Infill for Southport: a tiny suburb gets an urban apartment building. Will the urbanites bite?

Every little bit of construction counts!  And, in smaller municipalities, what might pass as no big deal instantly seems momentous.  Case in point: the multifamily development in the photos below would seem unremarkable and barely worthy of mention in a city the size of, say, Indianapolis.  (Or even the suburb of Greenwood just to the south of Indy.)  And, returning to the no-big-deal that will serve as this article’s primary subject, the effort to achieve a development may not seem worth it, given the time that elapsed between initial proposal and groundbreaking.  But this is the City of Southport, whose population is barely 2,100.  When I reference infill for Southport, what exactly am I referring to?

Here it is: a 96-unit apartment building called The Jacob going up on East Southport Road, which serves as the de facto commercial main street (although not the Main Street nominatim) to this strange little municipality of .63 square miles, completely surrounded by the City of Indianapolis.  Established in 1832 (just a year after Indianapolis incorporated itself), Southport was little more than a lightly settled stagecoach stop—an outpost of Indianapolis, for which Scottish surveyor Alexander Ralston platted the square-mile state capital plan nine miles to the north.  Ralston modeled the new Indiana-polis after Pierre l’Enfant’s plan for Washington DC, under whom he had worked thirty years prior.  Southport grew modestly even after the Jeffersonville, Madison, and Indianapolis Railroad opened in 1847, while Indianapolis surged to become the state’s largest city by the 1860 Census—a condition it has maintained ever since.  Indy’s settlement and municipal boundaries continued to spread across a greater share of Marion County until 1970, when the Unigov initiative consolidated the capital city with the county boundaries, only excluding five municipalities that retained full sovereignty: Lawrence, Beech Grove, Speedway, and Cumberland, which straddles Marion and adjacent Hancock County.

And Southport.

Southport and Cumberland were the smallest of these enclaves at the eve of the Unigov consolidation, each containing under 900 people.  (And truthfully, Cumberland is only half of an enclave, since this portion that stretches into unincorporated Hancock County can—and has—annexed considerable land.)  Both Cumberland and Southport have grown in population over the years, but the city of Indianapolis has completely hemmed in Southport, so, as a true enclave, it only could develop within the limited land holdings of its jurisdiction.  Here’s a simple map outlining the municipality, with the location of the infill for Southport (The Jacob Apartments) indicated through a purple star.

All photos in this article are from various points along East Southport Road, labeled in purple as “Southport Road” on the map.  As previously indicated, the road is the primary east-west bisecting collector for the municipality, and it hosts the majority of structures instrumental in Southport’s early development: namely, approximately a dozen buildings clustering around the intersection of East Southport Road and the former Jefferson, Madison, and Indianapolis Railroad (now the Louisville and Indiana Railroad), which remains an active commercial line to this day.  Southport only had 730 people in 1950, about the time American development patterns shifted away from historic main streets toward auto-oriented suburbia.  Its main street corridor was never more than a block or so.

The above photo shows the streetscape just to the east of Southport Road’s junction with the rail line; Jacob Apartments, once complete, will stand just to the west, where Southport Road meets the horizon.  The most noteworthy business in Southport is Long’s Bakery, barely visible on the lefthand margin in the above photo.  The Indy institution since 1955 has only two locations, and for many residents in the metro, Long’s is the only destination that places Southport on the map.  Beyond that, Southport has a dubious reputation (common to many micro-towns in the Midwest) of being a bit of a speed trap, especially along East Southport Road, where limits are much lower in the Southport portion than the surrounding Indianapolis residual segments.

Venturing a bit further westward along East Southport Road, the photo to the right shows the railway crossing, along with the Jacobs Apartment in its December 2024 state of construction, on the opposite side of the street from which I was standing.  This photo effectively captures the “street wall” culture of Southport that helps it retain a vestige of small-town walkability, even as many of the older businesses and structures have come and gone.  I featured this same portion of Southport in the earliest days of this blog, as part of a photo-rich series of home-based businesses throughout greater Indianapolis, where the homeowner modified the house to a strange residential/commercial hybrid.  At that time in early 2010, the Jacobs Apartment site still hosted a recently closed construction supply yard that had fronted Southport Road for many years.  My photos from that old article obliquely reveal the construction company, but it’s more clearly visible in the July 2009 archived Google Street View image.  Preferred Building Industries (mostly a lumber yard) had closed about a year prior, and within another year or so the building came down, when the City of Southport obtained the land.  Then it sat in limbo for fifteen years, with much of the paved area deteriorating so that grass could grow.

