In a report on The Jacob, Mirror Indy recounts that Michael Helms grew up in Southport, then left for downtown Indianapolis so he could walk to things instead of driving everywhere. In August 2025, he moved back. On September 11, 2025, he stood in his new one-bedroom with his dog Gucci and told a reporter what struck him most: he went to Southport High School and there was never anything resembling a mid-rise on this side of town, barely even a high-rise downtown. Now there was one, four stories of it, ninety-three units, sitting on a lot that had been fenced-off concrete since a lumberyard packed up sometime in the 1990s.
That ribbon cutting mattered for a reason that has nothing to do with square footage. It was the first new residential construction in Southport in more than forty years. For a city of roughly 2,100 people packed into 0.63 square miles, completely surrounded by Indianapolis on every side yet running its own zoning, its own mayor, and its own small police department, that is not a small fact. It is the kind of thing you notice only if you have driven past that empty lot for two decades wondering what happened to it.
The building alone would be worth a mention. What makes this year worth paying attention to is that it did not happen in isolation. Over roughly the same stretch of time, Southport broke its four-decade housing drought, assembled a public events calendar covering several months, and watched its high school quietly retire a tradition older than most of its students. None of these three things caused the others. They landed within about a year of each other, and together they say something about a place where these changes stand out.
The lot that sat behind a fence for thirty years
The parcel at 2110 E. Southport Road had been an eyesore for longer than a lot of current residents can remember clearly. After the lumberyard relocated in the 1990s, the roughly three-acre site sat as bare concrete behind a construction fence for years, doing nothing for a stretch of road that functions as the city's closest thing to a main street.
Rebar Development changed that with The Jacob, an $18 million project built with the Southport Redevelopment Commission and backed by a $2.2 million Redevelopment Tax Credit from the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Commission president Russell McClure said the project "stands to be the single largest investment in the city's history." Mayor Jim Cooney told WISH-TV what it meant on the ground:
"It's a really big addition to downtown Southport."
The building leans into that role. Its Hometown Heroes program offers a 10 percent monthly discount reserved for the first ten first responders, medical professionals, and teachers who sign a lease. It is also not cheap by neighborhood standards. As of a June 2026 rent comparison, monthly prices at The Jacob started around $1,399 and climbed toward $1,899 for the larger two-bedroom units, roughly a third higher than the average apartment rent elsewhere in Southport. New construction commands new-construction prices even in a city this small.
Not everyone showed up to the ribbon cutting purely optimistic. Longtime resident Ron Covert raised a practical concern about traffic, wondering aloud whether the city would need to add a stoplight near the parking lot entrance to keep things moving. He was still glad to see the project land, once he saw how much parking and landscaping the site actually included. That mix, genuine enthusiasm paired with a resident's eye for the traffic pattern nobody had to think about before, is a fair summary of how a lot of Southport seems to be greeting its own growth.
Southport's 2026 events calendar
City hall did not stop at the building. Southport's 2026 community events calendar lists free public events at Southport Park, 6901 Derbyshire Road, nearly every month from August through December.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| August 4 | National Night Out |
| August 22 | Movie in the Park |
| September 19 | Southport Park Beautification Day |
| October 17 | Southport Fall Festival |
| December 12 | Santa Through the City |
For a city this size, five organized public events between August and December is a real shift in how much programming Southport is putting into shared space. Two are already behind us. The Beautification Day on September 19, in two days, is worth flagging on its own. It is not a festival with food trucks and a stage, it is residents showing up to work on the park itself, which fits a year where the city's broader story has been about reinvesting in physical spaces rather than just filling a calendar with things to attend.
What's already open on East Southport Road
The Jacob did not land in a commercial vacuum. East Southport Road already had a working, if modest, stretch of local business before the ribbon cutting, and the new building sits close enough to walk to most of it. Southport Village Center is about 0.2 miles from the property, with Madison Square shopping roughly a seven-minute walk beyond that.
On the ground, that stretch currently includes:
- Whiskey Business Southport, a burgers-and-bourbon spot at 5220 E. Southport Road
- Uno Pizzeria & Grill's Southport location
- Perry Park, the neighborhood's longstanding recreation anchor, with an NHL-regulation ice rink, a pool, and two water slides that predate any of this year's changes and are not going anywhere
That last point matters for anyone trying to size up what's actually different this year. Perry Park has been the thing Southport residents already organize their weekends around. The new housing and the new calendar are additions to that pattern, not replacements for it.
A homecoming without a parade
The clearest sign that Southport is willing to retire something familiar came from an unexpected place: the high school. Southport High School had run a traditional homecoming parade for years. Last fall, the school scrapped it in favor of a new on-campus festival called CARDFEST, a change that made some longtime residents skeptical before it happened.
The community showed up anyway, in enough numbers to fill the stands and the surrounding festival space, even though the varsity football team lost to Cathedral 54-0 that night. Nobody was there for the score. They were there because the school had decided a longstanding habit could be replaced with something else, and enough people wanted to see what that looked like in person.
The size hasn't changed. The pace has.
Southport is still 0.63 square miles. It still has its own small police department, and it still leans on Indianapolis for fire coverage under an arrangement Mayor Cooney sums up simply in Mirror Indy: "We have a good relationship with Indianapolis." None of the underlying structure of the place is different.
This year brought a faster pace of change to Southport. A lot that sat behind a fence for thirty years became a building. Southport's 2026 public calendar lists five events. A school replaced a decades-old parade with an on-campus festival. Individually, none of these is dramatic. Together, inside about a year, they mark a year of visible change in a small city.
If you're already watching how the southside is changing, whether that's the redevelopment on Southport Road, the rest of Perry Township, or the towns further south in Johnson County, I'd love to compare notes. I'm Angi Oakes with Angi Oakes, and I spend most of my time paying attention to exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Let's Connect. Get a free home valuation or start your home search today.
