About this site
Memphis Zoning Watch tracks proposals to change how land can be used in Memphis and Shelby County — rezonings, planned developments, special use permits, subdivisions and street closures. It exists because this information is already public but is scattered across PDFs that are hard to search and effectively disappear once a meeting ends.
This is not a government website
Memphis Zoning Watch is an independent side project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the City of Memphis, Shelby County, or the Division of Planning and Development. Nothing here is official notice of anything. If you need to rely on a fact — for a purchase, a filing, a deadline, or a legal argument — use the government document linked on the case page, not this site’s description of it.
What it covers
Three jurisdictions, each with its own board:
- City of Memphis and unincorporated Shelby County — heard by the Land Use Control Board, the joint Memphis–Shelby County body. Records go back to 2015.
- Town of Collierville — heard by the Collierville Planning Commission, which recommends to the town’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen. Collierville’s published agenda archive begins in October 2025, so there is less history here than for Memphis — but it grows with every meeting from here on.
There are currently 1,720 cases on record.
Searching by address crosses these boundaries, which no official source does — the county and each town publish separately, so a property near a municipal line otherwise has to be checked in two places.
What it does not cover
These suburban municipalities are not included: Arlington, Bartlett, Germantown, Lakeland, Millington. Each runs its own planning commission, separate from both the Land Use Control Board and Collierville’s. If you live in one of those towns, a quiet result on this site tells you nothing — contact your town’s planning department directly. Adding them is the plan; Collierville was the first and the others follow one at a time.
Also outside scope, for now:
- The Board of Adjustment and the Landmarks Commission, which handle variances and historic properties
- Final votes by Memphis City Council or the Shelby County Board of Commissioners. Many case types only get a recommendation from LUCB and are decided later by elected officials — this site records the recommendation, not that final vote
- Building permits, code enforcement, and anything that is not a land-use case
Where the information comes from
Every case is built from documents the government publishes itself — Land Use Control Board agendas, staff reports and application filings for Memphis and the county, and Planning Commission agendas for Collierville. Software downloads each document, reads the text, and pulls out the details: case number, address, parcel, applicant, dates. Property boundaries come from the countywide parcel map.
Nothing is typed in by hand and nothing is sourced from elsewhere. Every case page links to the original documents at the bottom, so you can always check the site against the record.
Where AI is used — and where it isn't
AI does not produce any facts on this site. Case numbers, addresses, parcel IDs, dates, districts, applicant names and staff recommendations are all extracted by fixed rules from the source documents. A model is never asked what a case says or where it is.
AI is used for exactly one thing: writing the short plain-English summary that appears on some case pages, from details already extracted. Those summaries always carry a visible AI-generated label and a link to the specific document they were written from. If you see a summary without both, that is a bug worth reporting.
How accurate is it?
Reasonably, but not perfectly, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. The documents are inconsistent — formats have changed several times since 2015, some describe a location in words rather than by address, and some are simply typed oddly. Software reading them makes mistakes: a truncated project name, an address attached to the wrong case, a case placed on the wrong parcel.
727 of 1,720 cases (42%) can be placed on a map. The rest describe their location in ways that cannot be placed at all, so they will not appear in an address search even though they are in the case list.
Not every placement is equally precise, and the site says which is which. Most Memphis cases are matched to an actual property boundary from the parcel map. Collierville agendas usually describe a location in words instead (“south of West South Street and east of Sycamore Road”), so those cases are placed at the street corner named — accurate to about a block, and labelled as approximate wherever it appears.
If you spot something wrong, please report it. Errors here tend to be systematic rather than one-offs, so a single report often fixes dozens of cases at once.
Cost, and what happens to the data
The records are public and will always be free here. There is no paywall, no account, and no plan to add one. The data is also available as RSS, JSON and GeoJSON if you want to use it elsewhere.
No accounts, no tracking cookies, no advertising. Anonymous, aggregate visit counts are collected to see whether the site is useful to anyone.
Contact
Questions, corrections and tip-offs: contact@memphiszoningwatch.com. This is run by one person in their spare time, so replies may take a while.