Highland’s downtown draws crowds; small businesses flourish
Highland residents are pitching in to build a bright future in their town.
Councilman George Georgeff noted there isn’t a shortage of volunteers to work on the town’s various projects.
He said spring cleanup of the parks is one project with a strong turnout. After residents finish sprucing up the parks, firefighters in the volunteer department fire up the grill to feed them.
Highland has almost 24,000 people packed into an area that is less than 7 square miles, according to the 2020 Census, but residents and officials are working to make it seem much bigger.
Good schools, a low tax rate and a vibrant business community are all factors, Georgeff said.
The town was incorporated in 1910 and earned its name from the sandy ridge above 53 acres of swamp land, according to the South Shore Convention & Visitors Authority.
Pat Popa is a Highland ex-pat who still owns commercial property there, although she retired and moved about an hour away after selling her business, Popa Heating & Air Conditioning, in November 2022.
Her pride for Highland and its downtown shines through as she talks about living above her HVAC shop.
“It was a great lifestyle, living downtown. I loved it,” she said.
Popa spearheaded a project to bring ducks to Highland. Like the fiberglass cows in Chicago, artists decorated the ducks on behalf of sponsors. The ducks flocked across the town, especially downtown.
Gov. Joe Kernan, who served from 2003 to 2005, gave Popa an award for volunteerism after the project became popular. Later, Popa followed up with owl sculptures.
Two ducks still stand side by side in front of the Highland Griffith Chamber of Commerce office on Kennedy Avenue.
That spirit of town pride attracts more than just ducks and owls.
Developer Jovan Lozevski, president of Lakeview Homes & Development, is happily building 10 homes on 3 acres he bought from a Highland church. He’s sold on the quality of life in the town.
“It’s my Goldilocks zone analogy,” he said. “It has a mix of everything. There’s expressways and roads that take you everywhere you want to go; there’s restaurants; there’s housing at all price points, at all levels. There’s a wide variety of churches and community organizations.”
And that’s not all, he said.
“There’s a bunch of parks in town; there’s easy accessibility to Lake Michigan, so it has a good mix of everything at all levels,” Lozevski said.
Town plans
One of Popa’s owls stands inside the main entrance to the new police station on Ridge Road.
That main entrance also will serve the Town Hall, Georgeff said, when the new addition is built. Town Hall is now a separate building, showing its age, east of the police station.
The plan calls for expanding the police station to the east, adding Town Hall offices to the building, so the main entrance, elevator, stairs and public restrooms can be shared.
When the addition is completed, Town Hall will be razed and additional parking added, Georgeff said.
The Town Hall project is on the fast track because of a water problem.
“You can’t drink the water in there anymore because all the pipes are galvanized pipes in there, and the water comes out brown out of the drinking fountains, and the water pressure is really low,” he said.
The building is still using its original boiler system, too.
Highland has other ideas for upgrading its infrastructure. The town is working on a new comprehensive plan, replacing the previous one adopted in 2007.
After receiving about 300 survey responses from residents, the consultant working with the plan met with residents in a session that didn’t go well, Georgeff said. The council decided in December to terminate the contract with that consultant and go with another one.
Among the residents’ desires is for the town to find a new use for the former Ultra Foods property on the town’s north end. The property has stood vacant for at least a decade.
A portion was sold off for a veterinary clinic, but the remainder needs a new use.
A previous proposal to use the property for indoor storage was rejected by the town as not fitting for the site of one of the gateways to Highland.
“We’re looking for something a little bigger — a lot nicer than just indoor storage,” Georgeff said.
Highland also wants to find a new use for the Coach USA bus terminal that has been empty since the pandemic. One of the possibilities is for the town to sell its 8 acres adjoining the property for a larger project.
That bus terminal property could be another gateway to the town, Georgeff noted.
Happening downtown
Highland has a vibrant downtown and works to keep it that way.
“We have a great little downtown with a mixture of a lot of small, locally owned businesses,” Redevelopment Commission Director Maria Becerra said. “We have some that have been there a long time. The men’s clothing store has been there for over 60 years.”
Others are just getting started but already are making an impact.
“We have a young man that opened a gaming store, a small little business there on Jewett Street, so we have a little bit of everything,” Becerra said.