Though I didn’t live in Indy much of the time, I followed the site.  The small municipality’s Redevelopment Commission never gave up pursuit of an opportunity to pursue infill for Southport; I suspect this parcel is the primary reason a Southport Redevelopment Commission exists.  It must be one of—and perhaps the—largest parcels in the town.  At one point in time, a developer proposed locating a retirement building on the parcel, which sounded great: it would reinforce Southport as walkable for older adults who may no longer be able to drive but wanted a few places within walking distance.  Back in the mid 2010s, a Walgreens (now a Dollar Tree) stood at the corner of East Southport Road and Madison Avenue, the far western edge of Southport’s boundary with surrounding Indianapolis.

But the proposal for senior living fell through, I suspect in part because of the parcel’s two greatest liabilities.  First, it hosted a light industrial use which almost certainly conferred the soil to at least minor brownfield status, necessitating some level of remediation before any residential could break ground.  And then the bigger factor:

The proximity to a fairly active railway means the residents of this building will contend with train noise, often at night from my experience.  This juxtaposition only serves as a mild nuisance for committed urbanites (who are used to a noisy setting), but Southport is not really close enough to the more urban portions of Indianapolis to adapt well to such an ethos.  Architects and construction teams would have to design building to soundproof against the train noise and vibration as much as possible, and that in turn would raise the price—a cost that potential consumers may not be able to absorb.

It’s been fifteen years; the lumber yard is a distant memory.  At last, in early 2024 with some mild fanfare, the Indiana Economic Development Commission (IEDC), the Southport Redevelopment Commission, and Rebar Development announced a $18-million deal to build market-rate housing on the site.  IEDC sweetened the deal through a $2.2-million Redevelopment Tax Credit, applying Keynesian economics to this long underutilized parcel, a little under four acres in size.  By coastal standards, Southport is not a densely populated community; however, at approximately 3,400 people per square mile, it’s more densely populated than most places in Indiana, and the perception that the tiny municipality is “built out” comes primarily from the large residential parcels in the northeast corner, where East Southport Road intersects McFarland Road.  Bearing these factors in mind, this nearly four-acre lot at the railroad track is the best option to build high-density infill for Southport.  And, at four stories, Jacob Apartments is definitely the tallest and densest thing around.

Will this infill for Southport help encourage a broader culture of densification to help bolster the tax base?  Does Southport need a beefier tax base?  It certainly wouldn’t hurt.  Most of the municipality is lower-middle class and relatively stable; the most attractive elements are within walking distance of the tiny downtown core.

This zoom-in shows the most walkable element Southport, of which the Jacob Apartments (outlined in the purple parallelogram) will comprise a hefty element.  Just to the east, past the railroad tracks, East Southport intersects the named “Main Street”, barely more than two blocks long, but the intersection represents the core of older, pedestrian scaled businesses.

This photo comprises a good portion of what the developers will seek to market as walkable, urban living.  A bit further to the east, outside the frame of the zoom-in map, some well-maintained homes most likely date from the turn of the 19th century.

A block further, where Main Street veers into Derbyshire Road, one can find the only dedicated municipal park, about the same size (I’d guess) as the parcel that will soon host The Jacob Apartments.  Southport Park is shady and attractive but hardly a destination.  An elementary school with a separate playground stands a few blocks south of that intersection.  And a few of the other businesses on Madison Avenue (the eastern municipal boundary) offer an increasingly international flavor; more on that later.

Even amidst these appealing features, several of the older homes appear vacant and mothballed or marginally maintained.  And the second largest vacant site on East Southport Road includes what most likely is a historic rural school building, which has remained empty as long as I have known it, and I grew up less than fifteen minutes away.

I suspect the house in the foreground of the first photo is empty.  And, considering how long the old brick building has sat vacant, it’s amazing what good condition it is in.  I have never seen broken windows or graffiti, which is likely a testament to the low crime and high trust index within Southport, the commitment of a groundskeeper who prevents the building from suffering dilapidation, or a little of both.  I can’t help but think, with a more urban ethos arriving in the community though the new infill for Southport, maybe someday a developer will sponsor an adaptive reuse of this sturdy little building.  It flanks the eastern edge of East Southport Road as a main street to a historic little town.  Much of the remainder of Southport is a mix of the historic grid, minimally serviced rural roads with no curbs or sidewalks, and a large curvilinear suburb of single-family detached and duplex homes from the 1960s that probably comprises more than half the municipality’s population, which is not all that homogenous: in the last twenty years, the community has represented the hub of the Chin community, a persecuted Christian minority from Myanmar that has ostensibly made Indianapolis the largest Burmese refugee settlement in the world.

