Mike Brennan has come full circle, something he thought he would never do when he left Fort Worth to finish high school in New Jersey.
Born in Hawaii, Brennan was 4 years old when his family moved to Fort Worth. His father, Patrick Brennan, trained as a nephrologist and joined a practice in Fort Worth after he finished his residency in Dallas.
His father’s office was on the Southside on St. Louis Street behind where the Mag and May Apartments stand.
“I remember going there when I was, like, 7 years old with my older brother, and we would explore his office,” Brennen said. “That was my introduction to this neighborhood.”
Now, at 48, he is president of Near Southside Inc., the private, member-funded 501 (c)(4) nonprofit organization dedicated to revitalizing Fort Worth’s Near Southside.
He succeeds Paul Paine, who announced in May that he would step down at the end of June after 13 years as president of the organization. Brennan has been there for 12 of those years.
Together, they have overseen a dramatic change in the district, guiding development, building community and serving as a resource for businesses both large and small.
Before joining NSI, Brennan spent six years with the City of Fort Worth’s Planning Department.
He received his master’s degree in urban planning from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1999 and his certification from the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2002.
While with the city, he led the effort to create an urban, form-based development code for the Near Southside, resulting in the largest city-initiated rezoning in Fort Worth’s history. In 2008, the code received the Driehaus Award from the Form-Based Codes Institute, presented at the Congress for the New Urbanism, a consortium of urban planners, architects and city officials.
It’s been quite a journey. Brennan left Fort Worth to finish high school at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey at the suggestion of an aunt. He wasn’t particularly happy with Fort Worth and his experiences here at the time, he says, and “I was very curious as to seeing other places and being exposed to other things.”
He wasn’t interested in returning.
He graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, it 1992 with a double major in English and sociology and went to work for a mortgage company in Charlotte, North Carolina. The economy was sour nationally at the time, so he and some friends shopped four cities where they thought it would be fun to live and where the job market was better than other cities.
“We settled on Charlotte, North Carolina,” he said and then it was just try to find a job. He eventually ended up in the mortgage business.
English and sociology weren’t all that helpful then although he now sees that “my undergraduate education was extremely helpful in the work that I ended up doing. The detour into mortgage business, I didn’t realize how useful that might be until later on.”
He worked in Charlotte five years and then decided to go to graduate school.
“That’s when I made the decision to go back to school to study urban planning, heavily influenced by a close family friend of ours, Joe Riley, who was the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, for 40 years,” Brennan said.
Riley is no stranger to urban design fans in Fort Worth who heard him speak at a conference in the city. There are similarities in the downtown renovation of the two cities. An example is that Charleston built parking garages but with facades that make them look the same age as the original buildings nearby.
“Joe and my dad, Pat Brennan, they were best friends growing up,” Brennan said. “They went to the same elementary school, middle school, high school, and then were at The Citadel [The Military College of South Carolina] together.”
Writer Pat Conroy, author of The Lords of Discipline, a thinly disguised book on The Citadel, and other novels including The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides, was a few years behind them at the Citadel.
“There were some people that were very fond of their experience during that time, and others that were not,” Brennan said
Brennan visited with his father’s old pal and told him that he wanted to go back to school to pursue a career in line with the social side of cities, the economic side, the political side, urban design and how all those things work together.
Riley told him that some universities’ planning programs are heavily focused on the policy side and are in the school of public administration and others focus on design skills and they’re more focused on what’s being built.
Riley recommended the design school route “because that’s where you get to work with other students that are in architecture and design and landscape architecture, and it’s more of a focus on transforming the city,” Brennan said.
Riley gave Brennan a list of programs and people to talk to, and he ended up at Harvard.
It was during a break at graduate school that Brennan encountered Fort Worth’s Near Southside again.
His father’s new office was off Magnolia Avenue, and he told his son about a new organization on the Southside that aligned with his studies at Harvard.
