I have long touted the sports strategy that Indianapolis used to revitalize its downtown as a model for cities to follow in terms of strategy led economic and community development. I really think it sets the benchmark in terms of how to do it, and it has been very successful.
Indy is hosting the Super Bowl on Sunday, something that is locally seen as a sort of crowning achievement of the 40 year sports journey. As part of that, the Indianapolis Star and public TV station WFYI produced an hour long documentary on the journey called “Naptown to Super City.” I think it’s a must watch for anyone who is trying to figure out to revitalize their own downtown. An hour isn’t short, but given the billions of dollars cities pour into this, I think it’s worth doing some homework. It tells the story of how Indy went from a deserted downtown where local Jaycees were licensed to take their shotguns and kill pigeons to one where the Super Bowl is being hosted today.
I’ll talk more about the Indy strategy in a bit, but first the show. Alas, the embeddable version is gone, but you can view it online at WFYI’s web site.
One thing this brought home for me is the true magnitude of the change. Perhaps I’m being a bit uncharitable, but Indianapolis almost literally started with nothing. It was never a major, important American city. It had no brand in the market. And it had a downtown that was all but dead. Everything they have today was built almost from scratch.
Why do I think the Indy sports strategy was such a good one? Two reason: it was a good strategic area to go after, and it was backed up with very intelligent execution.
First, five reasons this was a good strategic goal to pursue:
- It just fits the character of the city. Hoosiers love sports. The Indianapolis 500 and high school basketball were long established. It’s something they could behind in a way that they would never have gotten behind being the “vegetarian capital of the world” or something like there. It was authentic to the city. If you watch the video, you’ll note how locals embraced the events that were held that. That goes a long way towards explaining the success of the strategy. You have to be authentic to a place in your development efforts.
- It was a whitespace opportunity where Indy could get first mover advantage. Today every city thinks they can make money off sports, but Indy really pioneered the notion that you could use sports as an economic development tool. There were a lot of firsts along the path, and that’s one reason Indy was able to take out a leadership position. Just as one example, Indy was first to do the “build it and they will come” model of building a stadium before having a team. As a result, they were able to grab the Colts, and do it in an era when you didn’t have to mortgage your whole city to make a team relocation happen.
- Being America’s top city for sports events was a realistically achievable goal. I know this because the city achieved it. This is in great contrast to the umpteen cities who all claim they’ll be the “best cycling city in America” or some such.
- There were huge collateral benefits to sports beyond the direct economic impact of the events and the jobs they support. They bring people to the city to show it off to people who might not otherwise come. They enliven downtown and create events that locals might actually want to attend. They also have been an amazing brand opportunity. Just think of the Colts. How many times a week during football season does the word “Indianapolis” get said on TV? Probably hundreds if not thousands. Imagine if the city had to pay advertising dollars for that exposure? Yes, sports is expensive, but I think it could be justified just as cost-efficient marketing alone. Think about how much companies pay just to put their name on the stadium. How much more is it worth to put your city’s name on the team or the event? Think about how much advertisers will be paying for a 30 second commercial in the Super Bowl? What’s it worth for all those mentions of your city during the Super Bowl again?
- It was an initiative that had the possibility of being truly transformative for the city. Again, I know this is true because it was.
I’m not going to claim these were actually the thoughts going through people’s minds as the sports strategy developed or that it was this calculated. But all of these things were implicitly true all along, and I think clearly the people pushing sports must have gotten it on that at some level. So sports meets the first test of a great strategy in that it set out after a good strategic goal.
It was also something where there was a level of execution detail that far exceeded what most cities do. In business, it’s one thing to have an idea. It’s another thing to execute on it and achieve market leadership. It’s still another to generate sustainable competitive advantage that keeps you there over the long haul. Indianapolis has managed to do all of these with sports. I’ll highlight eight examples of how it did this:
- It invested in world class facilities. A lot of these have remained top rated even long after they opened, like Conseco Fieldhouse, which is still ranked every year as the best arena in the United States.
- Two, it laid out an entire district downtown around events hosting, with everything you need in close proximity — venues, the convention center, hotels, shopping, and entertainment. This is something that’s already been widely commented on by Super Bowl visitors who are amazed you don’t have to get shuttled around all over the place and that you can actually walk directly from the media hotel to the hotels where the teams are staying.
