M|B|P

In Jackson, MS, Josh McManus sat down for Soul Sessions with Paul Wolf at Visit Jackson to walk through three projects we're deep in right now -- Jackson Rising, the Chastain campus redevelopment and the effort to bring architect Samuel Mockbee's personal archive back into public view for the first time in 25 years. (link in comments) The through-line across all of it: places don't fail because they're broken. They get stuck because capital has stopped believing in them. That's the gap we work in. And Jackson is showing what happens when you close it -- home values up 32% in the past year, the largest jump in the metro. If you look after a site, a campus or a community that feels like it's run out of road -- this conversation is worth your 27 minutes.

Many people have been asking: why is the Spanish national team basing itself in Chattanooga during the World Cup? The soccer culture and following in Chattanooga is not actually that new. Here’s the deeper story, as I understand it (and Josh McManus lived it): Years ago, some of the earliest energy around what became Chattanooga FC (https://chattanoogafc.com/), gathered steam from the wave of creative, civic and entrepreneurial energy in the city, as seen in initiatives like Create Here, CO.LAB and CO.STARTERS. Somewhere along the way, someone floated the idea of a soccer club. The response was basically: “If you’re serious, write a plan.” So they did -- right there in the back office of the Create Here HQ. What started as a rough plan on paper quickly took on a life of its own. A small group of believers gathered around the idea. They placed the team in the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL), effectively a fourth-tier national amateur league, with the idea that a well-run community club could punch above its weight if it tapped into the city’s pride and downtown revival energy. From the outset, Chattanooga FC was framed less as a top-down franchise and more as a civic project: local owners, local sponsors, and a heavy emphasis on affordable tickets and a supporters’ culture that felt embedded in the city’s identity. That ethos culminated in 2019, when the club became one of the first in the U.S. to offer public fan ownership shares, raising over 800,000 dollars from nearly 3,000 investors worldwide in a Packers-style model to fund the transition to professional play. From those first sketches to the early matches with remarkably strong community turnout, Chattanooga FC wasn’t just a team; it was a proof of concept for a different kind of local ownership and pride. A reminder that when people in a place decide to build something together, the city itself can become both the stage and the co‑author of the story. So Spain in Chattanooga is not random. It’s the long tail of civic imagination. A city builds the kind of culture where ambitious things can happen. A few people act on that belief. Institutions form. Community gathers. Credibility compounds. And one day, what once sounded improbable suddenly makes perfect sense. That’s how places change. Not all at once. Not by accident. But because somebody decided to make the improbable feel inevitable.