When I see the development along 106th Street and I-69, I flash back to a couple of specific conversations I had with Town Manager, later Fishers Mayor, Scott Fadness.
I remember a conversation about the 106th street interchange with I-69 when it was still being planned by state highway officials. Fadness emphasized to me just how important that interchange would be for traffic relief along I-69 at busy times of the day, abut also stressed that the area was poised for a development surge.
The second occasion was the announcement of Ikeas’s plans to build a Fishers store. I asked the mayor at that event how he foresaw that area around Ikea developing. Fadness used the word “thoughtful,” which was his way of saying he didn’t want retail and fast-food development all around Ikea, as has happened in other Ikea locations.
That led to a Fishers City Council action declaring the area around Ikea an “employment node.”
Kurt Christian, the new North of 96th reporter for the Indianapolis Business Journal (IBJ), has a lengthy piece about 106th Street in Fishers and how it is blossoming with development, but commercial and residential.
He reviews the developments already there, along with many in the pipeline.
You can read Kurt Christian’s story in the December 13th print edition of the IBJ, or access it at this link.
(NOTE: You may be limited on the number of online access to IBJ stories. As I have written many times before, good journalism will disappear unless you subscribe. An IBJ subscription is well worth the price of admission, in my view)
“We the People” Pat for the infrastructure, and then the landowners make a killing. If we continue to overbuild infrastructure, at least have the decency of the letting the state profit fully from those unnecessary additions by buying all the property around the interchange and then sell it. That’s what Japan does. But if we fully subscribed to Strong Towns, we’d stop building.