- Three, because of this Indy is able to effectively “saturation rebrand” downtown for an event and otherwise cater to events in a way that few other cities can or will. In effect, the city has converted its downtown into a giant sound stage. Take a look at the pictures of the city. The whole downtown as been rebranded after the Super Bowl, including, for example, plastering a huge Lombardi Trophy images on the side of the city’s premier hotel. You can debate the value of this to the city, but there’s no denying its value to the NFL. How many cities are willing to do this to the extent Indianapolis is?
- Indy created the Indiana Sports Corp. as the first ever non-profit management company for events. Today, everybody has adopted that model.
- The city cultivated a large, experienced volunteer base for putting on events that is much more powerful than what others cities have.
- Indy has been willing to take calculated risks in support of the strategy. Building the Hoosier Dome with no team to play in it — big risk.
- It not only went after the events, it went after the sanctioning bodies that determined where the events would be held. The most important is of course the NCAA, but there are others too. This has resulted in Indy having a “cluster” of these organizations and direct access to the people making decisions that pays incalculable dividends. This is one area where the “face to face” discussions that occur in Indy gives the city a big leg up. It’s not just better for selling, it gives Indy critical advanced intelligence about how these organizations are conceiving of their future events needs.
- Last but certainly not least, this has been a sustained, 35 year commitment. It wasn’t a party politics thing. It was a single project thing. It wasn’t a flash in the pan idea. It was something that has been relentlessly pursued over the long haul.
Add all this up and it is easy to see why still today, three or four decades after it first started and after pretty much every city decided to go after these types of events, Indianapolis is still the best place in America to host a sports event.
I hope this gives you a flavor why the Indy sports strategy was so good and so successful. It’s certainly something that’s not without its failures and downsides. The fact that sports has consumed disproportionate civic resources is one of them, and one highlighted by the documentary. But on the whole, most people seem very happy with the results.
Something the video highlights at the end is one essential attribute for success that you can’t plan for or make happen – luck. They ask questions like, what if the “Save the Pacers” telethon had failed back in the 70’s? What if the seats in the Hoosier Dome had been the originally planned variegated colors instead of the Colts blue and white colors when Bob Irsay walked in to check it out? There were many critical turning points where without a lucky break, who knows if the future of downtown Indy might have been radically different in some way. It should give us some humility about the limits of our ability to simply will things into being. On the other hand, it reminds us that if you aren’t in the game, if you aren’t swinging the bat, you don’t have any chance at all of hitting that home run. You have to play if you want to win.
Thanks for the post, Aaron. As i watched the documentary I was struck by the fact that Indianapolis targeted an economic sector and invested heavily in it, with largely positive results. Yet a lot of political commentary these days says government can’t do that, shouldn’t do that, always fails when it tries that, etc.
Excellent, Aaron. Thanks for posting.
Thanks for the informative blog post Aaron. Very interesting. I was trying to think if there are any other cities that are trying to do something similar. There are a few — maybe Charlotte with it plans related to promoting NASCAR; Orlando seems to be trying to coordinate with Disney and its local sports facilities to attract a lot of youth oriented, amateur sporting events; Atlanta seemed to be doing this a few years ago with the Olympics – and its frequent hosting of major SEC events; and maybe a few others. In my opinion however, none of them seem to have the strategy as a particularly high community priority in relation to the many other economic development efforts going on in their cities.
I think L.A. is trying to set itself up pretty well with the Convention Center, Staples Center and potentially – a new “NFL type” stadium all close together (pretty much touching) in downtown. They could provide some real tough competition to Indy, particularly with their ideal weather most of the year. They’ve also got plenty of other sports facilities in place – due to hosting an Olympics a few decades ago – and also having at least two MAJOR universities in town with many excellent sports venues. One drawback for them is that they are such a big city — sometimes “major” events get swallowed up with all of the other activities going on in these types of “extra large” cities.
Does any body else know about other cities that seem to be working on this type of sports focused economic development strategy?
Aaron: Thoughtful and incisive, as usual.
As someone who grew up in a period when the city seemed hellbent on turning downtown into a vast parking lot, I find Indianapolis amazingly improved in a very short period of time–even if still very much a work in progress.
I’d suggest another key element at work: I don’t know the details, but I do see real thinking about urban design behind downtown’s regeneration. The city has traveled a remarkable distance from the mid-1970s, with the reimagining of the Canal, creation of White River State Park, construction of Circle Centre, creation of the Cultural Trail (which any city would do well to copy), and the recent revamp of Georgia Street (as shared space, no less!). The sports initiative may have provided the impetus for these changes, but there really seems to be a vision of restoring downtown as walkable urban fabric. That’s a seismic shift in thinking from when I lived there. Might you be able to shed any light on this aspect of the story in a future post?
