Uptown Dallas, Inc. Picks Neighborhood Stalwart to Lead
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The nonprofit and public improvement district Uptown Dallas, Inc. announced last week that it hired Kelem Butts to be its next executive director.
Butts is no new face. A resident of the neighborhood for more than two decades, he’s spent the last several years on Uptown Dallas, Inc.’s board of directors and serving as public safety chair for the organization. He’s also got plenty of corporate experience from his time at AT&T and other nonprofit initiatives.
Speaking with CandysDirt.com, Butts said he was first motivated to get engaged with his community over quality of life issues in the neighborhood. One thing led to another and he got increasingly involved in civic matters as Uptown continued to grow and become a premier part of town.
“I like the fact that we have a nice breadth of residents,” he said. “There are younger people moving in, but we also see lots of people who have downsized from a larger suburban house to move into a vibrant, walkable neighborhood like Uptown.”
Roughly 19,000 people live in the neighborhood, which is also home to hundreds of businesses that employ tens of thousands of workers in the 1-square-mile public improvement district.
“We’ve really focused on making sure that we are the premier live-work-play neighborhood in Dallas, and I think that businesses see that and are attracted to what we have to offer,” Butts said, pointing to the McKinney & Olive and 23Springs developments.
Mixed-use is also all the rage in Uptown’s modern upswing, with a number of projects in the works that will be delivering more housing units, retail, and hotels. On top of all this growth, there’s also practical business matters Butts will need to get his hands around.
“First and foremost, the public improvement district is up for renewal, so I’ve already jumped into that. We’re also getting closer to moving forward with the two-way conversion of McKinney and Cole Avenues,” he said. “We have the World Cup coming up next year, and Uptown is going to be a beneficiary of that with a lot of people staying here, coming here to go to restaurants and bars in the area.”
“We certainly need to make sure that we are doing everything we can to make sure that we’re ready for the World Cup,” he added.
Butts noted that Uptown Dallas, Inc. is currently working on its next strategic plan, which is tentatively going to emphasize safety and cleanliness, infrastructure improvements, and marketing. Another pillar in the plan will be organizational leadership.
“I’d like to think that we have addressed leadership pretty effectively by hiring me, though I will have a lot of work to do to prove that point, but those other areas are ones that we’ve been focused on and will continue to focus on to make the neighborhood the best work-play space in the city,” he said.
