After several years of slow, steady progress with small infill projects, the Near Southside is starting to see more of the kind of large developments that have been common in locations like the West 7th Street area. Multiple large projects are now under construction, and one of them is starting to go vertical on Jennings Avenue.
This project will add 209 apartments at 400 South Jennings Avenue, in a new five-story building. Plans are for the building to feature all the sorts of amenities one would expect in a modern-day urban apartment project, such as a pool and a fitness center. The project’s design also includes a large fifth-floor deck at the corner of Jennings and Broadway Avenues, which should give residents quite the view of the downtown skyline to the north.
As seen in the photo, the construction site has been cleared and prepped, and the first pieces of concrete for the building’s parking garage are now rising at the south end of the block. We should see the apartments themselves wrap around this structure. Since the finished apartments will be five stories tall, it’s likely we’ll see a ground floor of concrete topped by four floors of wood framing as construction progresses. This is common in projects like this, as wood framing is significantly less expensive than concrete or steel, but it is limited by code to a maximum height of four stories. This means that developers can reach five stories by placing the four floors of wood on top of a single floor of concrete.
Adding other similar developments creates more residences in a part of Fort Worth that’s easily traveled by foot or bicycle, meaning there will be that many more people calling the city home who won’t be totally dependent on their cars for everything. The more of that we can build and encourage, the more we’ll see a greater variety of retail businesses moving into the central city, as they return to being actual neighborhoods full of people who live there.
This project in particular should be a pretty large boost for current and future development along Jennings itself, and along South Main Street and the South Main urban village, which is only a few blocks east of the site. There’s a pretty large vacant lot diagonally across Jennings to the north, which itself would make an ideal location for a significant infill project.
There’s also an opportunity here to create a stronger link between Jennings and South Main, as Broadway Avenue leads directly from this site to South Main Street, and it is currently an extremely oversized street with not much in the way of pedestrian amenities. One could easily imagine a remade Broadway, spurred on by the addition of 209 new apartments, with improved sidewalks and protected bike infrastructure with all that excess space.
Now, if we can only get better transit linking these developments, we’ll really have something special.
