Jeff Kingsbury: This is, um, building 20. It was built in 1907, oldest building on the west campus. Oh wow. And used to be a brass foundry.

Brian Maughan Narration: Sometimes commercial real estate can be about giving new life to old structures. I’m visiting one such place today: Electric Works, near downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana. It’s being developed in the former General Electric Campus.

Heather Smith: For so many years, those buildings sat empty and that felt like such a reminder of that industry being pulled out of our town. Seeing the revival of Electric Works has been really great to see the community come back together, to have a gathering space, to have workspaces, and to see those beautiful old buildings being used again in a new way.

Brian Maughan Narration: I’m Brian Maughan, chief innovation and marketing officer with Fidelity National Financial, and this is Built – The podcast where you’ll meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do.

In this case, how they are turning 39 acres of century-old industrial buildings into a 21st century live-work-shop-play-learn campus– yes, all that!  – designed to inspire innovation and community.

JEFF: Our hope is to reimagine it as, the economic engine for an next century.

Visit_Roof: to give people access to outdoor space, uh, in a variety of different forms was really important.

Brian Maughan Narration: I'm standing on the rooftop of Building 19 with Jeff Kingsbury, co-founder and Chief Connectivity Officer of Ancora, which is the lead developer for RTM Ventures LLC, the company behind Electric Works. That’s name that the developers gave to the campus as a nod to General Electric, and to the future.

Brian Maughan Narration: This rooftop access is new, but perhaps its most recognizable feature is a huge electric sign facing Broadway with the words "Do it Best" in red topped by the name Electric Works in black and white.

Visit_Roof: That's significant because on the East campus there was a large rooftop sign that had General Electric and it had the blue GE logo and then General Electric in letters. And it was an icon. You could see it for miles, and it was on that building from the early 1920s, through 2015.

Brian Maughan Narration: That sign only went dark from December 7, 1941 until the end of WWII in 1945. So it acted as a beacon for the Fort Wayne community for almost a century.

Visit_Roof: Since we couldn't relight that GE sign cuz it had been removed by General Electric, we wanted to recast it on this building and acknowledge Do it Best as really the new anchor tenant and Indiana's largest privately held company, which is headquartered here.

Brian Maughan Narration: Founded in 1945, Do it Best is a member-owned cooperative business model, similar to ACE or True Value, with about $5 billion in annual sales. And since November 2022 they moved operations to Electric Works.

Visit_Amp Lab, Prayer Works, Do It Best: Having them as our anchor tenant really enabled the project to move forward. It gave it a level of credibility in addition to just the tenancy.

Brian Maughan Narration: Electric Works is located East of the St Mary's River and it's about a 15-minute drive from the airport. From the rooftop you can enjoy a magnificent view of the city, you can see downtown, which is a 20-minute walk, and these days you can also see how much work has been done and how much is left to do. A street called Broadway divides the East and West Campuses, which combined are 1.2 million square feet in 18 buildings. West campus has 700,000 square feet and is being developed now in phase one, which is nearly complete.

JEFF: And then about 500,000 or so on the east campus, which will be developed in later phases.

Brian Maughan Narration: Jeff grew up here in Fort Wayne, Indiana and went to school at Ball State University where he trained to be an urban planner. After a long career all over the West coast, Jeff returned home in 2006. He has chaired the redevelopment and reuse council, and co-authored the book Developing Sustainable Planned Communities for the Urban Land Institute, the oldest and largest network of cross-disciplinary real estate and land use experts in the world. ULI has roughly 45,000 members.

JEFF: I've been a member since 1988 when I was in college actually. but I owe ULI, for introducing me to my business partner, Josh Parker, who's the CEO of Ancora. He was partner in another firm called Cross Street Partners out of Baltimore, and I had my own firm, Green Street and Cross Street was pursuing this project, as an acquisition through an RFP process. We joined that team, along with Kevin Bigs, who's, a local developer in Fort Wayne and formed an entity called RTM Ventures to be the special purpose entity that was the developer for Electric Works.

Brian Maughan Narration: They bought the property from GE in 2017.

