Progress picks up speed in Indianapolis

Graduation is approaching, and most seniors are thinking, “What am I going to do with my future?”

People have been wondering the same thing about the city of Indianapolis for decades.

While the city does not have the same hit-and-miss advisors we have, a new strategic plan called Velocity makes improvements in amenities as well as commercial and residential life attainable.

Many of us saw the city go from Indianapolis to Indianapol-Oz for Super Bowl XLVI, but that progress is not the endzone by any means.

Especially in the past 30 years, Indianapolis has improved downtown livability and increased job opportunities, and these efforts culminated in last week’s ranking as the nation’s best downtown by Livability.com.

With Velocity, the city has goals varying in length from 18 months to five years, which makes the plan all the more realistic.

Eighteen-month goals include enhancing programming in public spaces, creating free Wi-Fi zones and initiating a two-week Indianapolis Arts festival.

Long-term goals to be completed in the next five years include improving bike-infrastructure, creating greenways to connect neighborhoods and IU-Purdue University Indianapolis with downtown, and creating a micro-grant fund for innovative start-ups.

Passage of the panhandling ordinance is another goal of the plan, and though we have been critical of Indianapolis’ methods of dealing with homelessness in the past, we are glad to see this point is balanced by an increase in availability and improvements to public housing.

Such wide-ranging goals in this horizontal approach to improve Indianapolis give the Editorial Board a rare opportunity to actually praise something happening in our state.

Most of these tactics, short-term and long-term, share the theme of attracting millennials to the area and actively fighting the “Brain Drain” Indiana public officials so often bemoan.

Currently, our generation makes up about 36 percent of the workforce across the country, but this should increase to 50 percent by the end of the decade.

If Indianapolis wants sustainable businesses to come to the area, then this is exactly the target market it should attract.

Funding specifics have not yet been released by Downtown Indianapolis Inc., but seeing as the plan includes input from leaders in city government, local business, community organizations, neighborhood groups and more than 3,000 individuals, it is likely that these goals will have plenty of local support.

Attaining these goals will bolster Indianapolis’ already-healthy resume in attracting millennials. The six square miles of the city’s downtown district already support more than 200 retail shops as well as hundreds of restaurants, movie theaters, sports venues, museums and parks.

If you’re graduating soon with no idea what to do, check out Indianapolis. This city certainly knows how to make progress.

­— opinion@idsnews.com
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