- Hi, my name's Jeff Speck.

I'm a city planner based in Boston.

We're here in Downtown Hammond, Indiana.

Used to be the second largest Downtown in Indiana.

Now most people don't know about it.

(suspenseful music) The central challenge that we're facing here is most people see it as a place to drive through and not arrive at.

That's the case of so many American main streets.

- The Hammond is special to me because I was born here and we've been vested here for a long time.

But when it's two o'clock on Saturday afternoon, this place is a ghost town.

(tense music) - I feel, and many people feel that the Downtown is really the heart of the community and drives the community around it.

And if it's not doing well, maybe the community won't do as well as it could be.

The way Jeff Speck conveys his ideas on the importance of walkability in Downtowns, they really resonated with us here in Hammond.

- Jeff has crystallized the most important element of what makes a town or a city work, which is it has to work for the pedestrian, it has to work for someone walking.

- He's a change agent.

I know Oklahoma City is a better place because of his work.

And there are other cities around the country that are also benefiting from his wisdom as well.

- Jeff, by taking on Downtown Hammond, is really putting his money where his mouth is because a lot of people have given up on Downtown Hammond.

- What we're trying to do here in Hammond is a microcosm of other cities all around the country.

If and when we succeed here, I think that Hammond can be a model for other cities like this.

- This is the work I wanna be doing because this is where design meets society.

It's where design impacts quality of life.

Can't imagine a more potentially rewarding kind of project to be working on.

- And I hope that someday Hammond becomes a great example and we'll have people come visit us and ask us questions, how did you do it?

- If we achieve it, it will be, it will surprise a lot of people.

When we're done, it'll be sunny every day.

(chuckles) (tense music) (tires rumbling) - [Announcer] "Walkable USA" was made possible by the Efroymson Family Fund the South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority, the Legacy Foundation, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Indiana Humanities in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities in partnership with Indiana Landmarks, the Illinois Arts Council through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, and others.

(tires rumbling) Thank you.

(suspenseful music) - How I would describe Hammond, I've actually done this with family members and friends from across the country.

I would say Hammond is a small little city just south of Chicago.

Sometimes people even consider it part of Chicagoland.

- An older industrial town.

We're in the Midwest right on the Lake Michigan shore.

We are a town of big shoulders, lot of industry.

I've lived here most of my life.

- It's a blue collar town, hardworking, diversity in employment, diversity demographically, diversity in income.

It's really, it's, I always say it's a snapshot of America.

I really do.

Downtown Hammond, that part of our city was chosen 130 years ago to be Hammond's heart.

And over the years we've seen that heart fall into neglect.

You don't wanna let your Downtown fall apart 'cause it hurts the image of your entire city.

- We knew our Downtown had a lot of vacancy issues.

We knew that cars just fly through our Downtown without stopping, without checking it out.

Mayor Thom challenged us and said, "Hey, why don't we find someone that is outside the box of Hammond, outside the box of Northwest Indiana, to take a look at our Downtown and get a different perspective?

And that's when I started asking around.

That's when I started Googling and watching videos and TED Talks and reading master plans on other communities, and that's where we got connected with Jeff Speck.

And what Jeff was saying just made so much sense to us and the focus on the pedestrian and creating an urban core that feels safe for people to get out of their cars, walk around, hang around, live, all that good stuff, walkability.

(graphic swooshes) (suspenseful music) - The general theory of walkability starts by asking a question, which is how do you get people to make the choice to walk?

In a country in which driving is so easy and so cheap and so subsidized, the answer is that the walk has to be as good as the drive, but to do that, it needs to do four things simultaneously.

The lock needs to be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.

And you can't just do three of them.

- Jeff doesn't take on a lot of projects because he is so busy.

He said, "I wanna work on Hammond."

- Throw houses on the right.

This project presents a very specific problem that I've never had to solve to this degree, which is a main street, forgive me, that's so far gone.

- He did say that.

And it's in the master plan, I gave you that.

The Downtown core is on life support.

And (chuckles) we kinda read that and just rolled our eyes.

I mean, but that's how drastic he said our Downtown is.

- None of these streets in the Downtown core feel safe or walkable.

- [Civilian] Woo!

- Every single street here is wrong.

(group chuckling) Every single street in our study area, there's something wrong with it.

It's unique to the degree that it went from so tremendously lively to so entirely dead.

- In its heyday, Downtown Hammond was a lively, vibrant, exciting place.

(lively music) Was filled with bright marquees, neon lights, grand department stores, and even grander movie palaces.

- It was truly a boom town.

The real heyday was the '50s.

It was hard to walk up and down these sidewalks.

This melting pot of humanity came together.

And as you were walking down from here around the corner, you probably heard six different languages, minimum, just walking a block.

- We would come here to the Downtown area for shopping, for movies.

There was so much here.

A huge Woolworths building, the Goldblatt's, the JCPenney.

- [Joseph] It's frequently brought up that "A Christmas Story" is about Hammond.