It’s a kick to see the city receiving so much praise from the visiting press and fans. I have many bones to pick with Indy, but there’s no denying its achievement in rebuilding its downtown. It’s earned the right to preen this week, and I hope everyone there is enjoying that.
Well, since the national Ponzi scheme is celebrated, why not celebrate the local downtown Ponzi scheme, which has little economic impact on the overall economic health of the city as money is continually poured into the downtown to prop up event-hosting, convention center, hotels and restaurants? It is not an economic sector as it can’t stand on its own, without a continual transfer of wealth from the general populace to the few who benefit from the largesse.
The only problem I see with the sports model is that it isn’t clear whether or not it can be feasible as a long-term strategy. Other than that, as of right now, Indy is pretty competitive in that market and has really built a niche of sorts. I think that in order to foster that continued momentum of progress and, hopefully diffuse that to other areas, the city needs to stay on its toes and be continually looking towards the horizon–while not settling for complacency.
Indy has the hardware: stadiums, arena, hotels, mall, skywalk system, upgraded outdoor spaces. Indy has pretty good “software” [re Rod Stevens post this week], too, but that’s what will require the constant tweaking.
Indy built from its “one event” skill, hosting the world’s largest single-day sporting event and its supporting monthlong festival enhancements for decades: traffic management for 250,000 people converging on a square mile is no new thing here; closing streets and managing 35,000 runners in the world’s largest half-marathon, no big deal.
The sports strategy has resulted in a huge multi-purpose, multi-location event center fully integrated with downtown. 50,000 for a religious, firefighter’s or FFA convention? No problem. 20,000 at hardware dealers and motorsports/accessories shows? Yep. NCAA Mens or Womens Final Four every few years? No big deal. Big Ten football and basketball championships? Check.
MetroCard…30 years isn’t “long term”? Long before the Super Bowl, the National Sports Festival was in 1982. Pan Am Games in 1987. A half-dozen Final Fours (men’s; two more women’s). An NBA Finals series in 2000. World Police and Fire Games 2001. Two AFC Championship games, 2007 and 2010. The Indy 500, Brickyard 400, US Grand Prix (F-1) many times. So many top tier events in so many different sports. It is a record of which civic boosters are rightly proud.
Yes, it is very clear that sports/events is a feasible long-term strategy for Indy. Years ago people asked me why on earth I’d move here from Philadelphia. Today, no one asks that, because the city developed a brand and had a couple of popular Hall of Fame athletes (Reggie Miller, Peyton Manning) to carry it.
Perhaps the best indicator of where Indianapolis is as a sports venue are the calls that Indy host future Super Bowls even though the game has not been played yet.
Chris, there’s no question that sports has emerged as a viable niche today, but I’m speaking in the context of 50-70 years from now. Can the city position itself to become America’s undisputed sport “capital”, similar to how Vegas has established itself as the entertainment capital, New Orleans as the party capital, etc…
If the Super Bowl comes to Indy again in 8-10 years, and if Indy is still doing the Men’s Final Four every 4-6 years, will that be proof enough that the strategy works?
Orlando as an attraction is really only 40 years old and it rivals Vegas as an entertainment capital, but no one asks if they can keep it up. Modern Las Vegas is maybe 60, and ditto. Indy’s right there, already 30 years into the sports event thing and 100 years into hosting the 500. I’m pretty sure it has legs.
No one throws a party like NOLA…but even there, the casinos, French Quarter, and Superdome/arena complex are a lot further apart than Downtown Indy’s attractions. Maybe they’ll build the Mother of All Ziplines down Bourbon Street and encourage women riders to flash the crowds below?
Alas, NFL owners may follow Formula One in chasing big money/world venues for the Super Bowl, so this may be Indy’s one shot. (Speculation about a London Super Bowl is on Atlantic Cities this week.)
Managing large crowds would be easier with better public transit, but Indiana lawmakers appear to beg to differ…
Sorry, but I can’t help feeling a big part of being able to orchestrate a huge event, close off streets over a wide area and the like comes from just not having that much going on.
Film companies have loved how easy it can be to do a movie shoot in downtown Pittsburgh, where it’s pretty easy to shut anything down. Cleveland is even better. Just add aliens, escaped prisoners or comic heroes cause there are few real people to complicate things.
A real city is measured on how it operates and attracts people on a daily basis. Perhaps Indy would have or could have never done that on it’s own. Somehow that seems like a pretty sad statement.
I have to watch the video and someday visit. There are some reasons to believe this may not have been the world’s worst strategy. Indy had a pretty legendary brand related to basketball already and it’s a city with a wide land area on which to make up for the large amounts of space used.
