University of Notre Dame finishes blueprint for downtown Gary with preservation plans, zoning changes

Chicago Tribune

6 days ago

The city of Gary now has a master plan for its downtown, so the time is now for developers to commit to its new vision.
Mayor Eddie Melton, along with city dignitaries and representatives from the University of Notre Dame's Housing & Community Regeneration Initiative, announced Tuesday morning that the school has finished the plan it started last August. Now, he and Redevelopment Director Christopher Harris are asking the city's largest stakeholders – the residents who contributed ideas to the plan – to advocate to everyone they know the benefits of the new plan.
The city has all the fundamentals any business would covet, said Jackie Shropshire, senior vice president of industrial for Chicago-based commercial real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle. And the timing to get into Gary couldn't be better.
'Post-pandemic, people are looking for walkable cities,' Shropshire, a Gary native, said, adding that pressure in Chicago's housing market gives Gary a competitive edge. 'Gary has regional integration as well; the South Shore Line is something companies desire.'
Marianne Cusato, Housing & Community Regeneration Initiative Director for Notre Dame and lead for the Gary plan, said she noticed a master plan when she arrived at City Hall for her first meeting with the administration. When she asked what it was, someone told her it was a master plan from 15 years ago.
What propels this plan ahead of the myriad other plans the city has commissioned is the community involvement, she said. At least 100 people came out to the first charette, or stakeholder meeting, back in August to make their thoughts known.
'We pinned up all the input after that first night, and when we came back with our first draft, we asked, 'Did we understand what we heard correctly?' because we know there's no reason for the public to trust us,' Cusato said. 'People said we didn't get it right, so we went back and kept going over it until we got it right.'
What the city has now is a holistic blueprint that takes into account preserving the buildings that can be preserved, changing zoning codes immediately in the downtown area to get the momentum started and planning new construction on both sides of Broadway to 'heal' the metaphorical wounds that blight has brought to Gary.
'(Planners) currently only destroy cities and build out to the suburbs; we're reinventing the culture of the city,' Cusato said. 'Gary has a much greater platform, but its issues are no different than those of Kalamazoo or Elkhart,' where Notre Dame is also working.
For its part, the city also has been working on setting up a different atmosphere for the downtown, including working with the Indiana Department of Transportation to steer truck traffic off 4th and 5th Avenues, Melton said. Whether that will remain something the city can keep doing will depend on whether the state starts turning all its roads into toll roads, the mayor conceded, but for now, it's an important piece of the project.
The city will also start accepting Requests for Information on the redevelopment of the Genesis Center as well as the 500 block of Broadway and 120 to 138 E. 5th Avenue corridor, Harris added.
'We're being intentional about (the Genesis Center), so the RFIs will tell us how do we partner (with a developer), do we refurbish it and who has the resources to do anything,' Harris said.
There is also a set of Notre Dame-provided zoning codes for the immediate downtown area that the Gary Plan Commission has already approved unanimously, Harris said; they're included in the new master plan that the Gary Common Council is anticipated to take up by the end of July.
George Rogge, who lives in Gary's Miller section and sits on the city's Redevelopment Commission, has seen just about all the plans for reinvigorating the city, but he's never been hopeful. He is now.
'The city's been talking about this for the last 50 years. I remember talking about it under Hatcher, and then again under Mayor Thomas Barnes,' he said. 'But sitting in that first meeting, there were 24 to 30 young people (on the Notre Dame team), and they were focused on all of this. We've never had that.
'I never thought I'd be pleased about a master plan, but I am.'
Those interested in reading the final plan can log on to https://architecture.nd.edu/news-and-media/news/deans-charrette-downtown-gary/