JEFF: And then brought on Larry Weigand of Weigand Construction. His family's been in, in Fort Wayne and in the construction business for generations. Larry joined the development team as well as is our general contractor. And then Tim Ash, who is a very successful entrepreneur and business owner in Fort Wayne also joined RTM Ventures.

Brian Maughan Narration: This group of people saw opportunity in these faded buildings. In part, because they knew the history. Even before these buildings existed, around 1883, the area became the center of industrial innovation when early entrepreneurs were experimenting with a new technology called electricity. With time, they needed more industrial space and many structures were built.

And decades later…

JEFF: at the height of WWII, 1944, 20,000 people worked for General Electric in this community. That was about 36% of the adult workforce so, today we would have to add up the top eight or so major employers in this community to get to that number.

So this was a big deal when this place was in full production. In addition to being the economic engine, it spawned a whole lot of other businesses and industries, particularly those in the magnet wire space, which were critical for early motors, generators, and electronics. Led other companies to move to Fort Wayne because of the supply chain considerations, including Magna Vox, which is where my father worked for 32 years. Like many Heartland communities that had a very strong and proud industrial base, strong middle class, that was Fort Wayne and it was due in large part to General Electric.

Kevin Gilliam: GE was the best place to work.

Brian Maughan Narration: Kevin Gilliam is a retired GE employee. He was Manager of Facilities Operations.

Kevin Gilliam: The camaraderie between the employees and the salaried folks, it was just a pleasure to come into work every day. GE treated me well. I was able to, um, retire at a comfortable lifestyle and continue on and it supported my family and myself for many years.

LARRY: My mother-in-law's father worked there for 40 years.

Brian Maughan Narration: Larry Weigand is the CEO of Weigand Construction, part of the development team.

LARRY: When you figured that 20,000 people at one point in time worked at GE and were on that campus, you always knew somebody. Everybody know, says, oh, my uncle, my cousin, my dad, my brother, somebody worked there at GE.

BRIAN: Yeah, I bet.

Brian Maughan Narration: Re-developing 1.2 million square feet is a colossal effort that required some creative financing. To get there, the team first worked towards designating the site as a historical landmark.

JEFF: we went through that process because we used federal historic tax credits as part of the financing,

Brian Maughan Narration: Jeff Kingsbury, again.

JEFF:  and going through that process you get that designation.

BRIAN: what was that like? What did you have to argue for or inform them of, or, debate, Hey, this is worth designating.

JEFF: There's a couple considerations that are given to that designation, which is, from the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior, which administers that tax credit program. Is there a, a design or an architectural significance to the buildings? These are very representative of early 19 hundreds industrial architecture. These are multi-story buildings in more of an urban context. brick facades, and, um, very substantial floors and construction because they had to endure and handle significant loads, because of the manufacturing that was occurring on multiple floors.

JEFF: so it was significant from a design and an architectural perspective. It was also significant to the community, but also the advancement of new ideas and new innovations, particularly those pertaining to electricity and early motors and generator technology. uh, number of patents that were generated here in the early parts of the late 18 hundreds, early parts of the 19 hundreds was really extraordinary. Our historic preservation consultant related it this way to me by saying that Fort Wayne at the turn of the last century was to early electricity and motor technology the way Silicon Valley is today relative to chip technology.

BRIAN: I love that.

JEFF: Yeah. So it really put into perspective what was happening here over a hundred years ago.

BRIAN: What's interesting for me as I think about that is all of us now, we take a lot of things for granted

JEFF: Mm-hmm.

BRIAN: and we benefit from a lot of the activities but their origin story from an electrical perspective has some history right here.

JEFF: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. A lot of consumer products that are in use today were the ice maker was created here

BRIAN: thank goodness, right? Yeah.

JEFF: Absolutely

BRIAN: Love my icemaker

Brian Maughan Narration: For more than eight decades this place churned out motors and other electric wonders like fans, refrigerators, garbage disposals, hair dryers…

VINTAGE GENERAL ELECTRIC HAIR DRYER COMMERCIAL - 1966 - clip: That feeling of luxury you get when you realize your hair is beautiful can be yours at home with the professional, general electric, portable hairdryer.

