Brian Shutt and Bill Taft on Rebuilding Indiana, One Neighborhood at a Time

So I took that interest in history and rehabbing old houses and ended up getting a master's in historic preservation at Ball State.

And I came out of that and started out as a main street manager in Richmond, Indiana, and did that for a couple of years and.

learned a tremendous amount there about the economic development side of downtown revitalization.

And from that, got interested in this idea of community development and community development organizations.

And they were fairly new at that point.

And I found out there was one looking for a director in Indianapolis.

And so we moved to Indianapolis for me to take a job as what was then the Fountain Square Fletcher Place Investment Corporation.

And So it's the neighborhood that we're sitting in, Fountain Square.

And I came to take a job as executive director there, not knowing really very much about how to do that job.

But I spent 14 years here in Fountain Square leading that group, which eventually became Southeast Neighborhood Development.

And that's really where I learned this about real estate and certainly real estate development and finance, but also the broader just thinking about neighborhoods as a whole, their vitality.

What made them decline? What can you do to change those dynamics so that there's actually reinvestment and renewed vitality? And so that's sort of got me into the whole neighborhood work.

But when we were moving here, we were like, well, where are we going to live? We had rehabbed a house in downtown Richmond and we're looking for another old house because we were poor and we liked rehabbing houses.

So it was a good combination.

And We thought, well, we looked in Irvington.

It was actually too expensive for us.

And we knew a guy who owned a vacant house in Heron Morton.

And he owned a vacant house across the street from us in Richmond.

It's just how we knew him.

And he's like, well, it's been sitting vacant for a while, but I guess I'd be interested in selling it.

So we bought a house in the 1900 block of New Jersey Street in Heron Morton.

And I was talking to a friend who worked for Indiana Landmarks.

He's like, you're going to live there with kids.

We just had our first baby.

And so people were like, that's interesting.