Rezoning 92 parcels opposite Central HS debated
Will the proposed townhouse-commercial corridor dampen growth downtown?
MUNCIE — The Delaware-Muncie Metropolitan Plan Commission has approved rezoning 92 parcels of land to help revitalize the distressed neighborhood across the street from Central High School.
The commission on Nov. 3 voted 6-1 to give the McKinley Live Learn Neighborhood project a favorable recommendation. The rezoning to allow the “mixed-use” redevelopment of the neighborhood — including townhouses, storefronts, green space and event space — next goes to city council for its consideration at 7 p.m. on Dec. 5.
The lone dissenting vote was cast by J.P. Hall, an assistant professor of historic preservation at Ball State University and also a member of the state of Indiana’s Main Street Council, which promotes improvements to downtown areas in Indiana cities and towns.
It is not clear whether the rezoning, backed by Mayor Dan Ridenour and many others, follows the new comprehensive plan. The mayor, who filed the rezoning application and spoke on its behalf before the commission, says it does comply.
But an analysis of the rezoning by the commission’s professional staff added to some of Hall’s faultfinding.
“I support the mayor, I support McKinley, I support Elm Street (Brewing Co.) and other developments happening there, but the proposed neighborhood plan is not in sync with the Together DM plan,” Hall told me.
Together DM, a reference to Delaware-Muncie, is the long-range plan adopted by the city and county in January of 2022. It is supposed to guide local policy-making and investments to shape a better future.
Planning based solely on growth has failed Muncie in the past and will continue to do so, Hall said in an email. “We need to constrict, focus on growth in very specific markets, and focus limited resources where they will have the greatest impact. The Together DM Plan cost a lot. We need to understand it and follow it.”
Hall argues that the rezoning undermines or supersedes the plan’s aspiration to continue strengthening Walnut and Main streets downtown.
The McKinley project has been advertised as a “Live Learn” neighborhood because of its “opportunity to link job development with education” by leveraging the neighborhood’s proximity to sites including Central High School, Minnetrista and Ivy Tech Community College's downtown campus.
According to the application, the rezoning will help stimulate redevelopment of the neighborhood’s “peripheral” areas —Walnut Street and Columbus Avenue — into “vibrant mixed-use corridors” with uses like townhomes, small-scale apartments, cafes, a yoga studio, a convenience grocery store, etc., in addition to being friendly to bicyclists, pedestrians, bus riders and the disabled.
The application envisions higher-density housing and storefronts on the two peripheral corridors while then “scaling down” to preserve and improve mostly single-family housing in the neighborhood’s inner core. The application also visualizes a former church in the inner core as office or event space.
The comprehensive plan found that “appealing housing options” are lacking in Muncie; that “neighborhood commercial development opportunities” should be permitted to “punctuate residential neighborhoods;” that the city should reimagine the use of lots where housing has been demolished “as park land and/or green infrastructure for storm water capture;” and that connections between downtown and adjacent neighborhoods like McKinley should be strengthened, the rezoning application reports.
In recent years, momentum has been building for the McKinley neighborhood to make a comeback, starting with Muncie Sanitary District sewer and White River levee projects. The federally mandated work included demolition of 25 blighted houses in the neighborhood bordered by Walnut, Wysor Street, the river and Madison Street.
When the work started, the neighborhood was known for blight, abandoned housing, 911 calls, crime, drugs, rental units, and a higher-than-average number of young males who were high-school dropouts. The sewer work also led to green space/park land/storm water basin/trail/greenway improvements in the vicinity.
Conditions were such that when prospective employees/employers were being recruited to Muncie they supposedly would be driven not down Walnut but along Wheeling Avenue, across the river from Central, and told, “There’s our high school.”
In addition to the sanitary district’s upgrades to McKinley, a new YMCA is expected to be built just south of Central High School near the T-intersection of Walnut and Columbus.
As part of that project, the city secured a federally funded Regional Economic Acceleration and Development Initiative (READI) grant to make improvements to the intersection of Walnut and Columbus, along with streetscape enhancements to the first block of Columbus east of Walnut. The updates are to include on-street parking, sidewalks, bike lanes, street trees, street lamps, and street furniture. A bond issue approved by city council will help fund the work. The end goal is to make all of Columbus into a “complete street.”
The project has advanced during several years of collaboration between the mayor, Community Development, the YMCA, Muncie schools, the community foundation, Minnetrista, the chamber of commerce, the neighborhood, the Muncie Redevelopment Commission and others.
The rezoning applicants are the city of Muncie; the redevelopment commission; Delaware Advancement Corp.; Dogtown LLC (William Lett, CEO, Phil Tevis, president); Hickory and Elm LLC (William Lett); Michael T. Concannon (Concannon’s Bakery); Ocean Life for Me LLC, San Pedro, Calif.; Bill Lett; the Muncie Sanitary District; and Bruce Rector, president of McKinley neighborhood and a property owner. The applicants own much but not all of the land that is up for rezoning.
Rector and other McKinley residents spoke in favor of the rezoning at the plan commission hearing, as did the mayor, in addition to Lett, an owner of Elm Street Brewing, a brewpub that is helping to revive the neighborhood, and Tevis. Tevis owns a local landscape architecture/design-build firm whose projects have included wetlands, trails, river projects and the downtown Walnut streetscape.
