Building

Using Design to Scale

By John G. Moore, Creative Director Public art is not often thought of in the same vein as internet scalability—but it should be. Scaling applications and public artwork are one in the same. Artist scale things all the time—we are masters of scaling. Venture capitalists and Internet founders should hire more artists. We know what […]

30th Street Project & Broadway Garden

We happy to announce that we have closed on the purchase of a Renew Indianapolis (Indy Land Bank) building and lot on 30th Street and Broadway in our Mapleton Fall Creek community, just one block away from our existing Park Garden. We will renovate the building and use a portion of the vacant lot as […]

New Jersey Homes

We’ve had a busy year at Urban Patch! National conferences, the Sunflower Mural, rain gardens, walnut harvests, kicking off the Redbud Project and more! But wait, there’s more — we have another addition to the Urban Patch! We closed last week on a great 2-family home with great bones in our target ‘patch’ in the Mapleton-Fall Creek […]

Re-Booting the Inner City: National Preservation Conference Recap

Last month we hosted as a part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation National Conference in Indianapolis a community-based field session. As a result of the workshop we wanted to share the results that focused on neighborhood partnerships  and preservation strategies. We hope that this might encourage further work both in the Mapleton-Fall Creek community […]

Urban Patch on the News

Urban Patch co-founder Joyce Moore was interviewed about the Indy Land Bank indictment by Kara Kenny of RTV Channel 6. (The segment starts at 2:45 into the video link below). Over the course of our work investing in our community and building Urban Patch we, like many others, ran into issues with the Indy Land […]

Birchwood Homes

It’s been a busy week at Urban Patch! Aside from responding to the Indy Land Bank scandal, we closed on the purchase of a “double” residential building in Midtown Indy’s Watson Park area. The neighborhood was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012 and is home to many beautiful single family and multifamily homes. The mix […]

We’re Build Indy’s Crowd Favorite!

Urban Patch and our new Indy Redbud Project were selected along with Growing Places Indy as a “Crowd Favorite” runner-up for Formstack’s “Build Indy” grant competition. We were chosen from the ten Build Indy finalists and were selected via a live vote to split all of the money from the “Celebrate the City” ticket sales and […]

Preservation at the Crossroads

Urban Patch is proud to announce that we will be leading TWO sessions at the upcoming 2013 National Preservation Conference in Indianapolis.  We will lead a field session in our own Mapleton Fall Creek community highlighting the role of historic preservation in community redevelopment and partnerships. New Partnerships Re-Boot the Inner City Older neighborhoods that have suffered long-term economic and […]

Delaware Project: Cellulose Insulation for Lath and Plaster Walls

We did several energy-saving sustainability upgrades as part of our Delaware Project restoring a vacant historic home.  The most important green upgrade, with biggest bang for the buck, was to better insulate the building. Many older homes, while well constructed, have no insulation in the walls.  Installing costly energy-efficient new HVAC systems would do no good without […]