- Stuck, stuck, stuck!

- The town in the movie is named Hohman, which is Hohman Avenue is the main street in Hammond.

The Higbee's department store where he goes to visit Santa and gets kicked down the slide and told- - You'll shoot your eye out, kid.

- [Joseph] That was based on Goldblatt's which was the big department store in Downtown Hammond.

- It really was amazing.

(suspenseful music) What really caused the fall of Downtown Hammond was three things.

First of all, the economy changed in the factories.

Our area became Rust Belt City just like everywhere else.

And so the jobs left and when the jobs left, the people don't shop much anymore or they move away.

And then the second thing was the people that had good careers and they decided that a little bungalow here in Hammond wasn't suitable anymore.

So a lot of the money that had been made by the blue collar people left and moved out to the areas further south.

And the third thing, of course, once that money left, then the businesses decided, well, there's nothing left here.

And so they moved out with them - And people would drive to the suburbs or the corn fields and go to the shopping mall because it was convenient.

Downtowns across the country started to die off.

And along with that dying off came the broken windows, boarded up buildings, businesses that had gone dark and could no longer sustain themselves, and the Downtown area of Hammond was one of those victims as well.

(suspenseful music) - You have to realize that we used to build wonderful communities in the US until, really, well into the '20.

There was this great lull in development between the Great Depression essentially and through World War II where nothing was built.

And when that was over, we had become thoroughly a fan of this modernist planning concept that had come from Europe of separating uses.

And so any post-war development of any scale in the US was pretty much a pod of single use.

It was either a housing subdivision or an office park or a shopping center or something else, which could not create community because it was just one thing, one aspect of daily life isolated from every other aspect of daily life.

- [Announcer] So it is that we can live where we want to, the shopping centers now come out to meet us.

- So you had this model of cities that were specifically designed without centers around the presumption of individual automobile ownership and use.

And celebrating this fact that we now have this incredible tool, this automobile that allows us to have a house in the country and a job in the city.

- Like so many people these days, we live in the suburbs and Dave needs the car every day for business.

When he was gone, I was practically a prisoner in my own home, but that's all changed now.

Three weeks ago, we bought another Ford.

- Our cities began to decant into these suburbs.

And what's really important to stress is that there was a collection of federal programs, most prominent among them, highway building and loan guaranteeing that actively caused this to happen.

We built more highways than any other country.

If you look at different North American cities, the more highways, the more the inner city decanted, the more the inner cities were evacuated.

As the city manager of Rochester, New York said, "We built an evacuation route.

It worked.

Everybody evacuated."

(chuckles) I was trained as an architect and I always thought growing up that I was gonna be an architect.

In fifth grade, I would ask everyone in my class what kind of house they wanted.

I designed a house for every one of them and drew it up with floor plans and elevations, so there was like 30 houses in this book.

But as I was about to start architecture school, I heard about this new town called Seaside that was in the Florida Panhandle by these two architects, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

- Liz and I happened to be from walkable areas and we were nostalgic for what we had grown up with, you know, Philadelphia and Barcelona.

And so we projected it, kind of the places we all want it to be.

- [Reporter] In the new village of Seaside, Florida, people, not cars dominate.

- The experience that visitors to Seaside could have they weren't having at home was that you could walk out the front door of your house and walk a few blocks to the market or for a cup of coffee or to the beach without ever having to drive.

- What Seaside did that was so important, for the first time since before the wars essentially is it said, we can make a new place in America that isn't just a pod.

It's got places to live, work, recreate, a shop altogether, and we're gonna make a town.

And Seaside was possible because of the absence of rules.

That almost everywhere else in America, making these places is illegal.

- There was actually no bureaucracy to tell us no.

This was so out of the way that there was no one up in the county seat to say, no, the roads have to be wider.

It was serendipitous from beginning to end.

- [Jeff] I realized that they were doing design at a scale in which it was having a lot more impact on people's quality of life.

In 1993, when I graduated from architecture school, I got to join the office as a project manager.

- Jeff's early work with DPZ was working on the urban design of new and existing communities.

Those were the years in which some of the basic ideas of walkable communities were being brought to the public.

- Here we were experimenting with pedestrian streets, we were experimenting with doubling the density on every lot.

In all our projects, we were experimenting with mixed use and putting restaurants next to shops, next to houses, and other things that weren't being done.

What was the aha moment for me and so many other people who are now in this business is that I heard Andres Duany speak.

- When you speak to people who live in the suburbs, you find two contradictory, I think, opinions.

One is that they like where they live, they like their house and they like their lot.

What they don't like is the public realm.

As soon as they step out of their front yard, they enter a situation which is essentially harsh, stressful, and ugly.

- Before hearing Andres's talk, I knew that there were certain places in, even in the Boston area that I really loved, like, you know, Cambridge or Beacon Hill.

And there were other places I really hated like the Golden Triangle in Framingham around the mall.

I hadn't really thought about why I loved them or why I hated them.