Emcor Hyre Electric is looking to move to Kennedy Avenue on the south end of town to expand the facility. It employs some 60 people, Becerra said.
The existing site, adjacent to the bike trail, could be complemented by townhomes and walkable retail close by, she said.
“We have a lot of restaurants downtown,” and a walkable downtown is important.
Popa said Highland’s walkability makes a big difference.
“I could walk to Traditions and have dinner. I could walk over to Russ Cafe and have breakfast. I could walk down to something going on down at Main Square, to a festival. I could go to an outdoor concert,” she said. “It was great to live in or near a walkable downtown.”
The Main Street group meets monthly and talks about ideas to draw more clients to the downtown. It’s working.
“Everybody knows we have a restaurant crawl, and that does bring people downtown no matter what the weather is,” Becerra said. “… And then we also have a big crawl in the summer where we close down the streets. We have vendors and food.
“Thank goodness we have very little vacancy there at all.”
An ice cream place downtown just expanded across the street, taking advantage of a commercial grant program for that kind of investment. For every dollar the business owner puts in, they get reimbursed 30 cents, so 30% of what they invest they get reimbursed for any improvements, interior and exterior.
“In this case, they took an old house that’s been probably vacant for about five years and recently had broken windows,” Becerra said. “They bought it and moved across the street, and now it’s handicapped accessible. They have outside seating, and it turned out beautiful.”
The $40,000 grant from the town helped them pay for it.
Another business used a commercial grant to turn a former bar on Ridge Road into a coffee shop.
“They have one in Whiting and one in Griffith. We’re glad they came here to Highland,” she said. “It’s been pretty busy.”
The town sets aside $125,000 a year for the commercial grant program.
After Traditions Restaurant & Pub burned down in 2023, the new owners are using a grant to help them rebuild.
“It was a total gut. They are rebuilding with the same menu and so on. We’re looking forward to that,” she said.
Popa said downtowns draw a special crowd.
“We can’t compete with the box stores, but it’s sort of like more unique places and experiences,” Popa said. “I think that people are still drawn to that.”
Commercial successes
As strong as the downtown is, it’s not the only commercial district in town. Where Highland and Schererville blend together, a Macy’s opened. Additional investment also is planned in that area.
A Cardinal Campus office park near the police station has opened, too.
And then there is the boutique hotel near Dr. Claude Gendreau’s Veterinary Orthopedic Center.
“People come from all over the nation to bring their pets here to get surgery. They’re going to have somewhere to stay now,” Becerra said. “There will be retail on the bottom and then what they’re calling a boutique hotel. That’s under construction right now.”
Helping the town is earning an A- rating by Standard & Poor’s.
“That’s a good thing if any developer out there is interested,” Becerra said. “And we do have a strong allocation fund for redevelopment, so we are able to provide some incentives.”
Lance Ryskamp, president and CEO of the Highland Griffith Chamber of Commerce, likes to see small businesses take advantage of these incentives.
“I think we do a really good job of being part of the community and that the community also is very supportive of us,” he said.
New members of the chamber find support from the businesses that have been around a long time.
“These are people that have traveled the road you’re traveling,” Ryskamp said. “They know the ups and downs, and they can share their collective wisdom with the group.”
He said that small businesses have the biggest impact at the local level.
“All these big conglomerates and big corporations out there in the world have all kinds of economic power, but really it’s the businesses at the local level that are really the economic backbone of the community,” he said. “They’re the people that you see at Little League games, and their business names are on softball shirts and food drives and things like that.”
But, he said, these small enterprises also need the support of those communities.
“Your neighbor is there to support the community through their business, but it’s also important to promote the community supporting their business as well,” Ryskamp said. “They try to really focus on emphasizing the benefits of shopping local, and you know how that plays, how that’s an important part of the local economy. You keep your money in town.”
With businesses helping the community and the community patronizing local businesses, the quality of life also improves, Ryskamp said.
Educational opportunities
School Town of Highland Superintendent Brian Smith appreciates the support the school district has received over the years.
The district lost a proposed property tax increase in a close referendum in 2023. In response, the district opened its enrollment to add enough students to make up for the natural losses that come from families having fewer children.
