Fort Wayne’s Eric Doden, President Pago USA, speaks Thursday evening at the Strand Theatre in Kendallville, talking about the aggressive downtown revitalization work his company is doing in Van Wert, Ohio. Staff photo by Steve Garbacz
KENDALLVILLE — How can you flip a languishing downtown quickly?
Buy up half of its buildings. Literally And start doing the renovation yourself.
That’s what’s happening in Van Wert, Ohio, via the strategy shared by former Indiana Economic Development Corp. President Eric Doden of Fort Wayne.
Doden visited the Strand Theatre Thursday to share his presentation, “The Restoration of Van Wert, Ohio,” to a small group of about 20.
Doden’s a northeast Indiana guy, a native of Butler and Fort Wayne resident, a 2011 mayoral candidate in Fort Wayne and former head of Indiana’s top economic development agency from 2013 to 2015 under then-governor Mike Pence.
In that role, Doden traveled around the state and noticed growing blight across the state, especially in small towns.
Between 1950 and 2018, the U.S. population grew by 114%, but population in small towns only rose by about 19% over the same period, showing a fading rural and small-town geography.
“What I saw was the decline of our small downtowns,” Doden said. “I saw a lot of distress across our communities and especially in our downtowns.”
Doden relayed those concerns back to Pence, leading to the state pulling together its Regional Cities Initiative, leading to the state awarding three regions — north central, northeast and southwest Indiana — receiving $42 million in funding for economic development and quality of life projects.
The program allowed some big projects to take root, especially in regional hubs like Fort Wayne, Doden said. But while smaller communities were involved, it wasn’t having the same impact.
“I still wasn’t seeing small towns coming back in the way I feel we can have them come back,” Doden said.
But when looking at the problem, Doden recognized that communities could get multi-million dollar overhauls because the money to do it was already out there in state and federal coffers waiting to be tapped. With buy-in from private investors, foundations and the community, those dollars could be leveraged to much greater effect.
“If you do a $20-30 million project in a small town, you can use the same tools available to bigger cities in a small town,” Doden said.
Doden launched a new development firm, Pago USA, and got connected to leaders in Van Wert, Ohio, who were looking for help in revitalizing their devastated downtown. It was a town Doden was familiar with, as his grandparents lived there and he spent numerous weekends of his childhood there attending church and other visits.
In initial meetings, Van Wert identified its Main Street core, an rectangle around its Main Street, five blocks east to west with one block north and south of Main as its target area.
Within that rectangle, there were 116 buildings, about 100 of which weren’t occupied by government or institutional tenants, Doden said. And of those 100, only three were being fully utilized, with 80 of the buildings in such serious disrepair that they were in danger of collapse.
But within that core was more than 1 million square feet of unutilized space, 70% of which could reasonably be turned into high-demand residential space.
Doden described deplorable conditions in some of the buildings — dead animals littering upper floors, buildings filled with trash, one structure that literally collapsed into the street at 3 a.m. one night.
“These buildings were uninhabitable,” Doden said. “This stuff was just gross, there was no other way to put it
After looking at the town, Doden asked for the local community to put up just over $3 million, laying out a plan to buy as many buildings as possible and then, as new owners, launch the renovation work.
It took a little time, but the money came together and they went to work, ultimately buying up 52 of 80 buildings on the target list.
But how to fix them up? As Doden said, the money for those kinds of projects is already out there, you just need to know where to get it. They pulled together a plan to leverage local dollars against million in state and federal grants for downtown revitalization, historic preservation and economic development, pulling together ultimately a $27 million pot of money.
Doden stressed the importance of those pots, because the economics of such revitalization work would never fly in the private sector alone. The $27 million renovation plan would ultimately result in physical assets worth only about $10 million when all was said and done and no developer is going to take that kind of loss to flip a downtown.
With the money in place though, work has been ongoing to fix up buildings one at a time and start flipping the script on Van Wert’s ailing downtown. Doden said once the buildings are fixed, they will remain under local nonprofit ownership and management in hopes of not simply repeating the long-range cycle of absentee ownership and eventual decay.
The process is ongoing, but other communities are now hoping to replicate the strategy. Doden is working with Hillsdale, Michigan, the site of the nationally recognized conservative think tank college and alma-mater Hillsdale College, where the seed money is coming from not a community foundation like in Van Wert, but from a wealthy benefactor interested in seeing the small college town thrive.
Other communities in Indiana have also been reaching out, Doden said, and the idea could spread more widely, with no reason why it couldn’t.
“This is new, but it’s exciting because we’re using the same tools that have been around for 25-30 years, we’re just using it now in small towns,” Doden said.
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