The Southside neighborhoods include Rustville, Fort Negley and Jefferson Heights. The Southside Neighborhoods Plan was a showcase for the city's sustainable development agenda, with "green" industries, a new school, historic preservation, and a variety of new housing. The renaissance is being led by Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise and the city's Design Center.

Dover, Kohl & Partners prepared a detailed plan for revitalization of Rustville, Fort Negley, and Jefferson Heights, three historic neighborhoods just south of downtown Chattanooga. When we began, they were scenes of devastation; this part of the city had been carved up by highways. Everywhere there was evidence of disinvestment, “urban renewal” failures, industrial flight, and extreme depopulation. At the time, virtually every building on Main Street was boarded up. It was clear revitalization of the Southside would be vital to the economic viability and future of Chattanooga’s urban core.

Philanthropy kick-started the revitalization. Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE), a privately-funded non-profit development organization, commissioned the DK&P plan. Through an initial $40 million grant, incubator businesses were financed and CNE recruited small builders to start painstakingly putting the neighborhoods back together, a few lots at a time.

The DK&P plan depicted how the Southside should be filled back in with single-family homes, duplexes, rowhouses, charming apartment buildings, mixed-use storefront buildings, small-scale industrial concerns, a new school, a new park, and adaptively-reused historic buildings, all arrayed on a network of artfully right-sized, tree-lined, reconnected streets. Making the streets into safe and attractive addresses was the simple organizing principle. Today, these approaches have common names like “missing middle housing,” “incremental development,” and “road diets,” but the Southside was a pioneering proving ground for all of them. Now, these three neighborhoods are lively hotbeds for creativity and local entrepreneurship, full of families and visitors.