I would say the jury is out on this, partly because huge scale events like this, may themselves become more rare and harder to finance. College sports is possibly at the start of some huge changes.
As far as branding goes. Get real, the interest in the team and not the town. Some particular events like marathons and bike races can work well at letting people see the city. The 500 also has that characteristic in that it’s truely an Indy only brand.
Often, sports hype like always showing smoking steel mills in Pittsburgh (Or tough Detroit streets) spread stereotypes that are not always helpful.
This is slightly off the subject but have you heard of the recent plans in NYC, to tear down the Javitz Center to open up the area for high rise mixed use development and actually create a huge new convention center near Kennedy airport.
The whole proposal flyes in the face of the common logic about how every downtown must have a major convention center. Obviously, NYC is unusual in having a wide variety of fairly large well located hotel convention centers and a massive demand by developers for land.
Personally, I see the logic of moving the Javitz but not as far as Kennedy. LIC, would make a very logical location, near both Manhattan and Laguardia Airport.
The whole concept is so weird, that’s it’s worthy of a post.
John, definitely watch the video. I thought of you when I saw it, and knew that it would address many points you’ve raised over the years.
One important point is, there is almost always some medium-to-large convention or sporting crowd in Downtown Indy. It isn’t just 10-12 Colts games and 41-50 Pacers games and 60 Indianapolis Indians (AAA baseball) games and whatever Big 10 or NCAA Championship is in town. It’s always a mix of locals and tourists, and the area is NOT dead apart from the Super Bowl. Many of the city’s hot clubs and restaurants are there.
Part of Indy’s advantage this week is that downtown streets were laid out 190 years ago with 100-120 foot ROW. Even with everything built to the lines, it feels open. The city has a mile-square rectangular grid (not unlike Wm Penn’s Philadelphia) and closing streets is not a huge issue. The plan has been well-communicated, and there are park-and-rides for employees working the disrupted area. The rest of us know how to find alternate routes.
News this morning says 150,000 people were in Super Bowl village last night.
I found the video pretty disturbing. Mostly, it sidestepped the big issues of what all the projects cost both in money and land use and what their tangible results were.
I expected to mostly hear from the folks who thought this was a great idea, but the extent to which the interviews were tilted towards the former mayors who helped hatch the projects and clearly self interested team owners or employees with no economists or developers made one more than mildly suspicious. One bar owner represents the alleged boom. If the results are so easy to see, it was funny how the video didn’t show them clearly.
The video also, in a very slick way, flips and confuses the subject. At first, it’s stated that the goal of the sports strategy was to revive the dead downtown, but quickly gets the idea that being “the sports capital of the world”. is an end in itself. I can’t help feeling this comes from the need to change the subject to something where the results are harder to measure or define. (branding is a good weasel word)
The general lack of footage of average daily street scenes downtown and normal business activity makes one wonder. The sky shots still overwhelmingly show massive amounts of parking lots and garages. I couldn’t see one obvious residential building downtown and very little evidence of investment in the areas near the downtown. Most of the footage is of crowds at major events.
There’s no way to do a counterfactual study but general evidence from cities across the world shows that much more has done with much less investment. In order to believe all this was a great idea, one has to start with a very negative view of the city’s ability to retain residents or develop any synergistic organic business activity.
The general theme is “you were nothing”, “you felt bad about yourself” (things an abusive boyfriend would say) and you are so lucky smart folks like us came to save you. I will admit they do a good job of putting a grim spin on the former city.
I did like the part where they bring up the what if luck aspects of this to. As they say, whatever results that have come with a good dose of luck. What if Ryan Leaf had been drafted over Manning?
This luck factor is one of the single biggest arguements against these types of all or nothing investments.
One thing I would’ve liked for the video to touch on is the city’s future with regards to sports. I think it’s safe to say that the city has earned the privilege of hosting future Super Bowls, but is there something more in the works? Perhaps that elusive, five-ringed behemoth will someday appear within reach…
Probably World Cup is the last unrealized ambition. A tournament centered on Indy and/or Chicago could also utilize college stadia in Champaign-Urbana, W. Lafayette, Muncie, Bloomington, and South Bend in a compact diamond.
Olympics are probably far beyond reach, capability, or reasonable expectation except in a supporting role for Chicago.
I suspect many folks would like to see the F-1 USGP come back, but that’s unlikely before Bernie Ecclestone passes from the scene.
John, if you and Aaron can ever schedule a joint visit to Indy, I’ll buy the first round after an “Indy Downtown Development” walking tour.