According to the plan commission staff’s analysis of the rezoning application:
Columbus is not a “peripheral corridor” as labeled in the application. It is located in the middle of the neighborhood, whose peripheral corridors are actually Walnut and Wysor streets. Columbus is a local street. Walnut is a secondary arterial street.
Rezoning Columbus is not necessary to improve the streetscape. Plenty of right of way already exists along Columbus to turn it into a complete street.
Converting the former church into an event space is inconsistent with “scaling down to the inner core of the neighborhood.” The ex-church is in the middle of the neighborhood and lacks authorized parking for commercial use.
The future YMCA lacks an approved site plan, and the McKinley Live Learn Neighborhood’s vision doesn’t include uses within the neighborhood that relate to the YMCA.
Much of what is identified as future development is shown on parcels not owned by the applicants.
Although the applicants state that the rezoning will advance the comprehensikve plan’s goal to “Make Walnut Street Exceptional & Connect Downtown to Community Assets,” this rezoning alone does not strengthen connections of the McKinley neighborhood to the downtown’s Walnut Street.
The proposed rezoning from variety business to central business is a “down-zoning,” because the VB zone allows more uses than the CB zone. The primary difference is the CB zone has reduced parking requirements.
When Elm Street Brewing, in a former manufacturing building, became a brewpub, the required parking was not added. The owner acquired four parcels that were converted to a gravel parking lot that does not meet standards or the needs of the restaurant and is spilling over into limited on-street parking.
A view of Walnut Street from Central High School. (Photo by Seth Slabaugh)
Hall, the plan commission member who opposed the rezoning, spent about two years on the steering committee of the Together DM comprehensive plan. His rationale:
(The plan) spells out some very specific strategies, one being the re-densification of downtown. And not just densification anywhere, but first starting by re-densifying Walnut (between the Fieldhouse and Canan Commons) and Main Street (between Cornerstone Center for the Arts and White River). “
In order for the downtown population to support necessary retail and services, we need to create a critical mass. The plan states that downtown currently has about 1.5% (1,100 people) of the city’s population, and for that mass to matter we need around 5% (3,400 people). That is going to take all persons on deck, incentives from multiple angles — public and private — and a fine-tuned focus of infill and rehabilitation. Downtown is appropriate because it is the location of most, if not all, of our cultural, civic, and economic energy. We need to double down on it.
The proposal for McKinley would essentially supplant the Together DM plan to that neighborhood. I am supportive —for the most part — of the good things happening in McKinley, and have been watching with interest. I’m sympathetic to the challenges they face. However, we do not need another commercial corridor, where one didn’t exist, and we need to focus our efforts around the Together DM Plan as proposed. Commercial development can, and should, be integrated into the neighborhood, but not at the scale proposed. McKinley has great potential as a neighborhood adjacent to downtown, and we need to think about how to best create connections between there, downtown, the greenway, etc.
The Together DM Plan states that we need to create downtown housing for 50 new residents every year for the next decade, then 100 a year after that. That’s difficult — if not impossible — under current circumstances. When we water down efforts with developments elsewhere, we will not get the results/critical mass we need.
A comparison is the Muncie Mall expansion in the early 1990s. We incentivized the development of (the strip mall) Muncie Town Plaza (including Kohl’s, TJ Maxx) for Simon Property Group, and it doubled the size of available retail square footage of the original Mall. In my opinion, this was solely done for the benefit of the developers/bankers, and was not responding organically to the market. We assisted these efforts with pubic funds, and look at where we are today. No one wants to talk about it and we are sleepwalking into the future.
Hall’s comments echoed the comprehensive plan’s findings that Muncie has made a habit of stubbornly refusing to acknowledge it isn’t a growing community.
Instead of planning for population loss over the past half century, Muncie and other Rust Belt cities “were planning for growth that never happened,” the plan notes.
For greater Muncie, “the failure of growth to materialize — combined with a slowness to adjust to this reality and adapt accordingly — has accelerated the decline of basic infrastructure and diminished the region’s ability to retain what it has,” the plan says.
The out-of-state, principal authors of the plan, urban planner Peter Lombardi and landscape architect Matt Ingalls, declined comment or didn’t respond, respectively, when I contacted them to weigh in on the McKinley rezoning.
But in an interview last year, Lombardi told me some things that seem relevant to the current rezoning.
When visiting Muncie, the two consultants stayed at the downtown Courtyard by Marriott.
Lombardi had told me that it was a great feeling to see downtown Muncie crawling with people during a First Thursday gallery walk and other activities.
“Certainly Walnut Street leaves a great impression and represents a basic that Muncie is getting right: having a couple of good blocks,” Lombardi said.
“But for the most part in downtown Muncie, that’s not the feeling you get,” Lombardi went on. “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.”
One positive thing about the rezoning disagreement is that it shows the comprehensive plan hasn’t been forgotten. The plan is sparking interpretive conversation. The back-and-forth also indicates that it won’t always be crystal clear whether or not something aligns with the plan. Some proposals might align in some regards but not others. We should be glad that people are reading the document and grappling with its priorities, principles and strategies.
Previously, in Greater Muncie:
Finally, a plan that admits we’re shrinking
East Central Indiana officials compete in Indy for $50 million