Bill Taft: Stagnant Indianapolis faces civic leadership recession

I recently wrapped up six years in a national leadership role that largely disconnected me from my long-standing engagement in Indy’s civic life. I decided to return to working in Indy six months ago and have been busily reengaging with community leaders with the goal of determining how I could be most helpful to local community economic development efforts.

While I have thoroughly enjoyed reconnecting with a diverse range of leaders, I have been shocked by the decline in their optimism about Indy’s future and sense of agency to address big local issues. I have a growing sense from these conversations that Indianapolis has entered a civic leadership recession.

What is the evidence for this leadership recession? I see a lack of coordinated efforts to mobilize the city around big challenges.
Most critically, these include the lack of affordable housing, the impact of unchecked homelessness on both unhoused people and downtown residents, and our inability to turn progress in education reform into the retention of city families, exacerbated by a deficit of early childhood education options.

There also has been slow movement in building and promoting the Riverside corridor as a regional attraction, a dearth of opportunities for young people and the plague of violence this fosters, the loss of broad support for IndyGo and the vision of building truly transit-oriented neighborhoods of choice, and the need for massive investment in our city streets.

And it’s not just me making these observations: As residents and businesses see Indy’s quality of life stagnating, the ring counties are absorbing growth that should be happening in our city.

The obvious place to place blame for this recession is the lack of visionary (or even competent) political leadership from the City-County Council up through the federal level. I will leave it to political commentators to hash out solutions, but one obvious outcome is the fact that our local elected officials are not taking the reputational risks or spending the political capital necessary to take on our biggest challenges. Simply keeping government operating and balancing its budget is not enough. We need elected officials to use their positions of power to drive real local change.

We can’t, however, chalk up our leadership recession to purely politics. I see a loss of risk-taking leadership in almost every sector of life. Organizational leaders seem to have defaulted to ensuring the sustainability of their own institution rather than leveraging their assets and networks for transformative improvements in our city. Maybe this is a hangover from the pandemic, but
now we all need to step back into the beauty and tensions of civic leadership in an urban community.

When my wife and I moved to Indy in 1991, we discovered a community that had aspirational visions and mature leaders who invited us into the work of making them a reality. Those of us who have reached “elder” status must ask ourselves if we still boldly aspire to make our city better.

IBJ readers have the position and resources to see community challenges and to take the risky step of finding others who can join us in taking them on.

We can end this leadership recession if we stand up, take a good look around us and move beyond self-protection into joining our neighbors in creating our best Indianapolis.•

__________

Bill Taft is director of Interurban at Indianapolis-based Sagamore Institute. Send comments to [email protected].

Click here for more Forefront columns.