It isn’t Manhattan, or even Brooklyn. We’re shooting for something different, as befits our geography, history, and culture: between NYC and LA, close to Chicago. Not built on fantasy/unreality like Orlando or Las Vegas.
I hesitate to mention parts of that history/culture on an urbanist blog: Wonder Bread was created here. 100 years ago the city competed with Detroit as center of the automotive industry. And it has evolved that the “standard” American English accent is centered here, along I-70 from Columbus toward KC. We’re Middle America. People from around the US are made comfortable visiting here.
Right, I think the LA Olympics used the swimming facilities of Pepperdine, near San Francisco. The “Athens” Olympics spread events over a large part of Greece.
My guess is that a trend towards more regional games, that are more frugal will take root as budgets tighten. That or Quatar will have to host every games.
They can all have a nap after everyone goes home.
MetroCard, the future is subject to debate locally. A number of people are wondering how long the city plans to ride this horse. The top level leadership plans to continue full steam ahead in some way, however. In fact, I was even told by some that they did not like the way the Star was treating the Super Bowl as if it were the grand finale of the sports strategy. At this point I don’t see how the city can afford to spend much more on sports capex though, beyond perhaps renovating the natatorium.
I don’t see how Indy could ever host an Olympics. If it were to do so, it would likely be 50 years or so in the future when it was a very different type of city. As Chris indicated, a World Cup or something is a possibility, if Lucas Oil Stadium can accommodate soccer.
John,
I get the impression that you think all successful cities have to look like Brooklyn. The reality of it is, most places can never look that way. Indy was always a city of low density single family homes. Unlike Pittsburgh, St. Louis, etc., Indy never had a legacy of classic urbanization, and never had much of a reputation or “glory days.”
Yes, there is no doubt some mythologizing of the past in that video. But a lot of us who are alive today personally remember what downtown Indy was like even 20-25 years ago. I can tell you it was even then pretty bleak. I know that from personal experience. If you want me to take you seriously on what a better way forward would have been, then you’ll have to lay out a plan for me, and point to where some plausible similar city actually made it work. I don’t know of any.
Don’t get me wrong. I think that the city needs to rebalance away from a pure sports/event play into a more mature downtown. Clearly there are huge issues with laying everything out for the benefit of hosting large events when those events aren’t around. Indy is clearly a work in progress. But it’s come further than basically anyplace else I know that started in a broadly similar place.
BTW: There is only one other city I can think of that went from obscurity to emerge with something like having a national profile: Charlotte.
I certainly won’t speak for him, but I see John as essentially questioning what constitutes success in a way that has nothing to with looking like Brooklyn. How does all the investment in sports strategy impact the daily lives of Indy residents in other parts of the city? Has their quality of life substantially improved or are the major returns limited to a relatively small number of people? If the returns are indeed limited, then how else could the various investments have been better targeted? Aaron downplays cycling and eating habits as matters of “branding” but regular interaction with those forces tend to have a far greater impact on quality of daily life for more people than do professional sporting events. Measuring at the macro “Look, Indy is famous” level does little to indicate distribution of benefits, which is the real question.
Hmm. Charlotte: the OTHER motorsport/NFL city.
Might add Nashville to your list; they rode to national recognition on the shoulders of country music plus the relocated NFL Titans. Seattle with the Seahawks & Starbucks too?
Jacksonville: NFL but no other specialty. Low national profile.
New or relocated NFL team plus a local specialty = route to national profile? More than one data point.
Jeff, $150 million in Near East Side Quality of Life Plan investment says that the community impact of NFL football is real, measurable, and widespread.
Several billion in construction (stadium, airport, convention center) provided lots of blue-collar construction jobs throughout Central Indiana.
John – for the record it was water polo that was held at Pepperdine during the ’84 Olympics, but Pepperdine is located in Malibu, which is quite near Los Angeles. They do have a campus in Santa Clara, but that’s not where the event was held. Your point about regional Olympics stands, but cities the size of LA or Chicago could probably hold one within their own metro areas if they wanted.
As far as Indy goes, their sports strategy made a lot of sense for their town. Sports are, and will continue to be, a huge business in this country, like it or not. No reason not to take advantage of that fact if you can, and if it makes sense for your city. It would not be a successful strategy for many other cities, but that’s one of the points that has been often made on this site – every city has to find its unique advantage(s) and design accordingly. We’re not going to have 150 Silicon Valley’s. The sports thing works well for Indy.
I will be back with more thoughts. Perhaps, the plan was good and the video just was targeted at folks who knew the story.
