Southaven: Mississippi's Memphis Suburb That Became Its Own City

The name Southaven is a simple description of geography: it is the haven south of Whitehaven, the Memphis neighborhood just across the Tennessee state line. The Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson developed early residential subdivisions here in the late nineteen fifties, and the place incorporated as a city in nineteen eighty.

What happened next was one of the faster urban growth stories in Mississippi history. Interstate Fifty-Five running through Southaven in the nineteen seventies made Memphis commuters willing to live south of the border, where land was cheaper and Mississippi taxes lower. The population tripled in twenty years. By the twenty twenty census, Southaven had fifty-four thousand six hundred forty-eight residents , the third-largest city in Mississippi and the second most populous suburb of Memphis.

Southaven's story is less about Mississippi history than about the gravitational pull of a major American city and the way a state line can create enormous economic incentives when property values and tax rates diverge on either side of it.