And after an hour in a room with Andres, everything was clear to me.

It kinda lifted the wool from my eyes and made me understand the built environment in our country so much better than I ever had before.

Understand the underlying rules and practices that had led us off the path of making walkable, livable places, understanding how it was possible perhaps to get back on that path.

- And it was Jeff's idea that this could be a book.

- It's called "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream."

The Wall Street Journal called it the urbanist's Bible.

- I think it sold close to 100,000 copies, which is really unusual when architects are the authors.

The goal of "Suburban Nation" was to bring this information about sprawl and these ideas about alternatives to a broader public.

- And what was fascinating to see being in the firm from '93 to '03 is that it took Seaside and then the other subsequent projects to help cities realize what they had.

So a lot of cities that didn't, a lot of Downtowns that were disinvested, that didn't love themselves, the planners in those cities learned about Seaside and recognized actually that becoming more like themselves and what they used to be, they could thrive again.

- A community group which came to us from Cleveland came to our office in Miami and said, "We're here to ask you to give us Seaside in Cleveland.

If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us."

And really convinced us to start working with existing communities to rebuild the wonderful places that they had once been.

(suspenseful music) (can spraying) - I gotta scratch my nose.

(chuckling) What we're trying to do here in Hammond is a microcosm of other cities all around the country.

We're fighting deteriorating infrastructure, we're fighting poverty and crime.

People ask me why I'm here and what I'm doing here in North Hammond, especially in Downtown Hammond.

I got tired of people saying, somebody oughta, when is somebody gonna do something about it?

And I bought some property here.

At one point, I owned about 60,000 square feet of commercial real estate, all of which was abandoned, all of which had broken windows, graffiti.

And I bought these places and people thought I was nuts.

But we bought 'em, we fixed the windows, we painted over the graffiti, we picked up the garbage all in the name of bringing attention back to Downtown Hammond.

I'm a hippie from the '60s, man.

I mean, we grew up knowing that we had to, if anybody's gonna make a change, it's gonna be us.

This building that we're in now, I literally took everything out of this building from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, everything came outta here.

And now we've rebuilt it.

We've revisualize it as being something else.

We decided to make a nightclub restaurant for people in the neighborhood, for people of the area to come to.

A place I couldn't get kicked out of.

(mellow music) I'm very lucky that my efforts personally coincided with the administration that's here now.

And these guys are a different generation, a different type of politician.

- You know, I feel lucky as it's mayor because the people let me be myself.

I'm sort of a character and I think they enjoy having a mayor that's sort of a character.

(lively accordion music) Seriously?

- What?

- What, you got an accordion, beer and perogies at the staff table?

- Well, Mayor, I'm pretty excited about the polka party at the Marina.

It's July 24th from 02:00 to 06:00.

- I always said when I first became mayor, one of the advantages that having somebody like me as mayor was I took an outsider's perspective to the city 'cause I didn't grow up here.

Sometimes when you live in a city for decades, you become used to things the way they are.

That's just the way it is.

It's the way it's always been.

So I came into Hammond with ideas and ways of doing things that were different, right?

So here I am, you know, 16 years into my process, 15, 16 years as mayor when I meet Jeff, and I think that maybe I had become a little accustomed to how Hammond was.

And I lost that edge and I think Jeff really brought that edge back to me and back to my team - Slightly make you know that we like this option better.

- You know, I think that Jeff, by taking on Downtown Hammond, is really putting his money where his mouth is because a lot of people have like given up on Downtown Hammond.

They gave up on Downtown Hammond in the '80s and the '90s when we were losing our department stores.

So to see him take on this project, I think that this could be really one of the crown jewels in his career if we could turn this around like we want to.

- With all fairness to Hammond (chuckles), and not to make them feel bad, but actually reflecting my gratitude for this opportunity.

This is probably the most struggling Downtown I've ever worked in.

I've worked in a bunch of others that were fairly dead.

When I worked in Cedar Rapids, it was pretty dead.

It's doing much better.

When I worked in Oklahoma City, I wouldn't say it was dead, but there were almost no merchants in the Downtown of Oklahoma City when we did our plan there.

And that's come back really in a lovely way.

(suspenseful music) - No city in American history, I suppose, has come as far as fast as Oklahoma City.

And that's partially because it had a long way to go.

You go back to 1990, it had become a pretty dreadful place.

If you lived in Downtown Oklahoma City in that time period, you were probably in jail.

Mayor Norick went chasing a United Airlines opportunity.

They were searching the country for a community to locate a really nice economic development opportunity.

5 to 10,000 high paying blue collar jobs in a maintenance facility.

And ultimately Oklahoma City did not win this investment opportunity.

Unbeknownst to the people in Oklahoma City, United had sent a team of mid-level executives into the city along with their spouses and just told 'em, "Hey, spend the weekend there and see what the city's about."

And when they reported back to the board in Chicago, the experience showed that United didn't choose Oklahoma City because they couldn't imagine forcing their employees to have to live there.