My questions very much have to do with hard numbers, which were very noticably absent from the video. What are the hotel occupancy rates? How many tax dollars are generated in relation to dollars invested? How much investment has occured–actual private, non subsidised investment.
The film pretty much sidesteps all those issues.
Yes, I guess from personal experience, I have deep doubts about Indy’s model which seems to be to create a downtown that operates in a vacume rather than create a series of well connected, mutually supporting core neighborhoods. such a model depends on a constant large influx of vistors. At least in Vegas, they are blowing huge money gambling.
Of course, the video implies no investment at all would have occured downtown-which flies in the face of the reality on sees in most cities.
BTW, I did say that I saw some value in the sports strategy. The main specific thing I doubted was the value of trying to dump so much of this stuff downtown.
Of course the lack of core neighborhoods, makes any transit investments much more of a money pitt.
I wouldn’t be so quick to count out the Olympics. Knowing what you know now about the magnitude of today’s Super Bowl, would you have thought that the Indianapolis of 1972 could ever host one?
I also believe 50 years to submit a bid is way too long; a 25-30 year timeframe is more reasonable. Note that in 1970, the population of metropolitan Atlanta is roughly equal to Indianapolis’s current metropolitan population (about 2 million or so). They too had been implementing some serious urban planning initiatives at the time that led to a (albeit longshot) bid only 17 years later. Never say never.
That is not to say that Indianapolis should follow the Atlanta model, but the World Cup is simply not ambitious enough, in my opinion. The city has worked incredibly hard to develop and embark upon a comprehensive sports strategy that has made it this far today. Go big or go home…that’s how it works.
John, Downtown Indy today might be similar to Lower Manhattan after the WTC and WFC developments: heavy on office and hotel (and “event center” and parking too, I’ll admit) and light on residential. I can’t remember the exact number, but I seem to remember that “only” 15,000 or so people lived in Lower Manhattan until a boom around the turn of this century.
Today Indy is experiencing a mini-boom in apartments and student-oriented housing. Now that the downtown is more active, younger folks want to live there. Apartment vacancy rates are extremely low downtown, under 5%. I’d expect the 8,000 or so downtown residents to grow past 10,000 in coming years.
MetroCard, there’s still plenty of “large convention” business out there that regularly rotates among places like Orlando, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Chicago.
News reports had 20-30 “special guests” of the Convention and Visitors Authority in town over the weekend, looking at Indy. Sure, it’s not “party central”, but it is family-friendly like Orlando. We have the world’s biggest and best Children’s Museum and a great zoo for mom & the kids while dad’s in the Convention Center.
That kind of stuff is much quieter, but the shine from hosting the Super Bowl leads there…”hey, we’ve done the Pan Am Games, the Indy 500 every year, and a Super Bowl. SURE we can handle your convention of 50,000.”
That helps Indy “punch above its weight” (as Aaron says) in attracting airline service and hotel chains, a positive spiral in economic-development recruiting.
Inspiring!
“Today Indy is experiencing a mini-boom in apartments and student-oriented housing.”
See, now that’s what I want to hear about. Obviously, there is more than one thing at work with any emerging core revival beyond just sports and a large convention center.
If one had to come up with one “magic bullet” concept proven to add value and residents to a downtown, it’s by integrating colleges and good magnet schools into the core. The University of Indianapolis and Butler are huge potential ingredients in the mix.
I would like to hear more about Purdue and Ball State’s branch campuses also.
IMHO, the land grant, Big Ten college model needs serious rethinking, in that it maximizes costs for the schools to provide basic services and functions normally free in a larger city, isolates students and seriously limits the potential active synergy between colleges and the real urban business world. A huge part of the need for big time sports programs comes from the desperate need to entertain kids in weirdly remote places like State College.
Even in the farm belt, agriculture is far from being the big employer. IU’s law, business, engineering, journalism, design, architecture, arts and likely a host of other programs should be gradually shifted into Indianapolis itself.
The functions like housing, Cafeterias, on campus exercise facilities, fancy buildings and on campus entertainment are of course not free-what I mean is in a larger, denser city they are more available and don’t have to be provided by the school.
Add to this, is the massive potential of offering continuing education programs to the much larger urban population.
The two big universities in Indy are IUPUI and Ivy Tech. UIndy and Butler are small schools. (IU, Purdue, and Ball State main campuses are each an hour’s drive, give or take.)