“We were losing about 30 or 40 students a year, so now we’ve opened our borders to try and replace those students just to make sure enrollment stays very steady,” Smith said. “We’re not bringing in like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids from other places, it’s just enough to keep our head above water.”
The district continues to invest in its facilities, spending $5 million to $10 million for projects like making HVAC systems more efficient and keeping the electric system up to date, plus reroofing when needed.
“That keeps us from having massive emergencies,” he said.
The schools’ success rate is good, with some students getting into Ivy League colleges and some earning enough dual credits to graduate college early. Dual credit programs allow high school students to earn college credits while still in high school.
“They get those credits for like a third the cost of enrollment if they were at like IU or Purdue as a regular college student,” Smith said.
“We actually had one kid who took advantage of everything you could imagine, and he walked into Purdue West Lafayette with almost 60 credits. He was two years done.”
But it’s not just about getting into good colleges. About 70 to 90 Highland juniors and seniors attend the career center in Hammond for half-day programs that speed their entry into the workforce upon graduating from high school.
“A kid may walk out at 18 years old with an Ivy Tech certification for welding, and they’re going to go right into the welding field at 18 or 19 years old making great money,” Smith said.
Location, location
Buyers for Lozevski’s Highland houses come from Chicago or Northwest Indiana, even from Highland itself, but a central selling point is easy access to Chicago.
The homes he’s building in Highland are selling in the $600,000 to $800,000 range.
“You can find this house in St. John or Crown Point, but you’re adding at least 30 minutes one way down there, whereas if you (buy) this house there or in Munster, it would be an additional $100,000. You’re still getting the same amenities, same quality, same proximity, but just without the added commute,” he said.
The enthusiasm for Highland Lozevski sees echoes that of all of Northwest Indiana. Munster may have the new train station as a result of the West Lake Corridor expansion of the South Shore Line, but that excitement crosses municipal boundaries.
“We all kind of piggyback off each other,” he said. “You know that that hotel is on the far south side of Highland. Well, people from other towns and cities are going to patronize it. That’s going to help Highland, but you know it’s reciprocal, so all the cities are seeing growth.”
Georgeff notes that houses elsewhere in Highland are generally well-maintained.
“I think the old homes are still well-maintained,” Becerra said. “We don’t see homes that aren’t being kept up. But if anything, you see then purchased or improved, even though they were built back in the 1950s or something.”
Being a landlocked town, surrounded by other municipalities, Highland now has infill development with little room for large new residential developments. That just adds to the importance of maintaining what the town already has.
“We were rated one of the most sought-after zip codes for people looking for housing because the quality of life is good here,” Becerra said.
The police department keeps the town safe, and the parks are well-maintained and popular.
“They have 100-plus programs from babies to seniors,” she said.
The Lincoln Center has many programs, and the parks department just opened six new pickleball courts in the Meadows area.
In addition, the Munster and Highland bike trails will connect, adding access to enjoy that park of Lake County. Highland’s bike trail has solar lights, so it’s still usable after dark.
Bright future
Downtown, the council is considering an addition to the fire station to add a kitchen and sleeping quarters for firefighters.
Part of that station might be 100 years old now, but it’s still holding up well. Georgeff said the plan to build an addition includes some remodeling and updates of the existing section of the building.
Main Square, off Ridge Road, will see a new decorative fence. Georgeff hopes it will be installed by the Fourth of July, making the park more attractive during festivals and other events.
The town’s fireworks display couldn’t be held in 2024 and likely won’t be held this year because of a sewer project in the Homestead Park area, where the town is putting in a pump station.
“We’ve been put off by Hammond with the connection for the sewer project for a year, so it’s kind of delayed us,” Georgeff said.
The town is working with Munster officials to replace the animal control building with a newer, bigger facility to make it nicer for the animals.
“I really think it’s going to remain a vibrant community,” Georgeff said.
“The tax rate this year, I was told by our clerk treasurer, is actually lower than what it was the year before,” he said.
Financial perks like this are only one of the reasons Highland was ranked No. 6 on Realtor.com’s list of the 10 “Hottest Zip Codes of 2023.”
“You’ve got really good schools, you’ve got really good parks, and the school town is very well-run, which as you know is a big thing to attract people to want to live here, and businesses tend to follow where the people go,” Ryskamp said. •
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