And so in the fall of 2004, just a few months after being elected mayor, I was invited by the US Conference of Mayors to attend this, this kind of learning academy over a long weekend.

And it brought in Jeff Speck who was, you know, at that time, you know, kind of working in those circles.

We had the least walkable Downtown anywhere.

But my interest in Jeff, I think, you know, piqued his interest in Oklahoma City.

And along with his advice, I kinda didn't go away.

- And then this amazing thing happened, which is Devon Energy built this 51-story tower in the heart of the Downtown that was generating $180 million or so in tax increment.

And so they asked themselves, what can we do with all this money that's gonna be a windfall to the city?

And they asked that question on about the same day that my walkability study landed on the desk of the mayor.

- We were trying to redesign this area that we called Core to Shore, 'cause it was the core of Downtown to the shore of what would later be called the Oklahoma River.

And Jeff Speck was ultimately hired as a subcontractor to come in and start helping us design the streets in this new, more highly advanced and highly, you know, urbanized way.

(suspenseful music) It's hard to imagine today, but Oklahoma City's Downtown streets were five lanes wide and virtually all one-way streets.

And they were, it was almost as if they were designed for people to get out of Downtown, evacuate as fast as possible, get on the interstates, and then head to the suburbs where they belonged.

If you were stopped at a stoplight and you were waiting for a pedestrian to cross, it almost seemed like how dare that person slow me down?

We were a car-centric community.

Ultimately Jeff's design was to say, look, you got this huge capacity of Downtown streets that you don't need.

He was talking about making the streets, you know, go down to four lanes or even two in some cases.

The whole idea that you would reduce capacity of your street, that was a really tough sell to a business leader or, you know, a politician in Oklahoma City.

We're always expanding streets.

Why would we shrink a street?

And, you know, I gotta admit that, you know, it wasn't my first instinct either, but Jeff was explaining through traffic studies, look, this is the capacity you have.

This is all you really need.

And, by the way, we can put some on-street parking in there, and of course everybody knows we need more, you know, Downtown parking.

- The head of Devon Energy and the city manager actually pointed at me in my face and said, "We will not be stuck in traffic after a Thunder game, and they meant it, and I had to promise them that they wouldn't be.

It took longer and it was much more expensive.

They called it Project 180 'cause it was 180 acres, but it was also about $180 million.

And they say it was a 180 degree turnaround in terms of what this Downtown was like - When it emerged and the Devon Tower was fully completed by 2012, and Project 180 at that time was kind of in its final stages, you could see that Oklahoma City's Downtown infrastructure was like something people in Oklahoma City had never imagined.

Jeff, in his own way is, you know, is changing America.

I know Oklahoma City is a better place because of his work.

And there are other cities around the country that are also benefiting from his wisdom as well.

(inspirational music) - You know, there's a lot of great planners better than me, but my career has been about sharing the message of good planning.

So I give two types of talks.

I give talks about why we need more walkable cities and how to make more walkable cities.

What we do has been called many different names through the years.

First it was called Traditional Town planning, which kinda turned off the liberals.

Then it was called New Urbanism, which turned off the conservatives.

Then we just called it good planning or best practices in city planning, whatever.

But calling it the walkable city is actually what's allowed a lot of people to relate to it much better.

We wrote "Suburban Nation," I think my colleagues also believed that we could stop suburban sprawl.

I don't think that anymore.

I think the subsidies, the market perversities, the indoctrinated behaviors, and the degree to which we've all become so car-dominant and car-dependent is maybe not irreversible, but it's certainly not going to allow our society to change in that fundamental way.

When I realized that, my mission kind of shifted to what it is now, which is making that urban lifestyle available to more people.

I found the books and the lectures that the books cause me to give have probably been the most impactful thing I've been able to do in terms of spreading the word, in terms of creating converts - Walkable city, and Jeff's work after "Suburban Nation," it's understood that walkability as the way in to the complexity of making great places, that if they can focus on one thing, which everybody can understand, that that can be the door into the rest of the project, the rest of the complexity.

And so from that sense, it's brilliant.

(mellow music) (tires rumbling) (mellow music) - When Jeff Speck came in and he had lunch here with the mayor and chief of staff.

And he's like, "They don't have any, this parking's all wrong.

They don't, like, why are they parked like this?"

You know what I mean?

And he says, "Hey," and he walked out the front door, he says, "what you need is this, you need diagonal parking.

You can gain," I think we gained another six parking spaces, but also it gives you the whole entire feel of like you're driving through a small town.

And I was like, "Genius."

I'm like, "Who would've thunk that?"

And it's super cool.

Our customers love it.

We love it, but it really gives you that small town, like, Main Street feel.

(tires rumbling) (mellow music) - [Jeff] I talk about the useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting walk, all those four things being necessary to get people to make the choice to walk.

Historic preservation and older buildings factor very heavily into the fourth category, the interesting walk.

It's really what makes our cities different from each other.

- There's so much rich history in what some people call these Rust Belt cities.