Brian Maughan Narration: and even turbosuperchargers, which are mechanical devices designed to boost the performance of planes, in GE’s case the warplanes the allies flew in WW2.

Heather Smith: My father was an employee of General Electric in the 1970s, working in the Hermetic Motors department.

Brian Maughan Narration: Heather Smith works in marketing these days, but as a kid, one of the things she remembers the most about the GE campus is the amount of people that worked here.

Heather Smith: Waiting for my dad to come out there was a gatehouse and all of the employees would come out at the same time for that particular shift. Looking back at the amount of products that we were producing right down on Broadway back in the 1970s and early ‘80s in retrospect was really impressive.

Brian Maughan Narration: But it wasn't only about innovation and production. It was also about community.

Kevin Gilliam: My wife even has stories.

Brian Maughan Narration: GE's Kevin Gilliam again

Kevin Gilliam: her grandmother worked here, you know, most of her life during the war. And she was a president of Elex

Brian Maughan Narration: Starting in 1916, the female employees of General Electric established the Elex Club in Fort Wayne to organize different social activities.

Kevin Gilliam: GE would have Santa Claus in the gym, and the employees could come and the kids could see Santa Claus and they would really get some nice gifts.

Brian Maughan Narration: Jeff took us to see the old employee’s gym… which had a lot more going on than what you’d expect.

Visit_Gymnasium_BRIAN: I'm very familiar with these.

Visit_Gymnasium_JEFF: The fact that you're taller than me, uh, is dissuading me from, uh, doing a pickup game of basketball here. But, uh, yeah, so what we have is, uh, what's known as the GE Club.

Visit_Gymnasium_JEFF: And, it was built in 1927, funded in part by the employees of General Electric at that time, and in part by the company, uh, like many companies of that era, there was a path where people worked there their entire lives.

Visit_Gymnasium_JEFF: This was a place where GE employees and their families could come together.

VP Heather Smith: I remember going and watching my dad play volleyball with his coworkers. I remember going and watching people bowling. It was a very family environment

Brian Maughan Narration: And in the center of the gymnasium today, on the floor, you still can see what's known as the "blue meatball".

Visit_Gymnasium_JEFF: Which is the Round General Electric or GE logo that I think everybody is probably familiar with. That was the one piece of GE identity that we really wanted to have. And as we were negotiating, the acquisition of the property, that became a contentious point.

Visit_Gymnasium_BRIAN: Really?

Visit_Gymnasium_JEFF: Yeah. General Electric wasn't sure, you know, if we would be successful or what we would ultimately end up doing with this property. So in protecting their brand, they were wanted to be thoughtful about what was left behind. Yeah. That identified them to the property. My hope is that when they come back and see this they'll be pleased and believe this is a place that honors their legacy and the people that made it.

Visit_Gymnasium_BRIAN: Is this the original floor?

Visit_Gymnasium_JEFF: It is. We refinished it.

Brian Maughan Narration: The stairs, the seating and other elements were built over a century ago, so they no longer met code.

Visit_Gymnasium: There was 700 seats here. We kept a few rows of these seats just as a more of a historic remnant.

Brian Maughan Narration: Spaces like this were the original live-work-play, but towards the end of last century the globalization of production heralded the end to the work GE was doing here.

VP Kevin Gilliam: GE announced the plant closing in 2014 and they had to give the union a year's notification. Basically that last year it was myself and about 10 maintenance guys and some folks in the lab. But we were basically closing the building.

Brian Maughan Narration: February 1st of 2015 was its last day.

VP Kevin Gilliam: I was, in fact, you know, the last guy to walk out of here.

Brian Maughan Narration: After that, the campus continued fading away.

VP Alex Stalter: I just remembered it was falling apart.

VP Ina Matthews: it was broken down. Lots of, uh, broken windows.

VP Jorge Ruiz: it was very dilapidated, um, you know, just a danger to the community.

