Groundbreaking for 360 Market Square Arena
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – It was nearly 14 years ago that Market Square Arena was imploded. Since then, finding something to replace it has been a struggle. Even the Mayor admitting some hiccups along the way.
Right now, the former home of the Indiana Pacers is a parking lot, but soon it will be home to 360 Market Square. The building is a new 28-story mixed use luxury residential-retail apartment tower. It’s being billed as a building that will help create a vision for Indianapolis.
“What we will be offering here is a residential living experience that just does not exist in the city of Indianapolis,” said Davis Flaherty, CEO of Flaherty & Collins Properties.”And quite frankly, does not exist only in very few developments anywhere in the country.
The cost for the project is slated at $121 million with the city footing $23 million of that. 360 Market Square, at nearly 300 feet tall, will be a sleek, curved nearly 300 foot tall building offering 292 apartments and a 40,000 square foot Whole Foods.
It will be visible as you approach the city from the north, south and east, and is expected to help continue to make downtown Indianapolis competitive with other downtowns across the country.
“It means that we are getting new life, we’re getting a new development, we’re getting something that, on the aesthetic side, is unique,” said City-Count Councilman Vop Osili. “But most importantly we are getting bodies and families here.”
And that equates to an economic impact for the city.
“Latest numbers that I saw when we build residential downtown, 40 percent of the people who move in are from out of county,” said Mayor Greg Ballard. “That’s new income taxes, new property taxes, so that’s where the budget comes from. So, that’s important but also adds to the cache of downtown, the feeling of it all because people do want a more urban experience.”
It’s anticipated 360 Market Square will bring $50 million in wages in the next five years and create 800 jobs, 600 of those expected to be in construction. Creating those jobs was an important goal and target of the project.
“We don’t generally do that and we did it on this particular job,” Osili said. “Because we felt it was important that if we were using city money that is generated by taxes that the people who live here, the residents who live here should have a good fair shot at being able to work on these projects.”
Ballard said a lot has been done to attract people to the city, from conventions to the Super Bowl.
“When you get people into Indianapolis they say ‘Wow, I never knew that’ and then they might want to move here,” Ballard said. “They might want to expand their business here, that sort of thing. So, it’s important that we keep building and keep adding to the feeling about Indianapolis that now it is almost really a cool, hip town to live in.”
Construction on 360 Market Square is expected to take about 20 months to complete with the first tenants hopefully able to move in close to the end of 2016.
According to Downtown Indy Inc. downtown residential growth is at an all time high, with 9,000 people expected to be living downtown by the Bicentennial.