Data from the 2020 census predicted the population of Fondren would start to decline by 2027.
“It was less than a 1 percent decline, but it was a trend that needed to be reversed before it started,” said Rebecca Garrison, executive director of the Fondren Renaissance Foundation.
Architects and urban planners who work in Fondren suggested a way to move the neighborhood forward.
“They came up with the idea that we hire our own urban planner with the help of the city of Jackson,” said Sandy Carter, a Fondren resident, who chairs the effort known as Fondren Forward.
Carter, a retired Trustmark Bank employee who leads the fundraising, has collected $275,000 in donations for the foundation to hire a firm to produce a masterplan.
Ideas tossed out so far include improving public safety, connecting Fondren with the Museum to Market Trail, finding a solution to make it easier to get from Fondren to the University of Mississippi Medical Center and coming up with a tie-in to Highland Village, he said.
The masterplan, which will cover the area that stretches from Woodrow Wilson Avenue to Northside Drive and from North West Street to I-55, is expected to encompass economic development strategies, preservation of cultural assets, conservation of natural resources, provision of community facilities, current and future housing requirements, zoning and land use, transportation and mobility and prioritized allocation of public funds.
A public meeting is scheduled March 21 at 6:30 p.m. at the Fondren Church gymnasium. Design options for the neighborhood will be presented, and community input is sought.
The planning process is lengthy, about nine months, and an action plan is not expected until October, Garrison said.
In calling on potential donors, Carter said he discovered that many people want to contribute what they can to improve the city and see it thrive.
“We’re seeing a real concerted effort to make Jackson and Fondren better,” he said. “A year and a half ago we hit rock bottom and the city was a terrible mess, but our water system is better, and our sewer system is better.
“When it got so bad, I called a Realtor about putting our house on the market. My wife looked at me and said, ‘You can talk about it or you can do something about it.’”
Every church in Fondren, all the banks, private foundations and the utility companies have all been generous, he said, naming just a few of the donors, in helping get Fondren Forward off the ground.
With an overall fundraising goal of $400,000, an additional $125,000 is needed to implement suggestions from the masterplan and Carter has no worries about securing those donations. “I feel confident we’ll get to the $400,000,” he said.
Fundraising has been a team effort, Carter said, crediting Garrison with keeping him organized.
An 18-member steering committee composed of Fondren residents, property owners, renters, business owners, advocates and city of Jackson staff, is in place and the foundation’s board of directors are responsible for the overall oversight.
Last fall, the city of Jackson assisted the foundation in selecting an urban planner. Five firms were interviewed and City Collective, which has an office in Atlanta, was chosen, Carter said.
Blake Reeves, an urban planner who grew up in Jackson and is a discipline leader of urban design and planning at City Collective, is involved.
“To have someone who knows Fondren, its rich history and its people to lead our effort is the best of all worlds,” Garrison said.
A team of three individuals from City Collective met with more than 30 people in four days to glean all the information they could, Carter said. “We were going from seven to seven,” he said.
The team consulted the city’s Director of Planning and Development Chloe Dotson, Rep. Shanda Yates, Rep. Chris Bell, Sen. David Blount, Jackson City Council Members Ashby Foote, Virgi Lindsay and Aaron Banks, the city’s Chief Administrative Officer Louis P. Wright Sr. and the mayor’s Chief of Staff Safiya R. Omari, Ph.D., but it didn’t stop there.
Representatives from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, JXN Water, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Millsaps College, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, the Greater Belhaven Foundation, LeFleur East Foundation and “all the developers who would talk to us” were also spoken with, Carter said.
“The council members have been very helpful and said, ‘Keep this up,”’ Carter said. “They said, ‘Take this and run.’ The city has been very helpful. We’ve worked as a team.”
He said city leaders have said, ‘We like what you’re doing,’ and want the foundation to share its planning process with other neighborhoods, with the idea being ‘if all of us start talking abut what’s going on in our areas maybe we can help each other.”
More than 100 people attended the first community meeting earlier this year, Garrison said. Four-hundred-fifty people responded to the online survey at fondrenforward.com and another 3,600 have visited the website.
Input from the community is especially important, Garrison said, so that the masterplan benefits the area in the best way possible.
The positive response to the planning process and fundraising communicates that “people still have hope for Jackson and want to invest in our city,” Garrison said. “Yes, this is a Fondren focused effort but, at the end of the day, it is about the city. We want to do our part to restore the city’s tax base and have more people calling Fondren home.”
Barry Plunkett, a Fondren resident and owner of Interiors Market in Woodland Hills Shopping Center in Fondren, said Fondren already has a lot going for it, including beautiful residences, numerous banks, several churches, retail and many places to eat in just a few blocks, and a masterplan for the future makes good sense.
Hiring a consultant, who can view Fondren with fresh eyes, is wise, he said, since the city of Jackson employees do not have the luxury of devoting time to a single project such as a neighborhood masterplan, he said.
A consultant with expertise and ideas from other cities can provide an objective view without a political agenda, and that can be useful, he said.
Mike Peters, a longtime Jackson businessman responsible for the development of Fondren Corner and Duling School, also gives a thumbs up to the planning that is under way.
“The consultant is bringing ideas from other communities like us and that’s good,” he said.
Fondren remains a bright spot in the city, Peters said, noting the move of Jones Walker law firm into the BankPlus building and Amerigo Italian Restaurant’s move into Duling.
One thing that makes Fondren stand out, he said, is its positive vibe. “It’s not all focused on the negative but what can we do to make things better,” he said.
Fondren is not the first neighborhood in the city to employ a planning process.
The Greater Belhaven Foundation has done so, although the process has not been on the scale and expense of that in Fondren, said Susan Garrard, who chairs the foundation.
“We have done extensive work with the Small Town Center at Mississippi State,” she said. The center provides a range of design and planning services for community such as engagement and visioning, master planning and project feasibility studies.
Lindsay, who represents Ward 7, said she’s seen what giving a neighborhood input in planning and asking questions such as “What would you like to see? How would this land be best used?’ can achieve.
David Turner, the owner of David Turner Companies and the project construction manager and general contractor for the Belhaven Town Center, brought in a design team to lead a collaborative process so that a new perspective could be envisioned beyond the institutional buildings and parking garage that were once on the town center site, she said.
The planning process plus rezoning for a mixed-use district paid off with the town center, a destination with some of the city’s most desirable activities and restaurants, possible, Lindsay said.
A similar planning process also went into the creation of The District at Eastover, another popular mixed-use district in the city, she said.
Lindsay believes neighborhoods should be proactive.
“Change is inevitable,” she said. “It’s either going to be good change or bad change. It is critically important that a community come together and plan for change, so it is good and meaningful, and it is change that they want.”
The word has gotten out about Fondren Forward and its intentions to move the neighborhood ahead, Carter said.
“People I’ve never known have come up to me and said, ‘What can I do to help?’” he said. “At the Jackson Food and Wine Festival, I had two people walk up to me and ask, ‘What can I do to help Fondren?’
“It’s been so rewarding, and I’ve met so many nice people. Jackson is full of so many nice people who want to see it get better.”