VP Meg Childers: There was nothing that really was growing here. Even if it was industrial, it wasn't growing, it wasn't contributing to the city.

VP Alex Stalter: It was kind of an eyesore.

Act II: Transformation

JEFF: Some people believe that there's an intrinsic beauty in older buildings and architecture of a bygone era.

BRIAN: Mm-hmm.

JEFF: I can appreciate that. But as a pragmatist as well, I think that there is a lot of reasons to protect our existing assets and um, believe that really the most sustainable type of development is redevelopment, which is one use giving way to another. Just using resources efficiently, And whether you believe in that from an economic perspective or from an environmental perspective or both, that's really the right way to approach it. For this particular project, there was a number of reasons that it made sense to utilize these existing buildings.

Brian Maughan Narration: A rough estimate showed that just a tear-down would have cost 40 to 50 million dollars.

JEFF: And then the third reason, which is really a market driven reason, was that this is the kind of place talent wants to be. And whether it's Do It Best, which is our anchor tenant, Indiana's largest privately held company, or the startup that I just met with today. They all are focused on talent. Talent's the new currency for economic development. So it's how communities like Fort Wayne are gonna compete nationally and globally.

Brian Maughan Narration: Jeff says employees will be drawn here because they’re going to get something different.

JEFF: There's also a factor of the amenities that we've created here, one of which is a food hall and public market. we have a full-time staff that focuses only on the activation and placemaking and programming of the district, so that we are able to offer that talent something to do before work, maybe on their lunch hour or after work. What we're really trying to create here is an 18 hour place.

BRIAN: Right?

JEFF: Increasingly we're seeing this blending of work and home. I think that's only increased because of the pandemic. And part of what we're trying to do is create a destination where somebody that may be in a hybrid work situation or has been working from home, we want to give them a reason to come collaborate and be part of this community.

BRIAN: If I was a young innovative professional, I'd want to be here because of the ghosts of innovation. I I would wanna walk these and just hope.

JEFF: That's great. Ghost of innovation. I'm gonna borrow that.

BRIAN: Maybe that's a piece of brick that somebody leaned on one and if I do get a little extra. I think that people are drawn to that. I think that's why we stand in awe at places and why we feel inspired in others. I think that's here.

JEFF: we had this challenge from a design and construction perspective. Where we just have to let the place be. Yeah. And not to sound too ob, ob obtuse, but everything's already here. What we really have to do is enhance it to the extent we can but not overcome it.

BRIAN: you're right, the history's here, and the place is here. So now it's activate it for this generation because it worked for the last one.

JEFF: Yeah, it did.

Brian Maughan Narration: But before activating these spaces, there's a lot of work and a lot of money needed. As we mentioned, Phase 1 of the project was focused on the West Campus.

JEFF: The first phase is um 740,000 feet of rentable area. We delivered about 286 million of Construction, including tenant improvements and such. So that's the project budget for the West Campus, 286 million. The sources on that break down to roughly, 40% private equity and debt, 20% federal tax credits, both federal historic tax credits and new markets tax credits. 20% is state support through, what's called the industrial Recovery Tax Credit, which has since been retired. And then a redevelopment tax credit, from the state of Indiana. And then finally the last piece is the local support, which is again about 20%. So it's roughly a 60-40, public to private ratio of funding.

Brian Maughan Narration: Jeff says these ratios are unique because Fort Wayne has one of the  most affordable housing markets in the country.

JEFF: If we were to do this in San Francisco or New York or Boston, I think the economics would be very different because we could get the rents that we would need in large part to, I think, deliver this amount of value. if we didn't have that level of federal, state and local support, we would have to have rents approaching $50 a foot triple net in order to cover the project cost. We're able to do that now here in Fort Wayne at 16, $17 a foot triple net, because that's what the market is. And then you've got your operating expenses which are higher here because we're creating a district. It's not just the four walls of a building and a nice lobby with some marble.

Brian Maughan Narration: This investment went in part to the actual labor that took to bring the spaces into this century.

