at farthest (a lot of businesses next to Oglethorpe consider their locations Midtown).

These days I'm more inclined to call anything Southside on the other side of White Bluff and Abercorn as the dividing line (so basically anything from Best Buy onward. I can also see some people using Montgomery Cross Rds as a dividing line as well.

Really, Truman has changed those geographical lines IMO.

This is true. I've never considered DeRenne as the dividing line for "modern" Southside Savannah. It made more sense to a generation of folks who remember when DeRenne was the actual southern boundary of the city limits proper, and when suburban development began to spread beyond that. But in more recent years I've come to think of the area from DeRenne south to Oglethorpe Mall as more Midtown and then the vast area beyond that as Southside. Of course, it doesn't really matter what anybody calls it. It's the perception that matters.

What's ironic about this argument that the Southside doesn't get any love is that up until about 20 or so years ago, it was the exact opposite. Indeed, the entire Southside evolved as a result of white flight and abandonment of the inner city north of DeRenne. So for the historic heart of the city now to be allegedly getting all the love at the expense of the Southside represents an evolution in the city's history.

[TheDarkKnight]

Originally Posted by Newsboy

This is true. I've never considered DeRenne as the dividing line for "modern" Southside Savannah. It made more sense to a generation of folks who remember when DeRenne was the actual southern boundary of the city limits proper, and when suburban development began to spread beyond that. But in more recent years I've come to think of the area from DeRenne south to Oglethorpe Mall as more Midtown and then the vast area beyond that as Southside. Of course, it doesn't really matter what anybody calls it. It's the perception that matters.

What's ironic about this argument that the Southside doesn't get any love is that up until about 20 or so years ago, it was the exact opposite. Indeed, the entire Southside evolved as a result of white flight and abandonment of the inner city north of DeRenne. So for the historic heart of the city now to be allegedly getting all the love at the expense of the Southside represents an evolution in the city's history.

For many years, Truman ended at DeRenne. The Eisenhower exit didn't open until 2004, and the Montgomery/Landings exits until a little while later. That's probably why people historically were using DeRenne as that boundary.

But since Truman is now open all the way to Abercorn, it makes sense that naturally that line has shifted farther towards OG Mall. That's why I basically say Eisenhower or White Bluff/Abercorn as that dividing line. I don't think in all my years in Savannah I've ever heard anyone refer to Publix at 12 Oaks as "Southside". That includes even when I was a kid.

[CoastalGAGuy]

Come now, y'all... It's long been known in Savannah that EVERYTHING south of Gaston Street is to be considered North Jacksonville.

[masonbauknight]

"The Southside" was always WAY south, and mostly west. Before Oglethorpe Mall's 1968 opening, this meant then-unincorporated neighborhoods below Highland Ave. (all to be annexed by the city in 1978). It never included DeRenne or any neighborhoods north of Bacon Park. The Southside was Chippewa Terr., Oakhurst, Paradise Park, Windsor, Wilkshire, White Bluff, and Coffee Bluff -- at the most lenient, add Halcyon Bluff and Ferguson Ave., but not Isle of Hope. The recent confusion is due to the navel-gazing of newer residents of downtown or midtown. For them, everything south of Habersham Village is "the Southside." That's simply a cultural bias.