City tries to move needle on downtown recovery
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The city of Indianapolis is bringing hundreds of employees downtown, backfilling space in the half-empty City-County Building while trying to help solve the problem of a downtown that's still struggling to regain its pre-pandemic form.
State of play: As of May, the city saw just about 40% of pre-pandemic activity downtown, based on cell phone data analyzed by the University of Toronto.
- Many employers have moved to a hybrid work model, where employees aren't coming into downtown offices as often.
- Hundreds of public employees also left downtown last year when the new Criminal Justice Campus opened in the Twin Aire neighborhood.
The intrigue: Downtown Indy says its location intelligence software shows a 25% increase in office visits over the same period in 2022 and a 67% increase over the same period in 2021.
Details: To help bolster downtown traffic and save money, the city will consolidate offices currently located in leased spaces.
- 300 employees from the Department of Public Works, Indy Parks and Department of Business and Neighborhood Services will move into the CCB from offices just south of downtown by the end of the year.
- By the end of next year, an additional 150 workers with Marion County Community Corrections will also move into the CCB from the former Jail I site. But that move won't necessarily bring more downtown traffic, as it's just a few blocks away.
- A third phase of the project will include renovation at the CCB and the relocation of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's downtown district from Union Station to the CCB.
Of note: The Jail I site, on Maryland Street between Delaware and Alabama streets, is slated for demolition and redevelopment.
What they're saying: The city says the moves will "create one of the densest blocks of consistent professional workforce in the Mile Square."
Reality check: More than 150,000 people worked downtown on a daily basis pre-pandemic.
- While the downtown office market is showing signs of life, it'll take more than a few hundred additional city workers for downtown to get its groove back.