PSA - Four (4) Month Recast Boost for Target Jurisdiction and Property - Recast City LLC

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For this technical assistance project, the city requested a focus on the area just south of South Bend's downtown along the Sample Street Corridor (see the appendix for a map). The Corridor is anchored by Vested Interest and adjacent to the city's older industrial district, much of which was part of the Studebaker campus. Although a few coworking spaces and businesses have begun to populate the area, many industrial buildings, vacant parcels, and surface parking lots have left it underused. Or 0, City leadership wants to continue the momentum of small-scale manufacturing by better coordinating existing initiatives and policies for small business development. It also aspires to target redevelopment along the Sample Street Corridor in a way that reintroduces manufacturing into downtown and repurposes historic buildings. South Bend's goals focus on ways to improve the local small-scale manufacturing climate by increasing jobs, providing adequate retail and production space, and by building strong relationships to better understand the challenges small businesses face —all with the goal of supporting new and growing businesses. .r, The team conducted interviews with business owners, property owners, and other community leaders to collect information about the assets and successes that can support small-scale manufacturing and strong placemaking. A number of themes emerged: 1. Cheap land, empty buildings. A legacy of its industrial history, South Bend currently enjoys a plentiful supply of relatively low-cost land and buildings suitable for manufacturing at every scale of production. Some available buildings are already equipped with high capacity power and broadband internet. 2. A re-emerging downtown, While many smaller "rust belt" cities remain moribund, South Bend has joined those at the vanguard of the 21' urban renaissance, with an intentional, policy -driven focus on revitalizing the core of the downtown. Restoration of two-way travel on the gridded streets and implementation of complete streets policies are happening at exactly the right time to position South Bend as the kind of smaller city to which millennials, 5