City commission approves plan to explore redevelopment of former Indiana Women’s Prison site

Indianapolis city officials are starting to consider options for the redevelopment of the former Indiana Women’s Prison on the city’s near-east side.

The Metropolitan Development Commission on Wednesday gave unanimous approval to a $10,000 contract that will see the city’s Department of Metropolitan Development collaborate with the Indianapolis office of the Urban Land Institute to cultivate ideas for the 15-acre property.

The move is a first step in what’s likely to be a multi-year process to redevelop the site, 401 N. Randolph St., which the city gained control of in November through a land-swap deal with the state.

Urban Land Institute, commonly called ULI, will organize a Technical Assistance Panel that consists of member-volunteers from across central Indiana and surrounding states who will confer with residents in the neighborhood before offering their perspectives on how the site can be best used.

“We wanted a process that engaged the community and wanted a third party who could help us and had that technical expertise to think through some of these questions we have about redevelopment visions,” said Megan Vukusich, director of the Department of Metropolitan Development. We thought it made a lot of sense for this piece of property to go through that process.”

A representative for Urban Land Institute was not available to discuss the group’s involvement in the effort, but a spokesperson for the organization noted that the technical panel is a more localized version of the group’s headquarter-managed Advisory Services Panels. In 2019, the city procured an advisory panel for the overhaul of Irvington Plaza.

The prison site, has been decommissioned as a corrections facility since 2009 and operated as the Indianapolis Re-Entry Educational Facility until 2017. The prison was first established in 1873, and it was the first separate correctional site for female inmates in the Untied States.

While the Indiana Department of Administration demolished most of the buildings and boarded up the rest in 2022, the site remains subject to oversight by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and its historical preservation division. That means any exterior changes to the buildings—or overhauls to the site as a whole—would require state review and approval.

Currently, the site is being maintained as it undergoes environmental assessments and is prepared for the ULI study.

Vukusich said the city does’t have specific ideas in mind for what could be done with the property, but said she expects the city will issue a request for proposals on its redevelopment by the end of 2025.

The ULI panel, she said, could help developers and community members further hone their ideas. She said the city hopes to learn what things may be most appropriate for the property, the necessary infrastructure changes, and whether options like affordable housing and public art would be beneficial for the immediate neighborhood.

Even so, the panel’s recommendations won’t set a definitive strategy for the property, but rather give the city a starting point for conversations, Vukusich said.

“I think with any redevelopment, we always have our list of priorities that we would like to see, but how we prioritize those different items we’d want to see in redevelopment really comes down to community engagement and the specific neighborhood,” she said. “Specifically, we’re really interested to hear from the community on what they want to see, then meshing those two with the site constraints that exist, so we can see what’s feasible from a market standpoint.”