These beautiful structures, these beautiful buildings aren't being built anymore.

You know, this building's 37,000 square feet, it's 16 inches poured concrete, goes all the way down to bedrock.

They don't build 'em like this anymore.

You know, we own this building.

We own, you know, 474, we own the building across the street.

All of those buildings were gonna be demolished for a parking structure or something else.

I have a responsibility to make sure I can do my part to save 'em in any way I can because we wanna be a cornerstone of the community.

From here on into Gary where we all, we have the locations at, we are centrally located in what people call red zone areas.

Most businesses don't wanna take the risk in neighborhoods that have been redlined.

They don't wanna take the risk.

I grew up in one of those neighborhoods.

I'm gonna do my damnedest to make sure that I give as much as I can to see it grow.

(mellow music) - This is what I would call an anchor institution in the Downtown, it's Paul Henry's Art Gallery.

It was a hardware store.

They've still got all this amazing hardware stuff from the early 20th century.

It's owned by the guy whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather owned it.

But most importantly, they have an open mic night every Thursday night that gathers people regionally from all over who have, you know, different talents, different interests, but it's an amazing community that forms here.

It's a very artistic community.

And that's why one reason, one of several that we're proposing, turning this alley here into what we're calling Arts Alley.

And you can see it's a wonderfully shaped space.

The Towle Theater is there, the art gallery which has open mic is here.

So you can imagine this covered in graffiti and other artworks, and the theater maybe spilling out with tables and chairs and just becoming a place that's special in the community.

(mellow music) - The Hammond is special to me because I was born here and we've been vested here for a long time.

But when it's two o'clock on Saturday afternoon, this place is a ghost town.

I'm here, but when you look out and back, there's not a car in sight.

So that's what needs to change is that we need more establishments that are open regular hours so that when people come to visit any of them, then they'll look around for other things to do.

- Jane Jacobs in 1960 talking about Wall Street asked, "400,000 people come here to work every day.

Why is there not a great restaurant?

Why is there not one great gym?"

And the answer is what she called time spread.

And time spread is what you get when you have a lunchtime crowd and a dinnertime crowd.

If nobody's living in a place, then you only get the lunchtime crowd.

There's almost no residential in this Downtown, and that's the case of so many, you know, American main streets.

But it is the great potential.

And what we've seen is that residential coming back to urban cores has been the key step in getting more business in urban cores.

(energetic music) (grinder whining) (sparks crackling) (grinder whining) - Well, for a couple years, we were looking for a place that could house all of our stuff in one spot and we didn't know if we were gonna buy some property and build something or get a commercial property.

And so I was scrolling, searching all the time, and I found a building in Hammond.

And I mentioned it to her and the first thing she said was, "Hammond?

You get your tires changing Hammond."

- (chuckles) I'm like, "No way."

And he's like, "You need, just give it a chance.

Give it a chance."

I'm like, "Okay."

And then as soon as we looked at this building, it was like, that's it.

When we got the building, when we even thought about buying and saying, "Okay, this is it.

This is our spot."

Like we didn't even know the area was being redeveloped.

We had no clue until we went to the city to see if we could have our businesses here, if they would even allow it.

The biggest thing that I saw missing was a sense of, that this was Downtown, this was just Hammond, and all the other neighborhoods were taking, they had a Downtown and they're neighborhoods of Hammond.

But this is the Downtown.

And I'm like, how is this not the heart and center of Hammond?

(energetic music) The Hammond Downtown Development District Corporation is a non-for-profit that we started because we just saw this lack of community between the small businesses Downtown.

Brian yells at me 'cause he's like, "You can't leave the building" 'cause I end up gone for two hours talking with the neighbors, talking with the contractors, meeting new people.

We do farmer's market and an art market on the every second Friday.

And we brought second lines, New Orleans style second lines to Hammond.

- [Group] Hey!

(lively trumpet music) Ho!

(energetic music) - Those are a start of our events and we have so many more planned, but right now we're trying to just create consistency so that way people don't have to think so hard about when these events are going on and they just know every Monday we can come to Downtown Hammond and that's what this area needs, is consistency.

- Honestly, one of the biggest reasons why we're doing this is because, you know, we travel quite a bit and when we're traveling somewhere, we're looking for a farmer's market or a cruise night or just cool stuff to do.

So why not do it right in front of where we're at?

- We have this opportunity to mold and to start something down here.

It's creating the city that we wanna live in.

We want people here.

Every single week we bring new people here that tell us they had such a wonderful time and they never even, they've never been downtown.

- Woo.

- To me that's what's important.

- So what does Downtown Hammond have going for it?

It has the bones of the ability to offer this five-minute district, to live, work, play within a five-minute walk.

It wouldn't matter at all if we didn't have the kind of demographics, the kind of economy that really depend on places that can offer five-minute neighborhoods.

If you can't attract the talent, you can't attract the jobs or investment that will represent 90+% of our economic growth for the next 20 years.

