LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — They call it a “new paradigm” for downtown Louisville.
A 137-page report released Thursday calls for bringing more housing, encouraging a “24/7” downtown with a mix of uses and making downtown streets more walkable and improving transit, among many other recommendations.
But those ideas have appeared in previous versions of the same decennial downtown plan dating to 1990. So, what ensures Louisville will do the things consultants and elected officials have long called for?
“I cannot promise that we will get everything done,” said Rebecca Fleischaker, executive director of the Downtown Partnership, the public-private agency that produced the reports.
With office workers having disappeared from Louisville and many other downtowns in the era of remote work, the work is more urgent, she said in an interview.
“Now, more than any other — 1990, 2002, 2013 — plan, there is not a natural reason to have to come downtown. People are working from home, so that’s different. We have to do these things to make downtown more pedestrian friendly, more attractive and create this public infrastructure that is welcoming and world-class,” Fleischaker said. “We got away with it for so many years because people were coming downtown anyway, and that’s changed.”
At a luncheon to unveil the 2024 plan, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg listed the actions his administration is taking to improve downtown, including:
-Replacing garbage cans and streetlights
-Soliciting developers for three city-owned vacant parcels
-Building a “Community Care Campus” in Smoketown to serve the city’s homeless population
-Redesigning the 50-year-old Belvedere river overlook which spans I-64 at the edge of Fifth Street
-Commissioning a master plan for Fourth Street to ensure it serves as a “central spine throughout downtown”
-Redesigning Ninth Street from the I-64 off ramp to Broadway, which has for decades been identified as a physical and psychological barrier between downtown and West Louisville.
“Our goal in that is not just to make it a paved street for cars to get off the highway and drive somewhere, but to truly make it connected,” Greenberg said. “The days of barriers between neighborhoods are over.”
