Muncie's future hinges on 'getting back to the basics'
'We've been hearing that the community isn't getting enough of those basics right'
MUNCIE — It’s not an ambitious-sounding rallying cry, but after decades of deindustrialization it’s one that fits Muncie: “Let’s get the basics right.”
Muncie-Delaware County’s population decline continues; the housing market is soft, with supply exceeding demand; litter is left lying in public places; road conditions reflect long-term underinvestment; the household poverty rate in Muncie is 31%; demolition of unsafe and vacant homes in the past decade has created more than 100 acres of empty lots in the city; the appearance of major corridors and gateways signals low standards and lack of pride; and the list goes on.
“What we’ve been hearing through this process is that the community isn’t getting enough of those basics right, and before it can really think bigger, it needs to focus on those basic things that can have a really big impact on quality of life and people’s perceptions of their communities,” Peter Lombardi, an urban planner at cbz, told me during a recent open house attended only by me and one of his colleagues, Matt Ingalls, a landscape architect.
Hired by the city-county plan commission to help create a new comprehensive plan — a blueprint for the community’s future — Ingalls and Lombardi started analyzing the community in January.
“There is a widespread sense that the community does not show pride of place and ownership to an acceptable level,” they wrote recently. “Everything from the presence of litter, to road conditions, to the upkeep of private and public properties send a message that the community has low standards. There are exceptions to this impression, but prevailing conditions raise an important question: If the community doesn’t seem interested or capable of investing in itself, why should anybody else, including potential businesses and residents?”
In an interview during a Zoom open house on the plan on Oct. 12, Lombardi said, “Instead of kind of jumping ahead to projects or initiatives that the community might not be able to sustain right now, instead (we’re) focusing on basic things like are your roads in good condition; are enough homeowners … fixing their roof, repairing their siding, picking up litter in front of their house, those sorts of basic activities.”
He went on, “There are really some core things about community life that have been, if not maybe ignored, under-invested in, and that’s noticeable now.”
The new plan, known as TogetherDM, replaces one adopted by the city and county in 2000. Examples of the former plan’s achievements are downtown redevelopment; an extensive bike-pedestrian network including White River Greenway; a landscape ordinance to improve the appearance of retail corridors like McGalliard Road; recreation and conservation zoning to protect Prairie Creek Reservoir against overdevelopment; and steering industrial development to sites like the southside Industria Centre and Park One Business Park at Interstate 69 and Ind. 332, according to Marta Moody, director of the plan commission.
Three big priorities have surfaced in the new plan: improve quality of place; strengthen housing conditions and options; and cultivate opportunities for upward mobility.
“Matt took a close look at corridor sense of place, and what you found Matt was that, for the most part, especially in the city of Muncie, the corridors don’t say much about community pride, right?” Lombardi asked.
Ingalls, of Ingalls Planning and Design, in Fairport, N.Y., responded: “Right. There are times we see that in other cities, but it just seems more prevalent in Muncie, in terms of the expectation and desire to have higher-quality. Even newer development, in some corridors, is not at the point it should be or that the city should expect from newer development. Regulations need to be … upgraded a bit and hold people to a higher standard.”
He added: “The way properties look and are maintained and developed has a big impact on people’s impression of what the city is like, whether they want to open a business there, buy a home there, or send your kids to college there. All those things, aesthetics, quality of corridors including gateways and first impression of a place, I don’t know if Muncie is unusual, but it just seemed like every corridor we looked at had the same thing, whereas a lot of cities have a few corridors at higher standards and then maybe other corridors need some help. It seemed like Muncie has a bunch of corridors that need to be taken to the next level.”
Muncie’s low standards can be traced to the attitudes of certain local government officials and influential developers and builders who, in the early 1990s, mostly ignored Ball State University’s “Gateways to Delaware County” recommendations.
One county commissioner at the time said, “We’re not Carmel.” A local real estate agent said, “I love McGalliard.” Some builders fretted that landscaping in strip parking lots like a Walmart would make snow removal impossible. And others felt that if development standards were too high, businesses like Walgreens and Walmart wouldn’t want to come here.
“It’s a result of low self-esteem,” said Ingalls, who earned degrees in urban economics, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture from University at Buffalo and Ohio State University. “Worrying that you won’t get development because of high standards is simply not true … Fundamental urban design principles … don’t necessarily cost more money; it’s just a different way of doing things, but they need to be in the code. If you don’t tell business to do it differently, they typically will not do it on their own.”