In other words, you can't grow your economy.

You're stuck in decline.

(tires rumbling) - It's super important that we don't just do the physical change without the human change.

And that's why from the very beginning, the principle strategy of this effort has been the housing.

(numbers rattling) - To have people live here, that's kind of a new concept, but it's not out of the realm of what we can do here.

We have vacant properties that we can build from ground up.

We have vacant older buildings that we can reutilize for housing that once housed offices.

- This building was built in 1924 and it sat vacant for the last six years.

There was a pipe that burst and we had about six feet of water in the basement for several years.

So we're right now working on sort of transforming this building and renovating it to be 100 apartments and we're gonna have about 8,000 square feet of commercial on the ground floor.

We'll have a retail, we're also gonna have a beautiful event center for weddings and different events.

So many people around the region have been to this building, they've started working in this building, they open up their first checking account in the building.

So the goal was really to keep it open for people to enjoy.

Between this project, which will offer a hundred new units, residential units, and a couple other developments that are underway, there's gonna be several hundred new residents that live downtown.

- But the housing without improving the environment won't change this place and improving the environment without the people won't change this place.

I do have particular hope though for this effort because we have a train coming in.

(train horn honking) (tracks rattling) - [Anne] We have an existing line called the South Shore train that goes from South Bend all the way up to Millennium Park of Chicago.

This is an extension that starts in Hammond that will really be a big draw for people and residential and businesses in Downtown.

- So you have this Downtown that's concentrated on growth in urban housing alongside this trade.

And that's a game changer.

(mellow music) - Nothing correlates more in terms of where college-educated talent wants to live than the ability to live without a car.

So the train station is vitally important to Downtown's ability to be an engine for economic revival and economic growth.

Probably for different reasons today than pre pandemic.

Pre-pandemic, the train meant access to jobs.

Post-pandemic, the train represents access to experience, to amenity.

(bell rings) (tires rumbling) - What's important to understand is when you make places better, you run the risk of making them unaffordable.

The principal concern is, one, rents go up so you can't stay in your apartment.

Two, taxes go up so you can't stay in your house, right?

And then there's a whole bunch of other more subtle things like, oh, the shops that are here don't really serve me anymore 'cause it's all Starbucks and fancy cupcakes for tourists or whatever.

That's a very real problem.

Now I have to say, every city is somewhere on that curve and Hammond is not even making it onto the bottom.

I mean, no one lives downtown in Hammond.

The changes we make to Downtown Hammond aren't going to impact the real estate prices in the surrounding area for some time.

(tires rumbling) The poster child village of Seaside, they started out selling to school teachers and other folks, you could buy, you know, buy a lot for $18,000 and a house for not too much more.

And that changed rapidly as people started to want to be there and buy the prices up.

- Seaside becomes expensive because it's rare because it's so hard to build a place like this because it's against the code.

This is obviously... - In the '80s and '90s, whenever we spoke about suburbia as identifying its problems or as a topic of urban design, we were always told, well, isn't that what the people want?

The market's driving it.

The regulatory structure and the financial structure of development were such that other, there were not other options.

Suburbia really was a product of planning.

The regulations that the planners wrote, the zoning codes, and the finance system which had evolved to focus on separation of uses.

You financed housing or you financed shopping centers, but nobody wanted to support them together.

So even mixed use was not possible.

And the mix of housing types that makes great neighborhoods was not possible.

- The demand is so much greater than the supply.

And so those critics who say, "Well, it's impractical and nobody wants it and people want the picket fence at the end of the cul-de-sac, some people do, and God love 'em.

But a lot of people want to have a community that's a complete community where they can go to church, walk to the store, send their kids on the bike to the park, not have to drive their kids to school.

And we just don't have enough places that enable that way of life.

- So in the end, what Jeff and I and everybody else are doing is saying, just let the market operate by leveling the playing field.

Allow walkable streets.

- We also always had colleagues around the country who were essentially moving in the same direction and a small group of us got together to say, what's the best way to spread these ideas or to enable others to have these experiences?

And eventually what grew out of that was the organization, the Congress for the New Urbanism.

And it continues today with networking, sharing of information and observing and responding to changes as they occur.

(mellow music) - The big questions at the societal level are what is the difference between a society in which the car is not an instrument of freedom, but a prosthetic device that you need just to live your life?

And there are lots of interesting design-y reasons that we can give and have given over many years.

But for me, the big discovery was hearing from the economists, the environmentalists, and the epidemiologists about their own reasons for wanting a less auto-oriented society.

In 1970, people spent about 10% of their income on transportation.

Between 1970 and 2010, we basically doubled the number of roads in our country.

And as a result of that, what did that accomplish?

We now spend 20% of our income on transportation.

The environmentalists, it's fascinating, because the environmentalism movement, its history, if you study it, it's always been anti-city, it's always been pro-nature and go out and enjoy nature and protect nature.

But the city is evil 'cause the city is the source of all the pollution.

