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Little chance of seeing improvements in cleanliness, getting the beggars off the street and lowering crime downtown as long as Hogstett remains mayor.
Agree! If he can’t even keep the roads in working order, then he certainly is not going to be able to handle homelessness and cleanliness
Glen, the condition of the roads is more than partially due to a biased allocation of state tax dollars controlled by the Indiana legislature. IBJ has reported on this:
https://www.ibj.com/articles/metro-mayors-join-push-to-change-states-funding-formula-for-local-roads
This article is a good to see. I work downtown and agree – the scope of negative perception is exaggerated, leftover from the riot incident and extended languish from that. However, the cleanliness perception is totally valid. Downtown and key thoroughfares / intersections in the city are nasty. So much trash. Ever travel Keystone Ave? Yikes. Would like to see the city /mayor initiate volunteer clean-drives with neighborhood advocates.
Hi Susie,
Neighborhood cleanups are already available for folks via a partnership between the City and Keep Indianapolis Beautiful. Head to KIB for more info.
I largely agree with this editorial, but would emphasize that the perception of downtown as relatively dirty with a lot of vagrancy is mostly accurate – and a PR campaign focused primarily on convincing people otherwise will likely fail. “Safety” is a pretty big catch-all, and for most people it contains far more that simple crime rates. So, what to do? Focus on the fact that there are a lot of great attractions downtown, and that it is far safer than many think, while at the same time doing the substantive work of making it cleaner and more inviting. (It would be great if the entire city was made cleaner, but when is the last time you saw a city worker pick up any litter? I’ve never seen it happen in this city – not once.)
We need our local media outlets to print and air more of this type of information rather than local “Breaking News” with 15-30 minute “say nothing” announcements of every shooting or negative thing that happens in downtown. They’re selling drama. We also should not allow politically motivated billboards on 465 talking about how bad our crime is to skewer local politicians. I understand we may have a leadership problem and you can have whatever opinion you want, but why does our community and media continually shoot ourselves in the foot by saying, “Hey, attention! Breaking News! We suck and it’s dangerous here!”. That’s just not true and anyone whoever does that is degrading our community. Every city has crime and I’m not suggesting we not track or report things. However, no company ever sustained by telling customers how bad they were. It’s the same with a city or community. Tell the truth, but stop the sensationalizing situations and the overt amplification of the negative. We do so at our own peril.
When reading responses, I got the sense people truly cared about Indy. I picked up on several insider “perspectives”; I didn’t catch any outsider “perceptions”. I could have missed them. I know that sounds like semantics, although to me there’s a huge distinction. Perceptions almost sound like silly notions, ideas, or assumptions which can be easily explained away with rational wisdom. It might also imply there’s no real substance to a person’s statement or reality to an any tangible underlying problem.