From the Indianapolis Star:
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And that brings me to the latest neighborhood brouhaha: a proposal to demolish a long-vacant Shell gas station and a group of adjacent apartments and replace them with a five-story development that would include upscale apartments and, most likely and most controversially, a 35,000-square-foot Whole Foods grocery. The proposed project, for a site off of College Avenue just north of the Broad Ripple Canal, has both excited people and annoyed them. It offers a potential economic boost for the neighborhood and inspires fears that it would cannibalize existing businesses.
The controversy is unfortunate. The project offers a tremendous upside.
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Nonetheless, it’s unfair to dismiss many of the concerns of critics.
First are the tax incentives that would be part of the deal and that would come from a recently approved Midtown tax-increment financing district. The goal of that district is to invest in the area with tax money generated by new developments. Some really smart people are complaining that the goal was to target incentives at struggling areas, such as 38th and Illinois and 30th and Central, where the private market simply will not organically invest.
“I believe that the TIF dollars should be prioritized first in the southern neighborhoods in the district that have been starved for investment for decades,” City-County Councilman John Barth told me.
That’s a compelling argument, and Barth has emerged in the past couple of years as one of the most important and impressive voices on issues such as this one. Still, for a city to thrive it must make strong neighborhoods stronger while also finding ways to improve those neighborhoods that have declined.
Michael McKillip, executive director of Midtown Indianapolis, Inc., wisely argues that the “either/or thinking” has to stop. One simple solution would be for the city to make clear that the money that will be available from bonds tied to the recently approved TIF will spark development throughout the area. Broad Ripple should be just one piece of a very specific plan that includes several projects in several areas.
Developer Jamie Browning notes that his Broad Ripple development will create more new tax revenue than it takes out in incentives, thus providing more money than there otherwise would be for projects in the struggling neighborhoods. He also says the Broad Ripple project would include new lighting and landscaping to improve the canal area. And responding to criticism that Whole Foods could hurt an existing natural-foods grocery — and this has become a rallying cry for many critics — he points out that Whole Foods is a good community partner, one that buys local and promotes healthy lifestyle.
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http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013305230045