“I was getting a planning degree at the Harvard design school, and my focus was on central city revitalization. And of course, that was the main mission of this new organization called Fort Worth South,” Brennan said.
His father arranged a meeting with Don Scott, the first president.
“I sat down in this room – probably at this seat – with Don Scott just to hear about what he was working on, what the big vision was, and what he was doing,” Brennan said. “I don’t remember exactly everything he was telling me. I think we probably spent some time talking about the TIF district that probably either had just been established or was in the final phases of establishing.
“I lived in a very similar neighborhood when I was in Charlotte. My interest in urban planning, really that started during my time in Charlotte,” he said.
The spring before graduation, Brennan was looking for jobs on the American Planning Association website and saw a job posting for a planner in the urban design division for the City of Fort Worth.
Until then, Fort Worth hadn’t crossed his mind as a possibility.
But it would be a good place to work because he would be part of a group trying to make things better, he decided, and he interviewed with Assistant City Manager Fernando Costa at an American Planning Association National Conference in Seattle.
That was about the end of April 1999. He graduated in May and started in Fort Worth at the beginning of July and worked for the city for six and a half years, worked his way up to manager of the Comprehensive Planning Division.
Costa and Scott put together a group of people to assess the progress made on the city’s 2003 strategic plan and Brennan was part of that. He also was staff lead on creating some new mixed-use zoning classifications that would allow projects that had a mix of uses within a building or on the same site. At the time, that was not legal in Fort Worth outside downtown.
Brennan cited the Modern Drug building, at Hemphill Street and Magnolia, which historically had apartments on the second floor and the drug store and other businesses on the first floor.
Developers Fran McCarthy and Ray Booth were trying to renovate that building and return it to its original use but the zoning wouldn’t allow them to do that.
That, Brennan said, highlighted a need for zoning reform to allow new development to be complimentary to the original development that made the neighborhood what it is and not have conventional suburban development filling in the gaps, because that would erode the neighborhood’s character.
Not everyone understood it at the time, Brennan said, but people such as Joan Kline, Booth, McCarthy, David Motheral and Dr. John Freese did.
“All those original community leaders, they understood that for this revitalization effort to be successful, we really needed to capitalize on the assets that the neighborhood had,” he said, “and it was those old buildings, and the very walkable environment; it was the environment that had been created with projects like the streetscape improvements along Magnolia.”
If Magnolia had just been lined with parking lots and single-story convenient stores and medical clinics, that would have been a huge loss, so that mixed-use zoning was one of the first efforts.
Brennan said he “expressed … interest” to Scott but continued to work for the city.
One area he was working on would turn out to be fortuitous for the Near Southside.
“One of the last things I was involved in before I moved from the planning department to Fort Worth South was the designation of South Main Village as one of the city’s designated urban villages,” Brennan said. “That was really important, and it was something that I felt strongly about because South Main Street had not been included in the original commercial corridor study that lead to the urban village program.”
South Main had all of the same ingredients that Magnolia did as far as the buildings, the street with great potential, and some interest from some pioneering investors, so it was added to the urban village list before he joined Fort Worth South in February 2006.
“And so that was, like, 30 years since my first introduction to the district, and then, basically another decade later and with Paul’s retirement and stepping into his shoes following Don and Paul as president of the organization, that’s a huge honor and it’s sort of amazing for me to look back and say, ‘Wow. It’s been over four decades of attachment to this neighborhood,” Brennan said.
His parents, Trellise and Patrick, had long careers in medicine – she as a registered nurse and he as a doctor – and started “an adventurous second career creating Brennan Vineyards,” Brennan said. “They are still at it going strong and making a long list of award-winning wines.”
Brennan is married to Denise Neely, who represents Toledo, Ohio-based Valuation Partners in Texas and some surrounding states. The company sells appraisal services to mortgage companies and banks.
They met in Charlotte and decided to marry while he was in graduate school. They married after the move to Fort Worth. They have a daughter, Claire, 15, who will be a sophomore that R.L. Paschal High School in the fall.
