Commercial construction remains in the doldrums nationally.
In and around Downtown Indianapolis, not so much.
About 85 commercial and residential projects worth about $3 billion are newly opened, under construction or soon to break ground in the Downtown area.
That?s close to the high water mark of construction activity set a few years ago when Downtown had $3.2 billion of development in the works, including the $450 million Marriott Place hotel complex and $720 million Lucas Oil Stadium.
Replacing those mega-projects is a new wave of construction driven by hospital expansions and residential development.
A ?sustained pipeline? of construction activity is the way Terry Sweeney, vice president of real estate development at Indianapolis Downtown Inc., describes it. ?We just have a good mix of (new) projects that have backfilled? the massive Super Bowl-related development completed in the last two years, he said.
Many hardhat workers who once toiled on the Indiana Convention Center expansion and JW Marriott are now working on such projects as the $754 million Eskenazi Hospital and the $475 million Riley Hospital for Children Simon Family Tower.
About 30 of the 85 new projects tracked by IDI are residential, as developers see Downtown as an attractive housing market for students, single adults, empty nesters and others drawn to an urban lifestyle.
To Leonard Hoops, chief executive of the Indianapolis Convention & Visitors Association, continued Downtown development is an indicator that Indianapolis? vital signs are strong, especially if it hopes to expand its convention and tourism business.
?Downtown at the end of the day is the primary attraction to meeting planners. They want to see (new development). You feel like you?re in an exciting city. The more cranes going up, the more buildings going up, the better it bodes for my business.?
While Downtown keeps building at a healthy pace, construction has slowed elsewhere in Central Indiana, as well as nationally.
About 20 percent of the membership in unions represented by the Central Indiana Building & Construction Trades Council is either out of work or has left the area to work elsewhere, President John Griffin said.
Construction activity in Central Indiana ?is not near what it was four, five years ago,? he said. In his 35 years in construction, ?I don?t recall ever seeing a scarcity of work like this.?
The value of total construction put in place nationally last year was $787 billion, off 1.1 percent from 2010 and down 32 percent from 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Source: http://ukbuzz.net/?p=950
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