Because of Muncie’s low expectations for itself, many residents seem satisfied to spend a couple weeks a year vacationing in attractive locations and are willing to live the rest of the year in mediocrity, as Deane Rundell, a former local planner, used to say.
That drabness can be overcome through “some good, fundamental urbanism,” Ingalls said. “It certainly won’t happen all at once or over the course of the next 10 years, but that’s how development happens anyhow. It took decades to get where you are now and it'll take decades to bring it back the other way. But it’s a matter of getting started, getting tools in place that are needed and, I think, having a higher expectation.”
Lombardi, whose office is headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a native of Jamestown, N.Y. He earned an undergraduate degree in environmental design at University at Buffalo, followed by a master’s in city and regional planning from Rutgers University.
When visiting Muncie, the two consultants stay at the downtown Courtyard by Marriott.
“Certainly Walnut Street leaves a great impression and represents a basic that Muncie is getting right: having a couple of good blocks,” Lombardi said.
During their recent stay, the consultants attended downtown Muncie’s monthly First Thursday event, on Oct. 7.
They saw people crawling all over the place, restaurants with outdoor seating, and lots of entertainment.
“That’s a great feeling,” Lombardi said. “But for the most part in downtown Muncie, that’s not the feeling you get. It feels pretty empty and forlorn for the most part. Part of that is just that the footprint is bigger than the amount of activity you have now, which poses an important strategic question for the community.
“Do you focus on a few blocks to really make sure you get Walnut street right, and maybe Main Street, as an important connection route? Is the community prepared to really focus its resources in those areas, which I think makes strategic sense for the community? Or is there going to be an urge to spread things out, which is often what the natural inclination for a community might be.
“Some people might say we’ve put enough money on Walnut. Let’s show some love to other downtown streets, and that might not be the wise thing to do if Walnut street is still — you can sense it is still a little bit precarious … While a lot of good is going on on Walnut, it doesn’t have a long history of being successful yet.
“What we’ve seen in cities with legitimately thriving downtowns is that they have a couple of core blocks that maybe got reinvigorated a few decades ago and they haven’t let their foot off the gas on those blocks and they use the success of those blocks to gradually build strength outwards.
“From the downtown and adjacent neighborhood standpoint, you’ve got some basics right already, but thinking how downtown connects to neighborhoods, especially historic ones, is where a lot of attention has to be paid.
“What is the feeling of things? How can you really boost the confidence of people that you’d like to have buy and invest in historic homes? You can see a few cases already where people have really invested heavily in and are taking care of historic assets, but if you want to see that activity double each year for the next few years, the most important thing is confidence. People have to know that putting 200 grand into an old house is not the dumbest thing they could possibly do.”
The last comprehensive plan, which is 21 years old, projected that Delaware County’s population would grow by 2020 to around 134,000. Instead, it has shrunk to around 111,903, a decrease of nearly 5% since 2010.
“So part of what this plan is trying to do is, it’s kind of going to be a dose of reality to some extent,” Lombardi said, “recognizing you’ve been losing population for at least 50 years, you know.”
A refined draft of the new plan, to be acted on by a steering committee, will become available to the public on Nov. 5.
Other highlights of the consultants’ work so far:
Residential Property Condition Survey
A 2021 condition survey found that 23% of residential properties in the City of Muncie, the county's incorporated towns, and unincorporated residential clusters show signs of moderate or severe physical distress. These conditions have an influence on the quality of place experienced by residents and visitors.
Corridor Audit
A 2021 assessment of Delaware County's major corridors and gateways, which considered a range of factors and the overall urban, suburban, or rural context of the corridors and gateways, found that 57% rate poorly or very poorly for quality of place. The most significant factors in these low ratings are poor quality building and site design, streetscape design, and road conditions.
Street/Road Maintenance Analysis
A 2020 assessment of roadway pavement conditions in Delaware County found that 34% of the county's streets and roadways need reconstruction and 29% need major rehabilitation. This represented a slight improvement from 2016.
Parks Assessment
Muncie's park system suffers from decades of disinvestment. While funding has been increased for parks in recent years, the per capita spending levels in 2021 by the City of Muncie for parks maintenance ($24) was well below median spending levels for cities of similar size in the U.S. ($88).
Visit TogetherDM.org to help shape Muncie’s future for years to come