I spent four days at a convention and was pleasantly surprised by how walkable the downtown area was.
According to Next City, Indianapolis has invested a significant amount of money to make that possible. Kudos to the city planners and to all the people that helped make the changes a success.
“But in 2010, Indianapolis saw an infusion of $500 million after it sold its water and sewer utility to a public charitable trust. That money was designated for investment in infrastructure projects in a five-year program called RebuildIndy. Fifty public meetings were held to gather ideas for how to spend the money.”
Read more on the Next City site…
Homeless
There was an apparent issue with homelessness that seems to plague every large city. Apparently, Indianapolis is attempting to rectify the problems according to the Bloomberg article.
Punitive measures only trap people in a homelessness-jail cycle. Indianapolis is showing that there’s a better way.
Envision Broad Ripple
A better example of urban planning is the Envision Broad Ripple initiative, a community-driven, City-endorsed effort. When implemented, the Envision Broad Ripple plan should fix many of the defects in existing zoning, which currently necessitates a painful and politically risky variance process for nearly every proposal While neighbors would always like to be able to veto any development they don’t like, and the variance process provides a venue to do that, this type of political risk is a huge drag on investment. As someone once put it, political risk is the only real risk in real estate development if you know what you are doing. Creating a predictable environment for approvals is crucial to luring more investment. There is a key but often missed the link between the poor business climate created by the zoning environment in central Indianapolis and the disinvestment we see. This doesn’t mean I advocate low standards. In fact, standards can be high, but they need to be objective and achievable with reasonable financial estimates. Ultimately the type of development the neighborhood would like to see should gain approval immediately in the majority of cases.