LARRY: when they finally shut the lights off and moved out, and I remember driving by, you know, for 15 years, seeing that I would have just a really sinking feeling going, "man, what a waste for GE to have moved out and to have these beautiful, iconic buildings there."

Brian Maughan Narration: Larry Weigand again

LARRY: and then at the same time I was also excited about what could be someday.

Brian Maughan Narration: Weigand Construction has been part of Fort Wayne's fabric for almost as long as these buildings have been standing.

Brian Maughan Narration: Weigand Construction has been part of Fort Wayne's fabric for as long as these buildings have been standing.

LARRY: It was founded in 1906 by my great-grandfather, and so I am fourth generation.

Brian Maughan Narration: Weigand has 2 offices in Indiana with a staff of hundreds tradesmen and women. People doing work like Larry's great grandfather, who was a stone mason.

LARRY: he would go door to door and do residential sidewalks. And so one thing led to another, did a little bit bigger projects and up until 1993, we didn't branch out a lot, we did most of the work right around Allen County. So when I bought the company we started branching out, with a bigger geography and taking on larger projects.

Brian Maughan Narration: They were more than ready to take on reshaping the dormant GE giants.

LARRY: when we got involved as far as our pre-construction, at that time it was the largest project under contract that we had ever had, and it was not for the faint of heart. When you are doing a rehab, remodel and rehabilitation of buildings, you know, we didn't know what we didn't know until we got going and doing some investigative work and being on campus for a while. It was never a dull moment on the renovation, rehab of that project.

Brian Maughan Narration: A lot of the work done before the capital stack was put together was what the industry calls remediation work.

LARRY: So you had a lot of asbestos, you had a lot of lead paint, So we were on campus almost a full year managing the remediation work and doing some demolition and get ready work while the capital stack was getting finalized. And we had a kind of a skeleton crew of probably 10 to 15 folks there. People said, Hey, how'd you bid something like that? How'd you price this out? Since we were there on campus for a year prior to, we did a lot of exploratory demolition to figure out really what was behind that wall, how thick some of the floors were, so we corded through some of it. We ran the elevators up and down and saw what the shafts looked like, and what renovations needed. So we kind of did a design assist with some of the architectural folks and some of the engineers so that we knew exactly what needed to be drawn and what scopes needed to be priced out. And we wanted to make sure as we were writing subcontracts and writing purchase orders that the local folks that this was gonna be in their community, that they were gonna be the ones responsible for bringing this project to fruition.

Brian Maughan Narration: And beyond the structure, Larry's team had a lot of work to do.

LARRY: We had to gut the HVAC, gut the plumbing, gut all the electrical. But as far as structure, that place was stout. um, you know, Working on a historic building like that, you know, day in and day out, we talked to our folks about quality control and making it just perfect, making it look just right for the client, and in this situation it was sometimes hard to say, no, we're good. You don't need to take a grinding wheel to that steel beam that has rust on That's what we want to keep. That looks fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna leave the crane in place with the cable wrapped around, that's what we want. And sometimes my guys just wanted to make it look like it was new. and the beauty of that is we cleaned it up, but it still looks like it was back in the 1920s and even in 1907, in building 20, it's just amazing.

Brian Maughan Narration: Today, the West Campus is open and vibrant and we got to see what some of the renovated spaces here look like.

Visit_Union Street Market: this is the West Hall. The West Hall, which was uh, is building 21. It has. Uh, really incredible light if you look up at the top, uh, with that opaque, glazing that was really all around this, this building, and had this very diffused light coming in, we kept that, uh, it's material called cow wall.

We also kept, uh, that five ton crane, illuminated it as well as illuminated a lot of the trusses and infrastructure of the building itself. So you have this very high Florida ceiling space that's very dramatic with multiple prepared food vendors, down here ranging from coffee, kombucha, uh, pizza, ice cream, including a adult ice cream. They've got a bourbon, vanilla that's fantastic.

Brian Maughan Narration: Here at Union Street Market, they prioritize access to fresh and healthy food. There's also barbecue, Thai, and Korean food among other options. The merchants here are all local, and many came from operating in their kitchen or food trucks.

