Community Engagement · Development Strategy · Urban Planning

Northwest Landing Vision Plan

Indianapolis, Indiana

What

Proformus partnered with the Aspire Higher Foundation to develop the Northwest Landing Quality of Life Vision Plan — a shared guide for a near-northwest-side Indianapolis neighborhood of roughly 2,450 residents across ~435 acres, now steadying after decades of disinvestment. Shaped over eight months by more than 196 residents, business owners, and neighbors, the plan begins with an honest look at the neighborhood today and lays out a practical path to growth on its own terms, without pushing anyone out.

The work translates that engagement into a spatial framework the neighborhood can build from: land-to-assessed-value mapping that pinpoints where small-scale reinvestment yields the most tax-base recovery, catalytic site identification, and Missing Middle infill scenarios on real parcels with real numbers. Organized around a Move / Live / Play place framework, the plan connects safer streets and Neighborways, housing and commercial infill, and a completed Kessler "Diamond Necklace" greenway into a single legible system — with a new Northwest Landing CDC positioned to convene the capital that carries it forward.

From listening to evidence to action

The plan starts where the neighborhood does: eight months of conversation — short and long surveys, one-on-one interviews, and focus groups held in the churches, senior housing, and on the doorsteps people already trust — read alongside an honest accounting of conditions on the ground, from vacancy and land-to-assessed-value ratios to social vulnerability and food access.

Together they pose the question the plan exists to answer — and its non-negotiable: growth without displacement is the test every recommendation has to pass. Whether reinvestment compounds for the longtime residents who held the neighborhood together and keeps homes within reach, or quietly trades them out.

Four guiding themes

Pride & Connection Essentials & Access Local Leadership & Collaboration A Thriving, Welcoming Future

Resolved through three place frameworks

Move + Live + Play

Those themes and frameworks resolve through a matrix of fifteen goals into a slate of fundable, parcel-level interventions: Missing Middle infill near Flanner House and Aspire House, calmed Neighborways and safer crossings, a completed Kessler "Diamond Necklace" greenway, and a neighborhood CDC built to carry the capital forward.

Northwest Landing Vision Plan framework diagram — The plan framework.

Rendering of reinvestment in Northwest Landing — What reinvestment on the neighborhood's own terms can look like.

Planning has failed this neighborhood before

Like many inner-city neighborhoods across the United States, Northwest Landing has a complicated and fractured relationship with the highway that surrounds it. Interstate 65 was constructed in the late 1960s despite heavy community outcry from the predominantly Black neighborhood. Residents insisted the interstate be depressed, so the future infrastructure wouldn't physically rip the neighborhood in two.

Despite over 3,000 signatures and a plea to then-Governor Roger Branigin, the state built I-65 as a fully elevated roadway through the United Northwest area. Planted atop tall grass viaducts, the interstate acts as both a figurative and an actual wall between the neighborhood and Midtown Indianapolis to the east.

That history is why this plan listens first — and why growth without displacement is its test, not its tagline.