Five years ago, the city of Noblesville, the mayor and City Council got together and decided we needed a bold economic development initiative for our community. It's safe to say that at one point Noblesville was the furthest reaches of civilization in Indianapolis. I think our time has come, our opportunity is here. And Noblesville is now a place on the map for a destination for businesses. Probably most exciting thing we've got going is our corporate campus plan. A 3,600 acre mixed use area providing residential uses, office, commercial, industrial uses. Tens of thousands of jobs created in this, really creating Noblesville as a destination for work rather than Noblesville as being a place that exports people to work other places.
And it all pretty much started when Deer Creek went in back in the 90's. Pretty significant traffic generator goes into a relatively undeveloped area. Now the infrastructure is starting to catch up out there. Business wants to be where the people are.
It's going to create a lot of tax advantages for the city and also the residents of the city where the burden won't be placed on just the people living in homes and everything.
You know, that hour commute to downtown Indianapolis now becomes a ten minute reverse commute up to Noblesville, and ideally that would be our best scenario. It's basically the southeast part of Noblesville, State Road 37 to the west of it, I-69 to the east of it, 146th Street kind of being the spine right in the middle, right through it.
It's just a matter, I think, of personal commitment and what you're doing for the citizens of Noblesville, obviously a lot of pride and confidence that we're doing the right thing.
Still a great deal of opportunity for developers to get involved in the campus, for individual users, through a partnership we do with the city, or with other developers to find ground for their facilities and buildings.
Right now we're just driving past what I call probably the new gateway to the corporate campus. 146th Street will pop through here and go east about 5 miles to exit 10. Eventually you'll be able to make a straight drive right out to the interstate and the new mall which will be on the east end of corporate campus.
Now on the east side of it we book case it on that end with Simon's newest mall, lifestyle center. It's a million square foot of outdoor shopping opportunity and a mix of uses that will serve this community and the entire region.
Well it's much like Clay Center in Carmel, it's almost twice as big. But it's kind of a small town environment. It's not just a great big shopping center. It's like the middle of Noblesville, only bigger on the east side of Noblesville.
They've really got a good start on the project and not a lot of people understand a lot of the work is really going on right now even though you can't see it.
But they also had the foresight to include some residential planning to try and create the housing and everything that is needed to feed these types of businesses that are starting to pop up as this corporate campus develops.
This has all been approved for apartments and homes and development has already started out here with the approval process, so two to three years from now you could have build out subdivisions and apartment complexes here.
No longer do we have to go to Indianapolis for job opportunities. We want to provide a city where an individual can live, work, worship, and play right here in Noblesville, Indiana.