Beaver Lake
Walked back to Beaver Lake at Moose River Plains, for the first time in many years. It’s a beautiful, quiet lake and with a stiff breeze on the lake shore and an ample bathe of DEET, it’s pretty free of horse flies for a change.
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Why This New Yorker Returned to the Midwest | The American Conservative
Indianapolis is definitely seeing more high-density infill, even outside of downtown. But the “killer app” for the city is the single-family home. This is a place where you can not just live in a one-bedroom apartment after you graduate from college, but where you can acquire a real home with a yard, etc. and stay for your entire life. So the kinds of question marks people are putting over some of these other cities’ urban cores does not apply as much here where growing up does not necessarily mean moving out.
Indiana is not a single economy so it’s hard to talk about the state itself as competitive or not. There are places in Indiana that have a lot of challenges but also ones that are doing quite well, like Columbus and Lafayette. The Indianapolis region has the talent pool, quality of life, amenities, scale, and a cost profile that makes it competitive with many of the Sunbelt boomtowns (and better in some respects). I think there are a number of Midwestern cities in this category that are potentially ready to break out. They have not yet found a way to break through to the next level and become national rather than merely regional draws. That’s their and our to-do.