Visit_Union Street Market: what we wanted to do was give food entrepreneurs a place where they could expand and grow their business. Our hope is that they become so successful they move out.

Brian Maughan Narration: Along these walls, there's art made by local artists. And just outside this building there's an open space that will be activated pretty soon, and it's called Weigand Yard.

Visit_Weigand Yard n Dynamo Alley: We named it after Larry Weigand, who is really our first investor and our general contractor. His family's had a big commitment to the community. You have the buildings defining this outdoor space, which is kind of like a European beer garden with these shared picnic tables, uh, movable seating and chairs. And then trees to help soften that space. We have a stage that was, um, built to have outdoor performances. So this becomes more of a, a venue for music and different types of entertainment.

LARRY: I didn't know whether or not I wanted to have our name splashed up there at Electric Works. We just want our work to speak for itself but it was quite an honor

BRIAN: It's a beautiful yard. It sits right outside with that large crane that it just seems fitting, right?

Brian Maughan Narration: We continued our tour walking around the Electric Works Campus.

Visit_Amp Lab, Prayer Works, Do It Best: We were walking west on Sweeney, which is the southern boundary of the West campus, and we're starting to get into the neighborhood coming in just on Broadway. So this was a neighborhood of sort of classic worker housing. You had a lot of single family homes that were built with alleys behind the houses. When employment started to decline from General Electric, this neighborhood started to hollow out. And so you had a lot of vacancy or absentee landlords. We've started to see new investment in the neighborhood with people now really believing in the value of their home and people choosing to stay there.

Act III: Working towards a truly diverse and inclusive community / The Future

Brian Maughan Narration: Right up on Swinney Street, between the GE Club and a visitors parking lot we find AMP LAB. Which is the first of a continuum of educational opportunities the team wants to implement as part of Electric Works impact strategy.

Visit_Amp Lab, Prayer Works, Do It Best: AMP Lab is uh building 31. It was originally an office building and store for employees to buy GE products. And we had envisioned this inspired somewhat by the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is a redevelopment of an Old Navy Yard that includes a STEAM high school, STEAM being science, technology, engineering, art and math. So it's STEM plus the addition of art or design.

Brian Maughan Narration: AMP Lab serves about 400 11th and 12th graders from the five area High Schools within Fort Wayne Community Schools. It's opt-in and works through a lottery system to ensure representation across the public school district.

Visit_Amp Lab, Prayer Works, Do It Best: it's designed with four different labs. There's a Grow Lab, which is focused on ag bioscience. Okay. There's also a create lab, which is focused on the art component of steam. Includes a podcasting studio.

Nice. And spaces and tools for digital animation and other types of digital art. There's a venture lab where the kids learn about entrepreneurship. And then there's a maker lab, which includes a maker space with 3D printing and such. The students can conceive of an idea develop a prototype, they learn about marketing and then how to ultimately implement .

Brian Maughan Narration: AMP Lab opened in August of 2022 and just graduated its first class with 219 students.

JEFF: Very proud of the fact that the last time a school was in this neighborhood was 1980.

BRIAN: Wow.

JEFF: So to see a new group of young people who were our first tenants, I might add, fittingly having them on campus, has really been a joy for I think everybody.

The Fort Wayne Community Schools is like many urban school districts in the country where two-thirds of the children come from households that are low income. They're eligible for free and reduced lunch. More than 60% are children of color. And then, AMP LAB also has about 55% girls. As a father of a daughter who's always wanted her to feel a level of confidence when it comes to science and math, having those three groups, girls, children of color, children from low income households have exposure to the same opportunities that you or I would've had as white males is a key part of, I think, our economic future, because it it could unleash, a whole level of innovation we haven't seen by giving those same people the same opportunities to inventors and exposure to mentors and entrepreneurs.

Brian Maughan Narration: Jeff says they are trying to create a connection between education and industry and prioritizing higher education; kind of like an ecosystem. Ball State University and Indiana University will be part of the development at some point in the future.