IUPUI is a combined “branch” campus of IU and Purdue. It houses branches of the IU Med and Law schools, as well as IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs, the Herron School (of art and design), and the School of Informatics. IU administers the campus, and there aren’t really a lot of major Purdue programs there. It’s largely a “commuter” school but there is a demand for housing. IUPUI shares the west side of downtown with the former “County General” hospital called Eskenazi Health; with IU Health (a separate hospital/health-care system with another large hospital/level 1 trauma center north of Downtown); and with the VA Hospital. Eds and meds; 30k students. 22k undergrad and 8k graduate.
It’s actually one of the things that attracted me years ago, but something always got in the way of graduate study.
Ivy Tech Community College is the state’s junior college system. Its “Main Campus” is north of downtown (a few blocks from the trauma-center hospital mentioned above) and serves 20,000 or so students. It is also a commuter school.
Ball State has a small city footprint, its College of Architecture and Planning’s Indianapolis Center. It has had a big impact though, through its assistance with the Regional Center Design Guidelines and several Quality of Life Plans.
Sorry, one more thought until I move on.
I dispute the idea that Indianapolis did not have a brand. No it was not well known by the general public, but among corporate types and many decision makers it had an image as–the “Republican city” of the rust belt.
Not radical tea party, but, fiscally responsible, in contrast to the obvious disfunction of so many other regional cities. A lot of this high capital investment for low return spending one sees across the state seems to call that brand into question.
Thanks @Chris Barnett,
I would like to hear a lot more about the history of these branch campuses. Not to imply, it’s always a slam dunk but colleges are still very underleveraged assets.
I’m not a central planning type guy, but if I was comming up with one area to focus on, this would be it. I don’t just mean, colleges as a pipeline of steady jobs and big time research dollars.
I’m not an expert on this but can people name the big time start ups that have emerged anywhere near a Big Ten campus? Penn State, I think can get credit for Acuweather which was born in the early 1960’s. Borders came out of Ann Arbor along with I think Dominoes Pizza and I think Jimmy John’s came out of the area around the University of Illinois.
Doesn’t sound like a whole lot of bang for the bucks that flow into these schools. I’m sure there’s something but I’m missing it.
For what it’s worth, Bill Simmons (for the non-sports oriented, he’s a well-known sports writer) wrote this today:
“America Found a New Hidden Gem of a Sports City: Indianapolis! Who Knew?
Everything’s been said: great week, great city, great people, impeccably organized, surprisingly half-decent weather … it just couldn’t have gone better. This was a throwback Super Bowl. You walked to just about everything. You ate unhealthy food, drank beer and inhaled secondhand smoke. You had pleasant conversations with pleasant people. We were happy to be here; they were happy to have us. I will remember Super Bowl XLVI for what happened, but also for the Hoosiers gym, for the speeding ticket, for the parties, for a mystery podcast we taped that you haven’t heard yet, and for the good people of Indy. This will not be my last visit.”
John, Indy still has that conservative reputation as does most of the state. One of the reasons you see so little payback from university investments is that graduates tend to flee what they perceive as backwardness as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, heavily subsidizing sports does little to combat that.
Jeff, that’s a very unfair characterization. I’ll be the first to tell you Indy has a long way to go to build itself into a truly attractive place for top talent, but the numbers hardly paint it as a place the educated can’t wait to flee from. Indy metro has 30.7% college degree attainment. That’s not far off from Chicago’s 34% and clearly above the national average.
Based on seven years of employment in the IU undergraduate system and more recent conversations with groups of PhD students, it’s not unfair at all, Aaron. It’s a constant refrain and very much a conversation the state needs to have. Degree attainment levels are only a part of the story. A more ethnographic approach is sorely needed.
Jeff, I’ll take my data over your anecdotes any day, particularly since it foots to GDP data, population growth, jobs, etc over the past decade.
By focusing on the problems in the present – which of course do exist, particularly in trying to capture the “best of the best” – you ignore the vast improvements that have taken place and that continue to take place. That’s what the video tried to highlight. Assuming the legislature doesn’t kill the city first (through items such as continuing to refuse to allow the city to vote for itself on transit), further improvements in the environment seem likely.
Aaron, a couple points using your data on degree attainment:
Look at the top ten metros and the bottom ten metros. Considering political climate in conjunction suggests a pattern.
Even Louisville and Cincinnati have increased their undergraduate attainment levels faster than Indy over the past ten years. When one isolates for graduate degrees, the difference in increase is even larger with Indy actually decreasing per the LQ analysis you did.
If Indy’s sports strategy is successful, why is that the case?
