Miles SmithGary, Indiana, has announced a partnership with the University of Notre Dame to create a master plan for the city’s downtown area. The city will collaborate with the university’s architecture school to reimagine the city’s Broadway corridor over the next decade.
While still serving as state senator, Gary Mayor Eddie Melton authored Indiana Senate Bill 434 in 2003, which provides matching funds to cities to remove distressed properties located within Indiana’s transit development district. The city has received $6 million from the state, $3 million from Hard Rock Casino of Northern Indiana and will put up the remaining $3 million to pay for the planning project.
Apart from the downtown plan, the city is working on commissioning a new Adam Benjamin Metro Station in the next few years, Melton said.
City officials hope the investment will help grow a lagging economy and dwindling labor force. Gary’s median household income is $31,936, with a significant portion of the population living below the poverty line.
“Thanks to the passage of Indiana SB 434 in 2023, we have been able to jump start Downtown Gary’s revitalization with $12M of blight elimination. Moving forward, we want to make sure that we are very intentional about what we decide to rebuild,” Melton said. “This partnership will equip our community with tools to envision a sustainable plan for development that brings opportunities for businesses and residents to thrive in the heart of downtown.”
The partnership will begin with a series of community listening sessions, followed by a weeklong public urban planning session conducted by the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative. The goal is to put together a proposed vision and action plan to rebuild and revitalize downtown Gary, the city said.
Goals include attracting new businesses to invest in the city and creating a walkable downtown with quality public spaces and multimodal transportation with easy access to Chicago and Indiana Dunes National Park, the city said.
Work will include developing a vision and implementation plan for the regeneration of downtown Gary, creating a set of design standards for the Broadway corridor, developing a series of design templates for workforce housing units and commercial spaces and developing a concept design for the new Intermodal Transit Facility, the city said.
Carla Morgan, the city’s Corporation Counsel and a Notre Dame alum, helped orchestrate the partnership.
“They’re going to help us create an attractive, walkable city, which will reinforce our sense of community and vastly improve the quality of life for our residents,” Morgan said.
The Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative began in 2021 and has conducted seven similar sessions throughout northern Indiana and southwest Michigan to date.
The think tank works primarily with municipalities and not-for-profits throughout the Midwest to reverse the impact of decades of unjust infrastructure and housing policy, leaving downtowns throughout the region in a state of disrepair.
The program seeks to partner with communities within a 100-mile radius of the University of Notre Dame to assist with the cities’ community development efforts, said Stefanos Polyzoides, dean of the Notre Dame School of Architecture.
“The process that we have honed through partnerships with LaPorte, Kalamazoo and Elkhart, among other communities, allows us to inspire a plan to bring opportunities to Gary that have been unrealized until now by listening to community members and leadership, then translating the needs into a prioritized, actionable set of steps toward them,” Polyzoides said.
Photo by Paul Sableman