What follows are lightly edited segments of the transcript of the Fort Worth Business Press interview with Brennan:
NEW URBANISM
Along that same timeline when I was getting interested in city planning and urban design there was a national group that was forming called A Congress for the New Urbanism, and Joe Riley was one of the early pioneers. He worked with a lot of the founders of that group. They were the ones who started talking about building cities the way that we used to build them – human-scale buildings, street-grid and block layout that is walkable … in contrast to the way that things were being built basically after World War II where everything was oriented around the car, and the negative impacts on central city areas that were a result of that focus.
And it turned out that Ed Bass and architect David Schwartz were following that same path, and they were leaders in that national movement with their work downtown. On the Southside, Don Scott and Philip Poole were going to the national conferences and reading the same books. It’s one thing to say this is how we should be building or re-building our central cities, it’s another thing to actually take those steps to make it happen.
So that’s where the steps of forming an organization like Fort Worth South [the previous name of Near Southside], changing the zoning rules, creating a code that requires new buildings to compliment the old, looking at our streets differently and the design of those streets, all those things, there was an alignment between the goals at the local level and the discussion at the national level. That alignment was pretty critical in allowing Fort Worth South to have the community discussion where they could easily demonstrate to people [that] we’ve got a choice between two futures.
One is more of the conventional auto-oriented development that we’ve been seeing, and that’s what our current zoning requires. Or this other future where we have buildings that follow the same set of rules that we used to follow when the neighborhood was originally built, and we treat streets as public spaces because we don’t have a lot of big parks in our area.
Virtually everybody said, “Absolutely.” The competitive advantage that our district has is that character and that walkable pedestrian-oriented design, so when I came onboard it was really just about implementing that vision. And there wasn’t as much education that needed to happen. …
We had dozens of individual meetings with property owners and several community-wide meetings. By the time we got to the City Council there wasn’t any opposition.
GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS
[In some cases, it’s a small group or] just one individual who has gotten control of a key building or a key part of the neighborhood, and we’ve been very fortunate that they’ve really created something that’s perfectly aligned with the vision that we outlined at an early stage, because those buildings, if they fall into the wrong hands, they can be a totally different outcome. … They could even be renovated beautifully, and they might be filled up with something on a key street like Magnolia or South Main Street. If it’s just something that’s going to have no activity at the ground level then that’s a loss.
Eddie Vanston has been focused up in the South Main Village area and the Mag and May area, has saved old buildings there and filled them with just the most local and culturally rich set of tenants and businesses that you could ever hope for. It’s that Southside culture … we’ve been so fortunate to have just a key group of developers and business owners, property owners, that are all on the same page in viewing the Southside as something that’s going to have a local focus. There’s going to be a lot of emphasis on making the best of what we have, some just attachment to the buildings that are here and saving those, and those are the homes where the buildings were, where new businesses find homes.
And that’s been the path ever since BJ Keefer’s hamburger restaurant back in the early 80s. So that takes us to where we are now with South Main Street being kind of the next frontier that’s well on its way. Similarly, Magnolia was characterized as the 30-year overnight success a few years ago, when everybody was sort of paying attention to the fact that we had this amazing lineup of restaurants and pubs and we were activating with these major events, and so thousands of people were experiencing everything that Magnolia had to offer.
But the perception was, “Wow, we didn’t know about that, that must have just happened quickly.” And South Main Street’s sort of the same situation. Clearly, we’re not there yet because many of the buildings are under renovation. I think that this time next year it’ll be the same perception: “Wow, I didn’t expect all those buildings to have cool things throughout the buildings, and for it to be a real destination.” But there were people working on South Main Village going back before I got to Fort Worth South.
The only unknown really was whether those buildings would be owned by folks who had the same kind of outlook as to what the future of the street should be. Because those could’ve been purchased by out-of-town investors who are only interested in landing the national retail tenants that they know about, because they’re not attached to Fort Worth and they’re not familiar with the local mom and pops that are just waiting to find a new location.