Purdue's plans for downtown Indy extension and city's move to fix West Street

The IBJ Podcast with Mason King

Nearly one year ago—July 1, 2024—the urban university in downtown Indianapolis known as IUPUI—or Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis—officially split into two separate campuses. This created Indiana University Indianapolis, a standalone campus in the IU system, and Purdue University in Indianapolis, which is considered an extension of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette.

IU Indianapolis took the vast majority of the land and buildings considered part of IUPUI. The school is focusing in part on research, commercialization and student opportunity in the life sciences and biotech sectors. With its Lafayette extension, Purdue wants to draw more students interested in engineering and business to the university, including through new degree programs such as motorsports engineering and executive education.

With a relatively modest amount of land set aside for its Indianapolis operations, Purdue needed to figure out how it eventually could have an outsized impact. It recently revealed its long-term plans—16 buildings ranging from five to about 20 stories on just 28 acres of land in the northwest sector of downtown. In this week’s edition of the podcast, IBJ’s Mickey Shuey unpacks Purdue’s high-density strategy to serve 15,000 students per year by 2075.

Mickey also digs deep into perhaps the greatest hindrance to growth in that area—West Street, the wide and heavily trafficked thoroughfare that essentially creates a barrier between the Mile Square and everything to the West. As Mickey reports in the latest issue of IBJ, tearing down that figurative wall is becoming a greater priority for the city of Indianapolis. The Hogsett administration has begun “preliminary discussions” with the neighborhood and universities to develop potential solutions. But any fix likely to come from those talks—whether spanning the roadway with bridges or tunnels, creating a parkway, or adding more crosswalks to slow traffic—will be expensive and likely require consensus from many stakeholders.