Iowa State to create CyTown, inspired by Green Bay’s Titletown

AMES — Inspired by the Green Bay Packers’ five-year-old “Titletown” entertainment district, Iowa State University on Monday unveiled plans to develop 40 acres between its Iowa State Center arts complex, Hilton Coliseum, and Jack Trice football stadium into a destination “CyTown.”

The ISU vision for the $200 million CyTown project involves a 135,000-square-foot development including a medical facility, retail space, offices, and luxury suites. The endeavor would include an outdoor public plaza and amphitheater, restaurants and pubs, a hotel and convention center.

Plans for CyTown — which Iowa State officials said would be “the nation’s first multiuse district built on a college campus” — tie in the campus’ educational, cultural, athletics, and research missions, aiming to make ISU and Ames a Midwest destination. The vision, according to ISU President Wendy Wintersteen, was propelled by her predecessor in the 1950s, James Hilton, who brought forward the “revolutionary concept to create a central hub for the arts, athletics, and community engagement.”

“The development of CyTown will not only create new amenities, attractions and economic growth, but it will generate new resources to reinvest in the Iowa State Center as a premier educational, cultural, and performing arts and athletics complex for generations to come,” Wintersteen said Monday during a news conference.

Where to begin

Development will happen over years and in stages via a series of projects — starting with $25 million in parking and infrastructure improvements, scheduled to go before the Board of Regents for approval in November.

The board in June already gave Iowa State the OK to start planning that work, which involves constructing new parking with new lighting and installing new water, power, gas, phone, storm sewer, and sanitary lines able to support all the development Iowa State envisions.

The $25 million infrastructure project will hoist parking above the 100-year flood plain and vastly improve 4,200 heavily-used parking stalls serving the Iowa State Center and about 2,000 daily commuters, according to regent documents.

“That will take about a year and a half to two years, which will get that space ready to go vertical with what we envision the first phase of the project to include,” ISU Athletics Director Jamie Pollard said, sharing a target completion date for those infrastructure improvements of August 2025.

Some aboveground first-phase development could happen simultaneously with the infrastructure work, he said, including a medical clinic “that would be a comprehensive opportunity for us to better serve our student athletes, our student body, and the surrounding communities.”

Also part of the first development phase is a “CyTown Suites” initiative, which Pollard described as a “concept of taking what we do at the football stadium, but for seven days, and build — essentially — suites that our constituents could use 365 days a year.”

It also will include restaurants, brew pubs, other retail and office space.

“And we hope that we'll have that up and running in time to have some of those facilities online by the fall of 2025,” Pollard said.

Work on the infrastructure should start in earnest in January 2023 — pending Board of Regents approval.

More businesses, more visitors, more students

Occupying an area on the ISU campus known as “Tent Row” between Jack Trice Stadium and the Iowa State Center — the development project will tie in the ISU Research Park in its aim to bring more businesses, more visitors, and more students to campus.

That’s imperative at a time of waning enrollment, and a looming enrollment cliff facing universities across the Midwest — where the number of high school graduates on the horizon is shrinking.

“We can bring more businesses here, we can have more visitors,” ISU Research Park Executive Director Rick Sanders said Monday, referencing the enrollment cliff. “We’ve got to do a better job as an institution attracting more of that smaller pool of students. This is the kind of opportunity that helps with that.

“It is a really exciting time.”

Iowa State expects 75 percent of the money needed for the $200 million project will come from “land monetization opportunities,” with the rest coming from fundraising and leasing 20 CYTown Suites.

“This project, we believe when fully built out over the next 20 years, will generate approximately $200 million of spendable revenue,” Pollard said.

About $50 million of that $200 million will go back into enhancing the ISU arts campus — like Stephens Auditorium and the Scheman Building, which as part of the Iowa State Center have been overseen by the ISU Athletics Department for more than three years.

“So this is a monumental day for this institution,” Pollard said.

In the immediate term, Iowa State will pay for the infrastructure improvements with university and athletics funds, “which will be repaid, over time, by project revenues.”

“The CYTown plan fits perfectly with our long-term vision of growing the amenities in and around the Iowa State University Research Park,” Sanders said. “Our board believes this is an incredible growth opportunity for the ISU Research Park and comes at the perfect time in our history. Creating this kind of mixed-use site would help energize the whole area, becoming a real asset for us in promoting Ames to even more innovators and entrepreneurs.”

Inspiration

In dreaming and planning CyTown, Pollard said his team visited Green Bay for inspiration from its Titletown, which calls itself a community adjacent Lambeau Field that offers the “perfect place for community members and visitors to play, stay, eat, relax, and enjoy, no matter the season.”

Titletown involves a public park, outdoor games, ice skating rink, tubing hill, four-diamond hotel, orthopedic clinic, and restaurant and brewery.

“Our team has spent the last three to four years working on this,” Pollard said. “And one of the aha moments for us came when we went and met with the Green Bay Packers and spent a lot of time trying to understand how they did Titletown.”

He noted similarities between Titletown and CyTown, including the total acreage, “what their vision was, what they were trying to accomplish, what you physically see with a football stadium and a rectangle space that needed something else to be done.”

“And that's when the gears really started to put in motion of how do we go forward with this?” Pollard said.

“We're finding a way to re-purpose that land in a way that provides new revenues, that will allow us to infuse into that space to be able to attract and retain students, visitors, faculty, staff and energize that space in a way that'll allow us to reinvest in the Iowa State Center and also build a convention center and a hotel — so that we can help this community and our institution revitalize an area that has been so critical to the success of Iowa State University and the Ames community.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com