When you start at a low base, it’s easier to move up. Even with growth Louisville has the 5th lowest college degree attainment among all metro areas in the US with more than a million people. There’s also statistical noise due to the ACS survey margin of error.
I also never claimed other cities were doing poorly. Cincinnati has made major strides as a city over the last decade, and obviously as the best legacy of assets of any city its size (perhaps Pittsburgh excepted, but Pittsburgh was always a bit bigger).
But Chicago’s degree attainment level is increasing more rapidly than Indy’s as well, as is St. Louis’. Indy is surrounded by cities whose improvement in degree attainment levels are outpacing its own.
That depends on how you look at it. Between 2000 and 2010 Indianapolis added 90,000 people with college degrees. That’s a 34.5% increase that ranked #2 among the 12 regional large metros I track. (Louisville was #1 at 37.6% growth).
If you look in at the change in percentage of people with college degrees, Indy was #3 from the bottom, but all of the cities are in a very narrow range, going from 3.81 to 5.7. Exclude Pittsburgh at the high end, and basically everyone else was within a percentage point. This is probably within the margin of error. Whatever the case, it’s a pretty narrow band. And when you consider that Indy grew its Hispanic population by 160%, #1 in the Midwest, I wouldn’t be surprised if any slight lagging was due to composition of population effects. If I had the time, I’d do a version that was race and ethnicity normalized.
Again, I’ll be the first to tell you Indy has lots of work to do. But I might suggest that you’ve got much bigger problems closer to home.
I’m well aware of the problems closer to home, often made worse by the same political climate that lords over Indy. As we’ve discussed previously, Indiana’s state government isn’t exactly a tremendous help here, either, nor is Kentucky’s. But that’s largely my point: All the investment into a sports strategy seems to have made little overall difference in terms of talent attraction and retention, at least as measured by degree attainment in this case. There are too many other, larger variables at play.
@Jeff Gillenwater
Mostly I think Indy’s reputation as a fiscally responsible city is a big plus. It’s just that, some of this spending really undermines that.
The responsible, well managed city (The Singapore of The Midwest”) brand is potentially very huge.
@Chris Barnett
I thought someone else might step in to correct your impression of lower Manhattan. Yes, there were very few residents other than those living in Battery Park City untill pretty recently. Yes, it was heavily tilted towards offices and quite dead after work hours.
However, I can’t recall any significant amount of parking garages or surface parking like one sees in Indy right now. There was quite a lot of that on Manhattan’s West Side in Chelsea and the along the mid Manhattan waterfront until the mid 1990’s. Commuters to lower Manhattan overwhelmingly take the subway, Path, the ferries or cabs and limos.
It’s a bit of a long story but the revival of Downtown NY, was very strongly related to the repopulation of it’s surrounding neighborhoods, like Tribeca, Soho and now the Lower East Side and the Jersey and Brookyn waterfront.
That’s the big problem developing in Indy is that the masses of parking create dead space that separates the downtown from the rest of the city in addition to limiting taxable development.
Pittsburgh has a huge amount of Parking dead space in and all around the downtown, which is a really damaging problem.
Jeff, incidentally, I wouldn’t credit the sports strategy for being a talent attraction strategy, no matter what some locals might say. I think “talent” is a Christmas tree ornament that gets added to basically anything a local leader wants to do these days. However, I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that sports had something to do with Indy topping the Midwest charts for population and job growth in the 2000s, given that it is where they bet a lot of chips. As I noted in a previous post, they’ve stumbled a bit recently though. It remains to be seen if they’ll recover, but in any case I think the best positioned city to lead the Midwest in the next decade is Columbus, Ohio.
John, I see it a bit differently, perhaps less critically:
1. Lower Manhattan didn’t start from almost zero on transit. It’s in a transit city where 50% of work commutes are already by transit. That’s a huge difference with Indy all by itself.
2. I’d consider Manhattan the highest form of evolution/dense city development in the US. That even it went through a stage of superblock development and “use-separation” in LM says to me that’s a normal stage of evolution. (Even there, once upon a time, there were single-family homes and gardens…but that was 250 years ago.) Indy’s not there yet. Land isn’t “too valuable for parking” here. Nor is it too valuable for free-standing single-family homes near downtown.
The strides that Downtown made were great and few downtowns in the Midwest can compare, but it’s really much more of a “Super Downtown” than a “Super City”. Outside of there you’d find the rest very nap-worthy save for a few blocks of Broad Ripple and it’s been that way for quite some time. Now if some of that downtown money were to find its way to other areas Indy wouldn’t offer less than half the number of vibrant neighborhoods compared to the closest cities its size.