photo by Olaf Growald
Near Southside, Inc.
There’s a book called Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by Jim Kunstler. The book, one written to provoke strong reactions from those content with the status quo, suggests that cities have devolved into suburban sprawls of parking lots and cookie-cutter houses, making places within cities no place in particular.
Since the book’s initial publication in 1993, cities have undergone a renaissance. Realizing the errors of their recent tendencies to expand outward, cities started contracting. Abandoned buildings, warehouses, and homes near city centers became desired real estate, and prices soared. But it might be a tad optimistic to suggest this happened organically, that people naturally moved back to the areas of town their parents abandoned; a guiding hand might have helped it along.
Fort Worth’s Near Southside is the perfect example — an archetype, even — of this new trend in city planning. Charming old buildings, diverse homes, wide sidewalks, and a major overhaul in zoning made the Near Southside a hive for redevelopment. And Near Southside, Inc., the area’s neighborhood organization, has been its guiding hand.
Mike Brennan, president of Near Southside, Inc. since 2018 following 12 years as planning director — he is the organization’s third president, which was founded in 1996 — has overseen a neighborhood organization that has altered not only the neighborhood it represents, but all of Fort Worth. Thanks in large part to the Near Southside, Cowtown has a solid reputation as a destination for artists and entrepreneurs.
It’s difficult to wrap one’s head around the amount of work the Near Southside, Inc. team does. From planning events like ArtsGoggle to advocating for the neighborhood in front of city hall to administering the area’s Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district to making plans for new parks and common spaces, they are champions of their neighborhood while carefully shepherding it in the right direction.
“So much of our work, almost all of it, is collaborative,” Mike says. “Where we’re playing an important role, and we’re working with partners who are playing important roles. And usually we’re in the position of helping to facilitate the path forward.”
Mike’s roots with the Near Southside date back to the 1980s when things weren’t going well for the neighborhood. It was a dormant community kept alive by the surrounding hospitals, full of empty buildings and areas one would likely describe as sketchy.
His parents worked at the hospitals — JPS was home to one of his first jobs — so he frequented the area as a child, long before there was any vision to revitalize the neighborhood.
Mike then spent 16 years away from the Fort, jumping from New Jersey to Tennessee to Charlotte to Boston, all the while learning and becoming interested in city planning. He eventually went to Harvard’s urban planning program.
After school, Mike returned to Fort Worth as an urban planner at the city, where he was instrumental in updating the zoning ordinance in 2001 to make it legal to create mixed-use projects.
Since taking over as president, the organization has doubled in size. — from three to six.
One of the people he eagerly recruited was Megan Henderson, who, in many respects, has been the most visible and vocal advocate of the Near Southside. And her passion for the district started well before she accepted her dream job at Near Southside, Inc.
“When I was 16, I started coming to Fort Worth, because if you have a car, you point north and just start driving,” Megan says. “I would listen to shows, and a lot of them ended up in the Near Southside. I started making friends with the musicians who lived in this area. A lot of them had houses in Fairmount, and they seemed scary, and cool, and weird, and colorful.”
Megan Henderson is a Swiss Army Knife for the Near Southside, working tirelessly on events such as ArtsGoggle while also overseeing public art and small business development programs and being a tireless promoter of the community.
“The work has really had an incredible crescendo, the types of tasks that we do,” Megan says. “But we’re still so affective despite a fairly small staff compared to organizations like ours.”
Despite the neighborhood’s massive growth that’s visible to the naked eye, Mike and Megan refuse to admit they’re an overnight success.
“We had a year where we [had an event] and said, ‘Come learn about our 20-year overnight success.’ I was like, ‘Overnight?’ And we’re like, ‘For 20 years we’ve been slugging away at it,’” Megan says.
But, still, Megan admits, “We’ve gotten a lot done in 20 years.”
