Indianapolis, a comparable city?

One thing you hear plenty of people say is "You can't compare Fort Wayne to Indianapolis."



But why not? If you think about it, and really look at the statistics, maybe we're smaller but we're not all that different. Indianapolis has recently (within the last 20 or so years) worked on improving their downtown, and I consider their efforts a good example of what Fort Wayne is working towards.



Maybe our goal isn't to get an NFL team, or some multi-billion dollar arena, but the primary focus is still there, work with what you have- and improve it.



Now look what happened when Indianapolis worked on revitalizing their downtown. They now have Circle Centre mall, the Hoosier Dome, Conseco Fieldhouse, plenty of retail, and people started to move inward again, and downtown living spaces started to appear.



Now some will argue that people aren't moving downtown at all, and that they're really moving outwards into the suburbs. However, this is also untrue. Within that past 20 years, Indianapolis has seen various residential units built, due to the sucess of their revitalization efforts. One major improvement was the construction of the Riley towers, two mamoth 300 ft. residential towers on the north side of downtown Indianapolis.

Their improvements started in the 1970's, and still continue to this day. Indianapolis today is nearly unrecognizable as compared to 30 to 40 years ago.

One thing that they started with was making their downtown more friendly towards pedestrians. This has clearly also been a starting block for Fort Wayne, as we have seen high-speed streets narrowed, Headwaters Park, sidewalks repaved, as well as beautified streetscapes.

Once you have these in place, you start aiming for reasons for people to be downtown, such as entertainment, eateries, etc.

This isn't something that just happens overnight, its a process of events.

One thing that I tend to say is that hotel downtown right now, would more than likely not be successful. Simply because there is no market for downtown hotels at this time. You need to have a strong base for a hotel to build off of first, this base is entertainment. Right now, the way I see it, Fort Wayne is working it's way towards building this base, with retail becoming more numerous, and eateries providing plenty of support. However, this "base" is not yet strong enough to support a hotel yet. Now with the addition of the Harrison Square project, I believe that it will contribute enough to create a strong enough base to support a new downtown hotel.

And basing upon the fact that a new downtown hotel is one of the key factors of the Harrison Square projects, this works quite well.

It has been reported that Hardball Capital, who owns the Fort Wayne Wizards, is only investing $5 million towards the new stadium, with $30 million being the total cost. A survey released recently stated that more than half of the community thought that Hardball Capital should be putting more towards the stadium. However, I have not yet looked into this survery, so I can't say how accurate it really is.

Also, it has been brought up that Hardball capital has built hotels in Atlanta, but says the project is a no-go if a hotel is not found for the Harrison Square project. I cannot verify that they have built any hotels in Atlanta, but I can say that I don't believe there is anything wrong with the fact that they are not putting any money towards the hotel, simply because of the millions of dollars they are investing in other areas of the Harrison Square project. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?