Limo Service in Bloomington, IN

On-street parking downtown will be free Friday and Saturday evenings in July, according to a City of Bloomington press release Wednesday.

Beginning this Friday, all metered street parking downtown will be free beginning at 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Parking is enforced starting at 8 a.m. Saturday but is free all day Sunday. Parking is $1 per hour at the meters, which can be paid through ParkMobile, credit and debit cards or coins.

The goal of the initiative is to increase foot traffic and visitors to local businesses, per the release.

“By offering free parking on Friday and Saturday evenings, we hope to make it easier for people to come downtown, explore, and enjoy all that our vibrant community and local businesses have to offer,” Bloomington Mayor Kerry Thomson said in the release.

Thomson will be available to meet with Bloomington residents 5-7 p.m. this Friday and July 27 downtown.

For Fourth of July, the city and local businesses will host events across Bloomington, including on Friday and Saturday. Street and surface lot parking will be free Thursday for the holiday.

Here’s where else to park around the city and campus.

Where else is parking available in Bloomington?

There are four public garages managed by the city:

Each garage is $.50 an hour, but parking is free Sundays.

There are also four surface lots downtown:

Parking costs $1 per hour but is free on holidays and Sundays.

There’s also free two-hour parking on Rogers Street from Fifth to 11th Street, on Washington Street from Second to Third Street and Lincoln Street from Third to Smith Street.

Parking is always free on Grant Street from Second to Smith Street and on Madison Street from Second to Third Street.

Related

Your Guide to Celebrating the Fourth of July in Bloomington

A list of July 4 events taking place in Bloomington.

Where is parking available around campus?

All IU parking will be free Thursday for Fourth of July, as well as on other holidays.

Through Aug. 16, parking enforcement on campus will be scaled back. Parking will be free from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. Monday through Friday and from 6 p.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Monday. However, locations have specific hours during the academic year.

IU manages six garages:

Fees depend on the length of time, but the maximum rate per day is $30 and is $3 per hour at the ungated garages. All garages accept credit card and CrimsonCard. Henderson Parking Garage also accepts cash, and Poplars and East Parking Garages also accept cash, coins and ParkMobile.

Parking is free at the gated garages — Henderson, Atwater, Fee Lane and Forrest Avenue — from 6 p.m. Friday through 7 a.m. Monday throughout the academic year.

It’s free at the ungated garages — East and Poplars Grove — on weekends from 10 p.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Monday throughout the academic year. The ungated garages require a valid permit to be displayed beginning at 7 a.m. on weekdays.

Each garage has its own hours of operation throughout the week, which can be found online.

IU also offers some metered parking near dormitories and other locations. It costs $2 per hour from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and $1 per hour 5:01 to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday. It’s free from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. throughout the week.

Maximum time limits vary, but many only allow for one-hour parking. There is no time limit at Campus View and Tulip Tree Apartments. Metered parking is free from 10 p.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Monday throughout the academic year.

There are three surface lots available for free parking from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. throughout the week and from 5 p.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Monday:

Parking in CH and ST zones is free without a permit when classes aren’t in session and during academic breaks. The zones are also free from 5 p.m. Friday to 11 p.m. Sunday, unless otherwise posted or on home game days. The CH and ST zones include the white and purple lots near Memorial Stadium.

One-day campus visitor passes are available for those unaffiliated with IU. They can be purchased at the parking operations office and other select locations on campus.

This spring and early summer was supposed to be a time to "come on feel the noize" of cicadas. Two broods of periodic cicadas — one on a 17-year cycle, the other on a 13-year period — are emerging at the same time.

But McLean County residents have NOT heard that pumped up volume so much.

Emily Baldoni of Normal has been looking everywhere in town for cicadas. She has found nothing big, though she was hopeful as WGLT caught up with her Thursday on the Illinois State University Quad.

"I'm hearing like one single cicada. It starts with like (imitates cicada). Now, it's stopped," said Baldoni.

Baldoni has been taking lunches on the Quad to look for emergence tunnels. Very occasionally, she will hear one or two. Baldoni said that's very different from the din of many together.

"It can sound otherworldly. It's just this really loud drone," said Baldoni.

Baldoni said she got interested in cicadas a couple decades ago when there was a big emergence of Brood X on the east coast.

"It was intense. We lived in a neighborhood with a lot of old-growth trees, and they were just everywhere. I just got a little bit obsessed with them. I think they are really cool animals," said Baldoni. "They have this crazy lifecycle where they live underground for 17 years and then they come up and live it up for just a few short weeks above ground. By the time you see them, they're like almost old enough to vote."

So, not such a cicada rager after all for McLean County. State entomologist Chris Dietrich said you can blame a housing shortage — for cicadas, not the one for humans.

"They're really patchy because they require a certain kind of habitat, specifically mature forests. And as you know much of Illinois was historically prairie and currently mostly corn and soybean fields," said Dietrich.

Decatur and Springfield, meanwhile, have lots and lots of cicada karaoke.

Dietrich said since you need forest undisturbed for several decades to have periodic cicadas, and preferably a lot longer because cicadas don't get around so much, you should look to land near waterways to find them.

"I have seen reports of large numbers of cicadas from the Mackinaw River area and Lake Bloomington, those areas north of town," said Dietrich.

The University of Connecticut also has a website that plots out historic distributions of cicadas. That suggests Funks Grove, Clinton Lake, and the Vermilion River in Livingston County might also be good places to listen.

Still, Dietrich said the emergence of the 17-year cicadas and the 13-year cicadas together for the first time in a couple centuries is an opportunity for new science.

No results yet on hookups of these Romeo and Juliet families of cicadas.