JEFF: The idea is that if we can create a stronger nexus between education and industry, it'll enhance that flywheel of innovation, which was really in the DNA of this community. But I think maybe it was forgotten for a, a number of years. So we're trying to reconnect people back to that. The other thing that we're really focused on is health and wellness. This area is what we would call medically underserved, which is a defined term, having to do with proximity to primary care services.

Brian Maughan Narration: In this phase, Electric Works prioritized work with Parkview Health, a primary care and pharmacy that opened at the end of last year.

JEFF: As developers we can create the place, the physical environment. It's up to people to really build community.

Brian Maughan Narration: Kelsey Steffen is the Vice President of the Advisory Services Program at the Urban Land Institute or ULI America.

KELSEY: We do a lot of work, not only on the membership and networking and education side, but also on the mission side. So the program I run, the advisory services program, is focused on providing our members the opportunity to give back to communities across the country by volunteering their time to provide their expertise from whatever sector it is they work in the real estate and land development industry back to a community that's requested our assistance.

Brian Maughan Narration: Kelsey has been with ULI for 4 years. She is an urban planner by trade and has worked for local governments in California and Virginia. And a few months ago, she received a request from Jeff Kingsbury, who if you remember is a ULI Indiana member…

KELSEY: This is the first time we've had a developer come to us and say, I wanna improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in my entire redevelopment process, and I wanna become a model for other projects across the country.

Brian Maughan Narration: So ULI in partnership with Electric Works organized a one-week Advisory Services Panel in May, 2023. Kelsey facilitates this kind of process. She helped selecting the ideal candidates within ULI members to make the best multidisciplinary team for this project, bringing together people from different locations and disciplines in the real estate field.

KELSEY: and that's really where I think our program is different than having a consulting agency come in, because you get someone who's the assistant city manager from Fort Worth, Texas, and then you had the planning director for the City of Chicago and you have someone who runs a entrepreneurial consulting company.

Brian Maughan Narration: This is a collaborative process where Jeff's team prepared briefing documents for the panelists, lined up stakeholders interviews and arranged onsite events and venues for a public presentation to the community, all with the objective of getting recommendations from the panel through a 5-day process.

KELSEY: So they talked to roughly 80 members of the community, and they are off the record interviews, behind closed doors where they just have open conversation about: What does this project mean to you? what have you seen the failures? What are the successes? What do you hope to see come out of this redevelopment for Fort Wayne?

Um, the system isn't perfect, it could stand to be more inclusive on its own. But we also found that by talking to community members, we actually were able to find a lot of people through just talking to them. They were like, oh, why haven't you talked to the head of the YMCA, I'll tell 'em to come tomorrow. So it was a lot of that on site and our job is to just create space for that to happen naturally.

Dawveed Scully at ULI Panel: it was so amazing to talk to some of the folks in our interviews as well as the students at AMP Lab.

Brian Maughan Narration: You're listening to Managing Deputy Commissioner of Planning and Development at the City of Chicago, Dawveed Scully, delivering his remarks at the Advisory Services Panel.

Dawveed Scully at ULI Panel: And that sort of idea of ecosystem, I think really is the spirit of what this was when it was GE, where people really made their lives here, built their families, raised their community.

Brian Maughan Narration: You can watch the panel and learn about their recommendations by visiting the ULI website and looking for Advisory Services Panel in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

KELSEY: Sometimes you need a third party to help tell the story and bring everyone together at the table.

BRIAN: to have a successful redeveloped campus means that it can't just look better. It has to be woven into this fabric, and a lot of times the fabric that you're trying to weave into has had decades of disinvestment. and decades of community development that have had to come through the concrete, right?

They've had to struggle to get that first seedling out of whatever this disinvestment world and you have to go about it in a gentle way because people have history and people have emotions and people have real community there. But you also can't just be tenuous in terms of your approach. Like it takes a hammer sometimes to like, "Hey, we're gonna do this, right? We're gonna redevelop this piece of ground. And make it better," and you might not get it right in phase one, and it might take phase two and it might be phase three. And by the end of it, we've figured out how to get this redevelopment project in the community symbiotic.

