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W But A.J. Patel said Smart Streets, which has eliminated one-way streets, narrowed them to slow traffic, widened and beautified sidewalks with new trees and decorative brickwork, and created new bike paths, was a key secondary factor behind his company's $14 million investment. "Overall, with the two-way streets and the apartment people, it's a livelier downtown," said Patel, president and CEO of JSK Hospitality & Development, which hopes to open the hotel April 3. "There's retail coming in. Other companies are investing in downtown. Everything kind of came together and it's cleaned up the whole area. You've got a different image when you go down there now, compared to five years ago." In his annual State of the City speech Tuesday, Buttigieg said Smart Streets "has already been credited with helping to attract over $90 million in private investment — a nearly four -fold return on the public investment." Could that really be true? Orwould that private investment Credit to Smart Streets? naturally have materialized as the economy recovered from These are the developments Mayor Pete Buttigieg said the Great Recession of 2008? his Smart Streets project helped attract and the amount of private money invested in them: Michael Burayidi, a professor of urban planning at Ball State University, said there could be credence to Buttigieg's claim. In researching his book, "Resilient Downtowns: A New Approach to Revitalizing Small and Medium -City Downtowns," Burayidi traveled the country, interviewing city and town officials. He found that smart or "complete" streets were a common thread running through success stories. In the mid -20th Century, as America fell in love with the automobile, cities designed their downtown streets to decrease congestion with one-way thoroughfares that moved traffic to the suburbs as quickly as possible, Burayidi said. Over the past decade, cities have increasingly reversed course, embracing a "new urbanism" that seeks to return downtowns to their initial function as a community's backbone. "Communities that spend money to improve the quality of place and to make their downtowns pedestrian -friendly, such as Kokomo, South Bend and Lafayette, those are the communities that are seeing a resurgence of their downtown," Burayidi said. "A community can't simply sit back and say, `Well the economy is improving so we are going to attract business investment anyway.' ... It's not going to happen." Tribune Graphic/JOHN STUMP •