That conception was only reinforced when we started mapping carbon because the carbon maps are done per square mile.

If you look at any carbon map of the US, it looks like a night sky photograph of the US.

Brightest in the city centers, duller in the suburbs and green in the excerpts.

And the message that sends, again, is countryside good, city bad.

Until one very smart economist, Scott Bernstein said, "Is that the right way to map carbon?

Maybe we should be mapping carbon per household."

And he started making these maps per household and they just flip.

Because basically the more you drive, the bigger your carbon footprint.

So once the environmentalists realized that, it spread like wildfire and now you have folks like Ed Glaeser, you know, in "Triumph of the City" who says, you know, "We are a destructive species.

If you love nature, the best thing you can do is stay the heck away from it and move to a city.

The denser, the better.

Finally, the epidemiologists' book came out called "Urban Sprawl and Public Health."

And what this book said is that we have basically designed out of existence the useful walk in our communities.

You know, I like to say the fact that you drive to park, to take the escalator to the gym, to walk on the treadmill is why we have the first generation of Americans who are expected to live shorter.

Actually now it's the second generation Americans who are expected to live shorter lives than their parents.

There is the often unspoken as a health issue, concern of car crashes.

And I guess, you know, if you die, that's bad for your health, right?

The death rate that we have from car crashes, either riding in them or being hit by them, is a place-based phenomenon.

You're three times as likely to be killed in a car in the US as you are in Europe.

You are four times as likely to be killed in a car in Orlando as you are in Boston.

Certain parts of each city are much safer than other parts based on whether they're designed to move cars or to be places to actually live and walk around.

- One little snippet, I remember the first public presentation that Jeff did was here at the Towle Theater where we are today.

And Jeff and I parked across the street in a parking lot and walked across Hohman Avenue, four lanes of traffic on a walk signal.

And Jeff literally had to pull me out of the street on a car that came whizzing around the corner.

- We really feel like it's gonna take something quite major to turn this Downtown around.

In some Downtowns, we have found that just fixing the striping so that parking is welcome again.

Perhaps you have bike lanes and cars travel more slowly because the lanes are the right size.

Sometimes we find that's enough.

We feel here that we need a little bit more.

And we're actually using a model that we learned from a town called Lancaster, California, where they took a main street that had almost an identical configuration to this five lanes.

It was carrying about an identical number of trips, 15,000 cars per day, and they made the choice to narrow it to two lanes, parking on both flanks, and then diagonal angle parking in the middle of the street.

It's effectively turning the street into a linear plaza with very slow flow characteristics.

And when the cars are moving slowly again, life will come back.

- They're actually copying our boulevard.

That's remarkable.

Lancaster's, as far as the residents are concerned, have always identified the boulevard as Lancaster.

Even when we were a dirt road, Downtown is where people went.

Then it slowly became an eyesore.

(chuckles) Most of the businesses had closed up.

We were seeing an exodus of people.

And then 2008 hit, nobody could move, you know, because the housing market collapsed but, and that actually was a good thing for Lancaster 'cause it held everybody in place while we rebuilt it.

(mellow music) So philosophy behind it, you know, there's an understanding that once a week, we went to the marketplace, you know, and that's what cemented community.

People wanna be engaged in their community and you gotta give 'em a reason to do it.

East Boulevard gives us a reason to bring those different things to them, which are just an excuse for people to come together and recognize that we're different than everybody else, we're Lancaster.

(mellow music) (tires rumbling) - Hello, everyone.

Thank you for coming out tonight.

And thank you to those watching online.

My name is Anne Anderson.

I'm the director of economic development for the City of Hammond.

And I wanna welcome you to the unveiling of the Hohman Avenue redesign plan that the city will implement in the next year in Downtown Hammond.

These plans are part of a determined vision for revitalizing our Downtown.

- A few years back, we hired a rockstar in the planning circle, Jeff Speck, to analyze what was going on in Downtown Hammond, give us recommendations on what we could do, move more towards the 2100s instead of more, like, you know, the 1950s.

And we had a lot of great recommendations from Mr. Speck and it would've been a waste of money if we paid this gentleman to do all that work and not follow it up with action.

What makes this effort different?

First off, we're putting our money where our mouth is.

You know, I mean, we have $5 million budgeted towards just the first phase.

And we're dead serious about moving this project ASAP.

Now we have the funding through the American Rescue Plan, which is wonderful, and we have the ability to get it going.

(machines whining) - [Camera Man] How excited are you for this happening today?

- Well, I would jump up and down.

I'm very, very excited.

Today in Downtown Hammond, we are starting phase one of the redesign of Hohman Avenue, which is our main street in Downtown.

So we're gonna be reconstructing the street, doing a road diet, bringing it down from four lanes to two lanes.

But what's happening today is we are relocating our iconic Rotunda sculpture.

So it's a great sculpture that the city had.

David Black, he's a renowned sculptor design in 2000.

It means a lot to Hammond and we didn't wanna lose it, so we found a home for it down the street a little bit while we rework the streets.

