Bottleworks abandons housing for offices, repeating Indianapolis' worst mistake | Opinion

Indianapolis cannot afford to keep making the same mistakes and then writing checks to fix them. Originally from IndyStar

This story originally ran in the IndyStar on September 25th, 2025. Read full story here.

The new proposed Phase III of Bottleworks includes an office tower with more parking than leased space, no retail, and no housing. The anchor tenant would be relocating from their current office downtown, leaving another vacant office tower.

The Bottleworks District was supposed to mark a new era for downtown Indianapolis.

When it was first pitched, renderings showed hundreds of new apartments above boutique office space and ground-floor retail. It was the perfect pitch for an 18-hour corridor that could support itself through the overused planning aphorism of “live-work-play”.

That vision has not materialized. Instead, Phase III of Bottleworks will be an office tower for Ice Miller law firm on top of a parking podium. The project is shorter than originally proposed, contains more floors of parking than leased space, and offers neither housing nor retail. A development once hailed as the model for future mixed-use in Indianapolis now looks like a return to the one-trick-pony mistakes that have hollowed out downtowns across the United States .