Transit development districts near South Shore Line stations are bearing fruit, TDD steering committee members reported.
Michigan City’s district surrounding its 11th Street station is bringing several new restaurants, aided in part by the eight new liquor licenses the city received from the Indiana General Assembly’s largesse, Mayor Angie Nelson Deuitch reported Wednesday. “I thought we would maybe get two, but we got eight.”
In August, residents are expected to start moving into the Flaherty & Collins building attached to the train station, she said. The building includes commercial space on the first floor, perhaps for a large restaurant, and residential space above.
A cultural trail will lead South Shore Line riders to Washington Park, Indiana Dunes National Park’s Mount Baldy, and other destinations, Nelson Deuitch said.
“We have a lot going on all at once,” she said. “Our growing pains are like puberty right now. Our feet are growing like three sizes at a time,” she said.
Gary Redevelopment Director Chris Harris said his city also got liquor licenses and has a request for proposals active for the new Lake County Convention Center, with a contract likely to be awarded by the end of April. That’s probably the city’s biggest development project in decades, he said.
“We’re at the beginning stages of growing,” Harris said, but it’s started.
“2026 is definitely going to be a very transformative year for the downtown corridor,” he said, with demolition work being done in partnership with the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority.
The city is also working on connections to Indiana Dunes National Park from downtown and the Lake Street corridor in the city’s Miller section.
Last month, Gov. Mike Braun made an appointment to the commission set up for replacing the Gary Metro station with a new multimodal station. Gary is working with the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District to make sure platform heights line up correctly for the train tracks.
That new station, serving Gary Public Transportation Corp. buses and South Shore Line trains, along with the demolition work being done in conjunction with the RDA, will be instrumental in building confidence in Gary’s downtown, Harris said.
“We’re finding our way through the process, but we’re very excited.”
New TDD Steering Committee chair Bob Thompson, representing Valparaiso, doesn’t have a TDD formalized yet, but the city is authorized to have one. Its transit center is attached to Journeyman Distillery.
The city is planning high-density housing near that station, at the old ANCO plant downtown, he said. At the old McGill Manufacturing plant further north, the city plans to convert the old factory into a senior center.
The Beverly Shores/Pines transit district is the newest, authorized last year. Representatives are working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on costs and issues associated with extending sewers from Michigan City to the two towns, so development can occur along U.S. 12, RDA Communications Director David Wellman said.
Hammond is putting together a request for proposals at its Hammond Gateway station, built to serve as a connection between the South Shore Line’s new Monon Corridor route to Dyer and the traditional east-west Lakeshore Corridor route. Service on the Monon Corridor begins March 31.
East Chicago, which has done extensive revitalization for years, is ramping up, with consultants hired to address connecting the train station with housing, workforce and transit needs.
Northwest Indiana communities that want help with brownfields can get help through the Indiana Brownfields Program, Stakeholder Engagement Coordinator John Marsh told the steering committee.
Among the programs is one to remove underground storage tanks so soil underneath them can be evaluated for contamination.
The program’s biggest such project was in Valparaiso in 2022, when the soil was being examined at the former Wendell’s Marathon, at the corner of Calumet Avenue and Fair Street, Morris said.
The $355,000 project “was a beast. It was highly contaminated,” Morris said.
In the 1950s and 1960s, property owners would just put new tanks next to the old ones rather than pulling out tanks that might leak and contaminate the soil and potentially groundwater. “These things are like rabbits. They spawn,” Morris said.
While the Indiana Brownfields Program funds environmental investigations, drums and tanks won’t be left behind when discovered. “We’ll come in and do that surgical removal,” he said, when doing soil borings and installing monitoring wells.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
