They Spent $1 On An Abandoned Baseball Stadium And Converted It Into A 138-Unit Luxury Apartment Building

Bush Stadium, with its rich history, was once the home of the Indianapolis Indians baseball team. Over the years, the stadium saw many transformations, including repurposing as a dirt track and later as a storage site for 2,000 "cash for clunker" cars.

Michael Cox and John Watson took an abandoned baseball stadium that the city of Indianapolis gave them for $1 and turned it into 138 apartment units. Ninety-five of the apartments are one-bedrooms, 26 are two-bedrooms, and 17 are lofts, with rents ranging from $900 to $1,700 per month. 

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Watson, who was the board chair of Indiana Landmarks, a nonprofit historic preservation organization, was brainstorming ideas with his two sons and Cox about what could be accomplished with the stadium. Nine months later, they decided they had to turn their idea of repurposing the historic stadium into apartments into reality, or Bush Stadium would be torn down.

"Initially, people thought that we were crazy for wanting to turn an abandoned baseball stadium into apartments," Cox told Make It.

Michael, John, and his two sons took ownership of the stadium in 2011. However, the city also mandated that they build an additional 144 units outside of the stadium, now called "The Stadium Flats." As Michael says, "The profits from the project are split proportionally based on the ownership of the individual partners."

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At the same time, John emphasizes that "the cash flows from this project have been used to create other projects that we’ve done as well, as we’re constantly reinvesting back in this project to maintain it as a great place to live." 

They wanted the building to retain its stadium character, so they designed it so "that when you walked into the stadium, you felt like you were walking into a historic stadium rather than an apartment building." They kept the infield, the billboards, the ticket booths, the scoreboard, and the press box on top of the third floor of the building.

The renovations of the stadium took about two years to complete, and from a technical standpoint, it was probably the most difficult project that they’ve done. But that wasn’t their main concern. They were ultimately afraid that no one would rent these apartments as there wasn’t much going on in the neighborhood. "We were kind of pioneers when we did this project, and so we were concerned about its success, and we underwrote it very conservatively."

The budget for renovating Bush Stadium into apartments was about $14 million, with $6.5 million coming from a mortgage, $1.2 million from cash, $5.3 million from city of Indianapolis grants, and $834,000 from developer fees. 

The additional units the city mandated were constructed in July 2014, and the rents range from $1,067 to $1,470. The cost of these units was almost $13 million, bringing the total for the Stadium Lofts and Flats project to $27 million. The project was a complete success for the neighborhood, the future tenants, and the innovative developers. 

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