And a developer's gonna come in and put in a big redevelopment, mixed use residential project, and then when it's ready, we're gonna bring the Rotunda back into the plaza and reactivate it with some water feature.

And it's gonna be a great way to reactivate a public space right in the heart of our Downtown.

- I had a couple of questions when you... People ask me whether I think the city will be successful in this endeavor and I just really don't know.

I don't think any of us really know.

They're ideas, right?

They're ideas and you put the idea into action and see what happens.

Some of these ideas are kind of radical.

It's gonna be tough for people to understand.

This is a bike lane.

You can't park here.

It's gonna be tough for people to understand, to accept, you have to slow down through the Downtown area.

It'll take time.

Here in front of the building, they made the bike lane and they've put much more parking, 'cause, again, we want parking here.

Well, it looks like I'm parking in the middle of the street because there's the bike lane and then there's the caution lane and the parking is six feet from the curb.

So my cars are out literally in the middle of the street.

At first I said I'm not gonna park there because it's too dangerous.

My cars are gonna get hit.

But then I thought to myself, you know, again, if we're gonna be innovators, if we're gonna challenge the status quo, then we might have to have a bashed in car every once in a while, so (chuckles) I'm parking my car out there and I put some cones, the city actually loaned me some orange cones.

And so we'll see what happens.

I've picked up the cones four times and my car's been hit twice.

But, you know, it's early.

(chuckles) It's early.

What does the eastern philosophy say?

That the voyage of a thousand miles starts with the first step and these are the first steps.

(suspenseful music) - There's a lot of people who live happily in Hammond in very nice suburban environments, but they really have no Downtown.

We have to understand that every relocation decision, whether it be a college graduate or a corporation, is made with an image of place in mind.

And that image is palpable.

It's powerful.

It's resolutely physical.

It's a picture of buildings and streets and squares and cafes and the social life that those places engender.

If that's not a positive image, then the community does not have a positive image.

The image of the city that you see on the postcards, it's not somebody's house on a cul-de-sac.

It's the Downtown.

- This is one of the huge hurdles.

When the fall of Downtown Hammond happened, people went back into their neighborhoods and they ignored this area.

Not without good reason.

There was nothing going on here anymore.

And for a lot, there were many people, there was sadness.

They didn't even wanna come up to look at it because they remembered how it used to be.

And so it's vital, absolutely vital for people to recognize that if you really want a city, if you want a wholehearted all-American city, then you better get behind your Downtown.

(mellow music) (engine roaring) (mellow music continues) (tires rumbling) (excavator beeping) - This is the noise of progress.

(truck beeping) We love that noise.

We are in the final stages, finally, of this project.

It started over a year a half ago.

And we have had, we've had setbacks.

With any kind of construction project, there have been delays, there have been weather issues, there have been cars driving through barriers and into holes, that broke communication wires.

So stuff you cannot foresee (chuckles) has happened.

The business community in Downtown is a little like, come on, Hammond, If they can just hang on a few months longer, they are gonna have people living and working Downtown.

(mellow music) It's been four years since we've received our master plan for Downtown from Jeff Speck.

And those four years have been an absolute whirlwind of activity and ideas and meetings and struggles and setbacks and delays, but excitement and plans and re-imagining.

We are restarting Downtown's heart.

- 10 years from now, I have, I have confidence that we will see a beautiful Main Street, a beautiful new plaza, 600, 700 people living within a five-minute walk of this spot where we are right now.

And people wanting to live here and occupying homes as fast as we can make them.

(mellow music) Can't imagine a more potentially rewarding kind of project to be working on.

- I actually was at a festival a few years ago in Downtown, right in the core.

And the festival went into the evening.

So the sun went down, it started getting dark.

Standing in the parking lot, I was looking at our Downtown corridor, and all the buildings were dark.

Just floors and floors of dark windows.

And I poked the person next to me and I'm like, "Can you imagine in a few years, all those lights, all those windows lit up with people living there?

Driving through Hammond in the evening on your way home and seeing all the occupied windows, just people out on the streets walking around."

It's so exciting and I know it's not a pipe dream.

I know it's gonna happen.

And I believe our partnership with Jeff Speck and his walkability idea is definitely gonna get us there.

- I hope in five years that there's a ton of cool bars, restaurants, cocktails, unique foods, more outdoor stuff, just places to go and hang out.

And, you know, like the places that we travel to.

- That we can walk down the street to get food.

We can go to see music down the street.

We can go get groceries locally, we can do those type of things without driving 20 minutes.

That's the goal, is to have a true walkable city.

(inspirational music) (engine roaring) (inspirational music) (inspirational music) (inspirational music) (mellow music) - [Announcer] "Walkable USA" was made possible by the Efroymson Family Fund, the South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority, the Legacy Foundation, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Indiana Humanities in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities in partnership with Indiana Landmarks.

The Illinois Arts Council, through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, and others.

(mellow music) (mellow music continues) (mellow music continues)