Southport is kind of walkable.  Kinda.  Much more than the majority of the south side Indianapolis neighborhoods that surround it.  But the Jacob Apartments, as infill for Southport, are marketing themselves as “DOWNTOWN LIVING REDEFINED”.  How willing to “redefine” is the prospective market going to be?  I want to be hopeful, that this will prime the pump to spawn both reuse, revitalization and additional infill for Southport, all of which will stave off the perception of “unremarkable” or “tired” or “good for donuts” or “speed trap”.  But the building at this location will face many challenges.

The photos may not fully capture how close the building will be to that very active commercial rail line.  The proximity might have been a bitter impediment to development than any soil contamination left by the previous lumber yard (which I’ll admit I cannot verify). 

The without noise abatement, this infill for Southport will not sell to a market-rate client base that could just as easily pursue urban living in a neighborhood much closer to the Indy region’s true downtown.  Sure, some of those downtown Indy apartments have gotten pricey in recent years.  But this infill for Southport will be replete with amenities to endow it with “luxury” branding.  Are people going to pay that much to live in Southport, where, at most, twenty businesses are within a desirable walking distance?

I want both The Jacob Apartments and any other infill for Southport to succeed, but the differentials between Southport and Indianapolis may not yet be great enough.  Crime?  Sure,  Southport is much safer than Indy overall, and Southport has its own police department—best known for flagging speeders—but the adjacent portions of Indianapolis aren’t markedly more crime-ridden, so that isn’t a compelling distinction.  Schools?  Unlike Speedway and Beech Grove, two of the other Indy enclaves, Southport does not have its own district; it’s part of the Metropolitan District of Perry Township, which has a fair-to-middling reputation in 2025.  Yes, it’s better than Indianapolis Public Schools that serve downtown, the gentrifying neighborhoods next to downtown, and some of the poorest and most dangerous inner city districts as well.  But Perry Township schools generally don’t rate as well as suburban districts just to the south: Greenwood and Center Grove, or the Franklin Township school district to the east.

Lastly, there’s the physicality of The Jacob Apartments itself.

Even in its unfinished state, it is clear from the massing that it seeks to orient itself more toward East Southport Road than the inevitable parking in the back.  I appreciate that added effort; it will create an urbanized street wall.  Beyond that, however, it’s not likely to arouse much excitement.  Architectural aesthetics are completely subjective, and some may appreciate the renderings more than I do.  But it’s hard to imagine anyone using a term other than “basic” to describe a façade that, if the renderings are accurate, will lack any ornamentation and possess minimal articulation.  The design team clearly didn’t offer more than the most rudimentary effort.  Most disappointingly, it does not appear to offer any street-engaging first-floor retail.  I recognize that this is harder to achieve than urban advocates are often willing to admit; a marginal retail streetscape isn’t not going to inspire businesses to locate here.  In fact, it could sit vacant for years, which would deteriorate the financials of the place.  A bank may only have financed the project on the condition that it doesn’t include a risky venture like a separate leasable commercial unit.  So this infill for Southport will add density (rooftops) without retail—too bad. It will add at least one hundred new potential pedestrians with nothing new for them to walk to.  At the very least, the numerous amenities in the building (dog park, fire pit, coffee bar, meeting room) may allow a conversion at a later point in time, should the demand for retail space improve down the road.  But since the US is generally oversaturated with retail, such a cataclysm is unlikely.

The ambivalence I’m indicating here, as I ponder the pros and cons of unglamorous infill for Southport, reflects the prospect of The Jacob Apartments luring young professionals.  That’s the optimal target: they won’t balk at leasing costs that are orders of magnitude higher than anything else in Southport.  They’ll pay rent on time.  They won’t trash the place.  And (especially the really young ones) they won’t see the rumble of that train as a liability; it might even help Southport feel more urban.  But will these factors be enough when infill for Southport is competing with infill in Chatham Arch, Fountain Square, Lockerbie Square, Old Northside, Meridian Kessler, St. Joseph, Cottage Home, Bates-Hendricks, Herron-Morton Place, and at least a half dozen Indy neighborhoods that circumscribe downtown?

If, it two years’ time, someone is converting the old schoolhouse to an office building—or (I can only imagine) condos—I guess the answer will be a resounding yes.