About Us
The Downtown Improvement District’s mission is to enhance the image of downtown Fort Wayne for the social and economic benefit of our community by: providing special events to promote the downtown area; providing enhanced beautification, cleaning and security to complement the downtown’s wide range of services; and working cooperatively with local government to augment municipal services.
We are constantly looking for ways to make Downtown Fort Wayne more enjoyable for residents, visitors, and downtown businesses and workers. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to contact one of the DID staff.
What We Do
The Downtown Improvement District (DID) is an Economic Improvement District established under State of Indiana statute. Our services improve the business cllimate of the district and allow owners of non-residential real property to more easily assess their own economic potential.
The DID has a not-for-profit corporation status and is governed by a thirteen member Board of Directors.
The DID partners with the City of Fort Wayne, Allen County, and a wide-variety of public, not-for-profit, and private sector organizations to make downtown Fort Wayne a more attractive place in which to live, work, recreate, and do business.
The DID performs five key functions:
1. Management & Communications
Management of the DID is performed by its 13 member Board of Directors and a professional staff of three, with other part-time, contractual, and seasonal assistance.
The DID communicates to its members keeping them well informed about the organization and downtown development efforts. The DID also communicates with other downtown stakeholders about its mission and the opportunities, challanges, and issues affecting downtown.
2. Marketing & Programming
The DID works to elevate the overall image of downtown by encouraging strong visual improvements to the downtown landscape, by encouraging improvements to the built environment, and by developing fun, distinctive special events. The desired outcome is promoting the message that positive change is taking place downtown.
By marketing to specific audiences in the down town the DID elicits a stronger sense of communtiy while advocating on the behalf of the region’s residential, office, retail, and hospitality establishments.
The DID assumes many of the marketing responsibilities for downtown events and works to develop exciting new programming that will increase visitor traffic.
3. Business Development
Beyond marketing to those engaged in residential, retail, hospitality, and office market development, the DID works with existing downtown businesses to improve their performance, and with public officials to package and sell business development incentives.
DID staff meets with downtown businesses to help them meet challenges and take advantage of growth opportunities. The DID recruits business to locate downtown while offering annual small/retail business seminars.
4. Community Based Development
Promoting new forms of downtown housing is another key element to revitalizing downtown. The DID is responsible for promoting downtown housing opportunities and for building models of urban housing to stimulate developer interest.
Although small mixed-use projects and small mixed-income housing projects make great sense for a downtown area seeking to improve its vitality, often they do not provide the kinds of returns sought by private developers.
Finding innovative ways to fill development “gaps” -whether by partnering with existing organizations or by encouraging development of new organizational capabilities, is an on-going effort of the DID.
5. Parking Management
Effective and efficient utilization of downtown parking is essential to improve business success and enhance the downtown visitor’s experience.
DID and the City of Fort Wayne are committed to improving the management, marketing, and operations of downtown parking systems. DID has developed “parkitfortwayne.com” – a website devoted to making downtown user-friendly and easy to navigate.