4 hours Ago By Samuel Ryan Shaw
Aerial images of Longview from the 1970s and 1980s depict a city with a different center of gravity than the one residents know today. Loop 281 was constructed in 1960, but entire tracts of the city’s northern expanse laid undeveloped and shrouded in pine trees for the better part of the last century. South Longview — between Interstate 20 and U.
S. 80 — was nearly built out with homes and small businesses by the same point. The story of the next five decades, however, was one of uneven development.
Retail investments rushed into those empty northern acres, introducing Longview to its first mall in 1978 and a Walmart Supercenter in 2004. Lateefah Pruitt is seen in September 2023 outside State Realty on Mobberly Avenue. She co-owns the business with her father.
(Les Hassell/Longview News-Journal File Photo) Lateefah Pruitt, a longtime southside resident and owner of State Realty (her family’s business), said that despite South Longview’s many strengths, food and entertainment often mean a drive north. Longview officials have a plan to change that by boosting investment in the area through a number of ongoing projects and programs. “Our job is setting the stage for the market driven development to occur,” said Michael Shirley, the city's director of Development Services.
Though attracting specific companies to Longview is a task left up to Longview Economic Development Corp., municipal governments still have several levers they can pull on to grease the wheels of growth, he said. The most obvious tool at the city’s disposal is infrastructure spending, and South Longview is where residents can expect to see one of Longview's more unique projects, the Mobberly Avenue Complete Street.
The road, which goes past LeTourneau University, will get a “lane diet,” slashing it from five lanes to three, opening up space for bike lanes and calming traffic for pedestrians. Mobberly Avenue Complete Street project work continues Thursday, January 16, 2025. (Les Hassell/Longview News-Journal Photo) It’s a bold move in car-centric Longview and one city officials believe will spur change along the Mobberly corridor.
“When the city comes in and uplifts the infrastructure, giving a face lift to the area and providing more walkability and connectivity, that tells retailers, ‘Hey, the city's invested here,” Shirley said. “The complete street (project) should have a huge impact.” Longview District 3 Councilman Wray Wade, who represents a part of the area, has come to the same conclusion: “When you begin to bring businesses in, the businesses will not thrive if the infrastructure is not there.
” Shirley likened the lubricating effect of infrastructure spending in South Longview to the city’s streetscape remodel of downtown in the early 2000s. “We put $30 million or $40 million in investment into downtown, and you can see now that it’s a pretty thriving area,” he said. Pruitt welcomed improvements to the southside’s roads and sidewalks.
Indeed, she believes walkability already is one of her neighborhood’s strengths. Because South Longview encompasses the oldest parts of the city, homes in residential zones are more tightly packed and the roads less speedy than they are further north, condensing space enough for people to venture out on foot. “We walk in this area quite a bit,” Pruitt said.
“I'm very excited about the Mobberly (Complete Street) and I would love to see something like that on Lilly Street, too.” The ongoing renovation work to the High Street bridge in addition to Mobberly’s lane diet will cap off a series of big-ticket transportation projects with impacts beyond the southside and even beyond the city limits. High Street bridge replacement construction Thursday, January 16, 2025.
(Les Hassell/Longview News-Journal Photo) Shirley highlighted the city’s recent transformation of the Longview train depot into a multi-modal transit center fusing regional bus and rail services into a single location. “By making use of the TxDOT grant and rehabbing that station, we’re connecting the downtown and the South Longview core to all of those transportation networks,” he said. Zoning and incentive programs are like the software a city runs on.
They nudge investments to certain areas, promote specific kinds of development and can determine what can and can’t be built. The question of how to encourage housing developers and businesses to see their future in South Longview presents a unique set of challenges to city planners. “The biggest issue with redevelopment in South Longview is you don't have large tracts of land that a developer can come in and buy and just do a subdivision development, which is what developers are typically used to,” Shirley said.
Seeing out big builds on the southside often means buying multiple adjacent properties given the dense patchwork of small lots that predominate across the area. North Longview was a relative blank slate compared to neighborhoods in the southside when the city’s mall was constructed in the 1970s, but these days, space is running out for greenfield projects on both sides of U.S.
80, so the city's development team is exploring zoning changes as a possible solution. City Developmental Services Director Michael Shirley is seen in October 2022 during a ceremony to unveil a plaque honoring the Longview Arboretum and Nature Center’s designation as a Great Public Space. (Michael Cavazos/Longview News-Journal File Photo) “We’re looking at these areas which were old neighborhoods that are converting into commercial, or ones that were rezoned commercial, but they're staying residential,” Shirley said, explaining how synchronizing zoning with how space is used allows new opportunities to open up.
The city’s updated Comprehensive Plan emphasized the pivot away from annexing large properties in the north for development as well as the general blandness — or lack of “character” — encouraged by that approach. “With growth pressures to the north and tremendous redevelopment potential to the south, Longview is on the brink of tremendous improvements,” according to the updated Comprehensive Plan. Since small plots and aging homes cover much of the southside, one of the city’s priorities is expanding a targeted program called SLIP, or the South Longview Incentive Program.
Established in the 1990s, the program aims to modernize the area’s housing stock by providing fee waivers for new owner occupied dwellings. “That program has grown over the last few years,” Shirley said, “so we're starting to see new investment in those under-positioned neighborhoods.” He also explained how the city was open to promoting neighborhood “nodes” where retail could concentrate with the help of modified zoning.
Shirley pointed to the Stamper Park area, which is set to receive a $6 million public pool, as one potential retail node. Stamper Park Thursday, January 16, 2025. (Les Hassell/Longview News-Journal Photo) Up to the present, the city’s retail vision for the southside has been largely confined to the Interstate 20 corridor.
Wade said it’s been his “No. 1 focus” to attract business to the interstate junctions, citing a new Starbucks and a Racetrac gas station on Estes Parkway as major achievements during his tenure. It remains to be seen how the construction of chains by I-20 will lead to a vibrant southside, but Pruitt said she’s noticed a separate trend that has her optimistic for what the future holds.
“I'm already seeing the migration of families coming to the southside from Colorado, from Oregon, from California,” she said. She believes newcomers will only reinforce the community’s status as the county’s most diverse and multicultural. “I see the improvements happening because I’m on the ground,” Pruitt said.
“I’m glad because it's been a long time coming.”.