KELSEY: I think that's their goal, or at least get close to it, acknowledging that there are endless barriers and challenges ahead. So it's gonna take a lot of work and investment in this. So not just investment in the building and in the right contractors, which is all really great and we support that wholeheartedly. But you also have to invest in the strategic overarching DEI of everything you do.

Brian Maughan Narration: Another recommendation by the panel reaffirms a practical aspect of doing this work.

KELSEY: Diversity, equity, inclusion is good economic development. And I think that was a big point that the panelists tried to make. There is the business case, and It's not just motivated by money, but the underpinning is, by being inclusive, it's better for business. Like the more you do, the more you'll get.

Visit_Amp Lab, Prayer Works, Do It Best: we all often think about innovation as being lab coats and test tubes and that's part of it

Brian Maughan Narration: Ancora co-founder, Jeff Kingsbury, again.

Visit_Amp Lab, Prayer Works, Do It Best: but there's also innovation from a social perspective. And how we can start to, again, we talked about healing a community and how do you work to bring people together. This, I think, is gonna be an important part of that in the future.

Brian Maughan Narration: And the future is full of plans here at Electric Works.

JEFF: We're starting phase two this summer, and that's gonna include 297 units of mixed income housing, an early childhood learning center, and a fitness and wellness center. That phase on top of the investment we made in the West campus will be approaching, north of 400 million invested so far.

JEFF: the east campus will start master planning later this year, and that will likely be developed in multiple phases because it's 27 acres and 500,000 feet of historic building. So we'll do more new construction on that side. I don't know if I'll be retired by the time we finish here, but there'll be a billion dollars invested here and we expect in terms of impact, probably five to 6,000 people coming to work or coming to school here every day.

Brian Maughan Narration: As we end our visit at Electric Works, the developers have some advice if you'd want to follow their steps.

LARRY: Don't expect it to be easy but with the right team around you that has the right vision and conviction and ready to grind through it, it can be done. I do think that we would be a lot better off as communities if we looked at redevelopment first.

JEFF: When we build things, they're around for a long time. I think with that comes a great deal of responsibility. If you have the good fortune to find people that care about making an impact, that see a larger role for themselves and what their investment can do in terms of leveling up communities, creating a positive impact on people's lives you consider yourself fortunate. I think the more we can create places that connect people and foster community, that's really important work.

Brian Maughan Narration: The Electric Works - Do it Best sign was illuminated around 6:15 pm on January 30th, 2023, marking the start of a new era for this collection of buildings. And you already met the person who turned on the switch that night.

Kevin Gilliam: That was, uh, a great honor that I never expected,

Brian Maughan Narration: Former Manager of Facilities Operations at the General Electric Campus, Kevin Gilliam.

Kevin Gilliam: They said I'm the guy that turned the lights off here, which I guess I was, and then they brought me back to throw the switch when they lighted the sign up here.

Electric Works Sign - Audio clip: 3, 2, 1. Light them up. [people clapping]

Brian Maughan Narration: If you want to learn more about the history of the old GE campus, head to PBS dot org and look for the documentary Electric Legacy: The Story of General Electric in Fort Wayne. For videos and photos of Electric Works visit us at builtpodcast.com.

Kevin Gilliam: I remember we were joking Jeff Kingsbury and myself one time about the big crane that's in Union Street market. I said, you know what they ought to do is rent those controls for maybe five minutes and let you, you bring yourself a pitcher of beer and drop it off right there at your table. We gotta laugh out of that.

Brian Maughan Narration: Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode was produced by Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and edited by Genevieve Sponsler. Production support by Emmanuel Desarme. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. Our location producer is Kathryn Mauricio. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Special thanks to our guests, and to Kate Virag at Ferguson Advertising, Alex Stalter, Ina Matthews, Jorge Ruiz, Meg Childers, and everyone else who spoke to us in Fort Wayne.

I’m Brian Maughan.

This was our fourth season of Built –so tell a friend in commercial real estate about us! We’ll be back for season five in a couple of months. Thanks for listening and remember, every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.