On June 28, 2018, the IndyEast Promise Zone, in partnership with the City of Indianapolis, the Indy Chamber, and Develop Indy, led investors, developers, and real estate professionals on an afternoon bus tour to generate interest in the IndyEast Promise Zone’s former commercial and industrial corridor sites.
Organized by the Industrial Redevelopment subcommittee of Work IndyEast, the tour was part of the IndyEast Promise Zone’s objective of reviving legacy industrial sites and corridors by expanding access to goods and services, increasing the local employment rate, and improving opportunities for members of the local workforce to earn higher wages. During the tour, attendees heard from Evan Tester of King Park Development Corporation, John Franklin Hay of Near East Area Renewal, Cari Morales of LISC Indianapolis, Jeff Sparks of Southeast Neighborhood Development, and Piers Kirby of the Indy DMD about the roles of their respective organizations in the economic revitalization of underused sites in the Promise Zone. The tour has received overwhelmingly positive feedback, and a letter of intent (LOI) has already been received from a prospective developer and commercial construction company for one of the sites shown.
All of the sites featured on the tour have already benefitted or stand to benefit from their locations in the IndyEast Promise Zone, which confers priority points to projects that promote social and economic revitalization within its boundaries. One of the most noteworthy examples of how an abandoned site’s location in the Promise Zone has been used to renew can be seen in the case of Sherman Park, where an EPA Brownfields Area-wide Planning Grant was recently awarded to Neat East Area Renewal provide for the environmental assessment, market analysis, and contamination cleanup that will be necessary for new development to take place. A digital copy of the Sherman Park Plan is available here.
Interested in learning more about sites in the Promise Zone? Contact us at https://indyeast.org/about/team/