Brownfields Remain Economic Development Challenge

(INDIANAPOLIS) – Bringing more jobs to central Indianapolis means cleaning up brownfields.

Indy Chamber chief policy officer Mark Fisher says one persistent challenge is putting jobs near where people live, so transportation doesn’t prevent them from taking a job. The need to connect people in the urban core to jobs was a central rationale for the new Red Line bus. But Fisher says the need to clean up former industrial sites, from the former General Motors stamping plant to the old RCA television factory, is an obstacle that has to be cleared away first. Deputy Mayor Angela Smith-Jones says Indy has 140 acres of brownfields ripe for development once they’re cleaned up.

Cleanup plans are in various phases of development for some of those sites. Construction is already well underway at the former Coca-Cola bottling plant site at the north end of Mass Ave, with the Bottleworks Hotel scheduled to open next year, the first step in a planned shopping, office and entertainment district.
 

Once a brownfield site, the former Coca-Cola bottling plant in Indianapolis is now being redeveloped into a new shopping and entertainment district. (Photo: Eric Berman/WIBC)