Downtown office properties are facing tough financial years—but mall project offers hope

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6 thoughts on “Downtown office properties are facing tough financial years—but mall project offers hope

  1. Prediction: 20 years before downtown(s) return to pre-Covid status. More focus should be on residential and mixed/uses in downtown areas. The office-centric CBD is and should be be a thing of the past. Whereas downtowns may continue to have a significant office share, the decentralization of offices and office nodes has been well established. Commuting, roadways, and transit needs to be defined accordingly. Perhaps replace the urban intra-I-465 segment of I-65, in particular, with boulevards, parkways, and housing. And implement a planted median along the entirety of that hideous West Street between I-7- and 11th Street.

    1. As much as I wish that Indianapolis would have worked with INDOT to tear out the downtown interstates, let’s be realistic. The Aaron Freeman’s of the world would have never allowed it to happen, regardless of how much sense it might make or regardless of how well it’s worked throughout the country.

  2. As much as a tough situation that this is for the CBD, Carmel in particular, has invested heavily in many suburban office buildings. From what I understand that infrastructure is even more at risk as they are not particularly well suited for conversion to apartments due to the type of construction. I know of at least 4 large scale leases in these suburban office parks that were vacated recently in Carmel alone in favor of office consolidation or work from home.

    1. Carmel undoubtedly has a lot of redevelopment work ahead on its older suburban office parks – although it presently has the lowest vacancy rate of the major submarkets. However, Carmel’s office parks can be retrofitted by infilling the parking lots, which will potentially happen with Parkwood (look up the articles on it). Also, simply scraping a suburban office development and starting over is feasible.

  3. I’m not so sure the two are particularly linked. I’m not even convinced the added residential units will be sufficient to support the new commercial space and the vacant store fronts.

  4. “Downtown office properties are facing tough financial years” City Council: “Let’s impose another tax on Mile Square businesses to (Try to) solve a nationwide issue”

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