Infill Before Density: Some Ideas for Indy Velocity

Erika Smith from the Indy Star fills us in on a new plan for development in downtown Indianapolis that includes improving residential as well as retail and business development. Here’s some basics about the plan:

This is the thinking behind a new strategic plan called Velocity.

Led by IDI, this year-long process — with the help of dozens of community, political and business leaders — will come up with a five-year vision for Downtown Indianapolis. Under consideration are ways to drive economic development, make better use of public spaces and parks, improve transportation (yes, including transit), increase housing options, and add more arts and cultural attractions. A public launch is set for Tuesday.

But this isn’t planning for your father’s Downtown Indianapolis.

We’re talking Raymond Street to the south, 30th Street on the north, Tibbs Avenue to the west and Keystone Avenue/Rural Street to the east. That box includes a lot of up-and-coming neighborhoods that have benefited from Downtown’s growth, but it also includes a lot of neighborhoods that missed the rising tide that was supposed to lift all boats.

You can take a survey to give your opinions about what will improve downtown – your answers will help shape the advisory groups vision of what Indianapolis can be.

One of the things I emphasized in the comments of the survey is that we should concentrate on infill before density. There are hundreds of empty lots in downtown and “downtown adjacent” neighborhoods where homes have been bulldozed over the last 30 years. We have a lot of empty spaces to fill in – but rather than doing that completely with condos, townhomes and multi-story apartment buildings, consider strategically filling them in many of them with single-family residences. And where you are filling in with more dense residential construction – give apartments some breathing room. Make them three-bedroom rather than two. Make them two bedroom rather than one. Make them appealing to families with kids and dogs, not just single professionals. In short, concentrate on filling in the vast wasteland of empty lots up and down College Avenue with residences before building yet another downtown condo.

Old Northside Neighborhood

I agree that urban sprawl is bad. I know that density is considered ideal in urban planning. But we have a lot of empty slate to work with here. We can be careful about how much density we’re adding, because Indianapolis is attractive to it’s current residents for a reason. Stephanie and I considered living in Chicago, New York and Toronto when we were deciding where to live; we didn’t just land in Indianapolis by accident, or because we grew up here. The reason we picked Indianapolis over those other cities is because we’re able to afford to have a private library in our own home, and keep a dog and a vegetable garden in the yard, even living downtown. It’s not that I love driving – I’d rather take a bus (or better yet, a streetcar! Lets bring those back) to my workplace. But Chicago and New York seem frenetic and stressful, like there are people living in your lap all the time. We can come up with a happy medium between our current sprawl and the density of a large city, and better public transit can get us from place to place.

We’re not Chicago, and we don’t need to be. In fact it’s better off if that isn’t our goal; if we take advantage of opportunities we have that Chicago does not. Indianapolis has a distinct advantage in doing this sort of city planning over larger cities; we don’t have to make the same mistakes they did. We don’t have to force people to live in 300-square foot boxes because we’re retrofitting blocks and blocks of 200-year-old buildings. We don’t have to screw up by making the Robert Moses mistake of displacing urban neighborhoods and local businesses. We don’t have to become unfriendly to families with kids who need space to raise them. We also have the advantage of having a built-in target market for new residents – the people just north of us – the folks who grew up in Carmel and Noblesville because their parents moved out of Indianapolis in previous decades. This generation of young Hamilton County adults is more culturally aware than the people of their parent’s generation who fled the city for the suburbs. They’ll see the advantages of living closer to their workplace and shortening their commute while broadening their cultural exposure and awareness. But they grew up with a backyard and a dog and room and bedrooms for kids, and they may still want that.

I’m sort of curious whatever became of the Ball State plan for Urban Design Indianapolis that was in the works back in 2007 and 2008. I linked to that project several years ago, and when I went back to reference the guidelines they came up with here, the link to the website where the plan resided is broken. I was wondering how much that plan might inform the current one. After a considerable amount of searching, I wasn’t able to come up with a link to the plan that worked.

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House I wanted flips for 10x the amount

Back in October of 2001, I was house-hunting in Herron-Morton Place neighborhood, and unfortunately I was competing for properties with investors who were looking for properties to flip, and since I had a loan and they had cash, my offers kept getting rejected. Anyways, I’m goofing around on Mibor.com looking at houses because one of my friends is house hunting, and I ran across one of the houses I lost out on.

2045 N NEW JERSEY ST, INDIANAPOLIS 46202
Offered at $659,900
MLS#: 2674512

Mibor doesn’t let you link directly to the page (which is dumb!) but you can look it up there using the MLS.

Interesting price, since it was somewhere around $65,000 when I was looking at it.

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Julia Carson and Fall Creek Place

I can’t believe that I forgot, in my endorsement of Julia Carson, to mention her involvement with developing Fall Creek Place neighborhood — the now thriving neighborhood just north of mine, that is the threshold of an urban renaissance for downtown Indianapolis. Julia was instrumental not only in getting the federal funding to revitalized the neighborhood of Fall Creek Place, but in ensuring that the subsidies went to people of a variety of incomes — that the neighborhood would be affordable to the people who already lived there, and not just to the wealthy people who wanted to move into historic neighborhoods downtown.

Drive down Pennsylvania Street today, and you’ll see row after row of beautifully designed houses in keeping with the character of the original neighborhood. And you see the people living in those houses and walking their dogs and children on the streets, are from a diverse set of cultures and backgrounds. For those of us who live in nearby neighborhoods downtown, the change to our own areas as a result has been breathtaking as well.

You have both Julia Carson and Bart Peterson to thank for that.

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Herron-Morton Place Neighborhood

Herron-Morton Place Postcard
Herron-Morton Place Pstcard

Herron-Morton Place is an historic residential neighborhood in Downtown Indianapolis, comprising a 25 square block area just east of Meridian Street, and north of the bustling downtown area. It is beautiful, quiet, pedestrian-friendly, and is just close enough to downtown to walk or bike to major events, but just far enough north to be outside of busy downtown traffic.

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Hidden Indy: The Mystery Tao on Delaware

Back in the early nineties, I lived in the Marleigh Apartment building in the 1400 block of Delaware in downtown Indianapolis, which is in Old Northside neighborhood. Across the street was an impressive array of old Victorian houses with all the gingerbread and other bling they put on houses back in the 1800’s. I used to walk down the street and daydream about owning one of them. One day on a walk, I stumbled across something really strange.

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Somebody stole my rainbow Flag

From in front of my house, for the second time. I’m pretty pissed about it. However, my name is etched onto the pole, and the flag is super-glued to the pole, so whoever has it, if they stole it to put outside their house, won’t be able to display it without me finding it.
I suspect since it has happened twice now, though, that the thief is someone homophobic who doesn’t want the flag displayed. I’m trying to figure out the best way to put a massive flag on my house without anyone being able to do anything. I’m thinking curtains in the front window upstairs, actually. Hmmm.

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