Longer term, Dietrich said the advance of climate change, extreme weather events, and fragmented habitat may put broods of periodic cicadas at risk, and their crowd of loud boisterous voices could become ever softer and more isolated.

Meanwhile, Emily Baldoni will continue this year's cicada quest outside of Bloomington-Normal. Dietrich said Baldoni might want to hurry. A mild winter and warm spring mean cicada party time kicked off earlier than usual this year, and in some spots it's almost last-call.

If you miss out though, Dietrich pointed out, you still have the comforting late-summer sound of annual cicadas to look forward to.

Numerous housing developments aimed at helping to close the gap in Bloomington-Normal’s ongoing housing shortage have failed to get off the ground in recent years, but Central Illinois property management company Christian County Development Corporation (CCDC) and Georgia-based developer Domera Development LLC are defying the odds.

The duo has almost finished construction on a 48-unit property in South Bloomington — called The Villas at Prairie Vista — and a 30-unit property in Heyworth called Prairie View at Heyworth. Prairie Vista will consist of 2 and 3-bedroom duplexes, while Prairie View will consist of 2 and 3-bedroom single-family homes.

All the units will also be low-income housing — which McLean County lacks — and CCDC will even accept Section 8 vouchers. (A recent report from the McLean County Regional Planning Commission advocates for added low-income housing in the area.)

CCDC Chief Executive Office Meggann Bell said she’s not familiar enough with the area to know why the Villas at Prairie Vista overcame seemingly insurmountable odds, but CCDC has a good track record in getting Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) projects to the finish line.

“I don't know if we call it just persistence, whatever it may be, but all of our projects that we build and we manage have been very successful long term,” she said.

All CCDC’s 28 other sites across Central and Southern Illinois are low-income housing, according to the locations listed on its website.

Funding

LIHTCs in Illinois are granted by the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA). These allow for private developers to partially fund projects, cutting construction costs so that rates remain low when they go on the market. A portion of units are also required to be low-income for the first 15 years of existence when using state tax credits.

Nathan Joseph, who owns Domera, said the LIHTC is key to how the Prairie Vista and Prairie View came to fruition. They were able to create new, modern units without hiking up rental prices.

“That’s really what makes this go as an affordable development is being able to rent something nice,” he said. “Because there’s existing housing that’s in McLean County that is rented at similar rates, but a lot of it’s bad. I mean, it’s just old and bad and tired.”

CCDC submitted its application alongside Domera for the Prairie projects back in 2020, and they were approved shortly after.

That year, Joseph said Bloomington was ranked as one of the IHDA Opportunity Areas, so choosing to build there resulted in a higher entry score in the competitive process based on points.

“They’ll assign certain points to different cities, different counties, different census tracts based on, you know, different metrics within those census tracts: income levels, poverty, health, access to certain amenities,” he explained.

However, Bloomington no longer ranks quite as high.

“Right now it scores still pretty well, but for it to score really well something that the municipalities can do is… there's these pots of money that if they put them toward development, they have financing like this or some other kind of financing could they leverage it,” Joseph said.

Joseph pointed out that Bloomington could use its Community Block Development Grant (CDBG) funds for infrastructure purposes, or it could establish a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district, dedicating a portion of new tax revenue generated to the revitalization of that area.

In lieu of an IHDA Opportunity Area label, this is what Heyworth had to do to get its LIHTC award.

Joseph said Domera worked alongside village officials to prove to IHDA that Heyworth was making efforts to renovate and demolish abandoned buildings and using the TIF district model.

“IHDA said, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re right. There is a lot of opportunity here, because of the investment efforts of the village,’” he said.

Delays

Four years later, the projects are still only almost done.

Joseph called it “a stupid long time” to work on a project, but he didn’t fault the contractors. Instead, he said COVID-19, increasing costs of building and weather delays have all pushed the project into 2024.

Bloomington and Heyworth have both been supportive partners to work with. He called Heyworth “probably one of the best communities” he has worked with, and he said Bloomington’s City Council was widely supportive of the efforts.

Joseph said they also didn’t encounter any NIMBYism, or Not In My Backyard. [This has been an issue at least in Bloomington in the past.]

“No pitchforks and torches coming out to community meetings and trying to stop the development or not getting zoning approved,” he said.

Bell said construction in Heyworth could finish as early as this month and Bloomington as early as two months from now. If that doesn’t happen, she said she’d like construction to finish before the end of the year, so people can start moving into the units.

“We have a lot of anxious applicants and we're ready to get these leased,” she said

Ameren will need to hook up utilities at both sites as well, Joseph said, before anyone can move in.

The Villas at Prairie Vista also need some city approvals, including an occupancy certificate from the city.

Applications rolling in

Meanwhile, applications are open in Heyworth, and Bell said CCDC is sifting through them. In Bloomington, only pre-applications are out, but she said there were already over 100 applicants last week alone.

“The word is starting to get out,” she said.

Bell estimates 50%-60% of people will go through to the next stage of formal applications, but neither site is move-in ready.

Pricing for 2-bedrooms at Prairie View is $700, while 3-bedrooms will be $800. Bell said Bloomington rates will be slightly higher, though they haven’t finalized any numbers yet. Utilities are not included in the price and will be billed to tenants directly.

Income restrictions are based on the size of each family or household looking to rent. For example, incomes at both sites for an individual is capped at $45,960, and for a four-person household, the cap is $65,640, according to CCDC.

One of the most exciting aspects of becoming a college student is decorating your dorm room. We have to admit: Target is a great one-stop-shop for most dorm decor and furnishing items, but why not really lean into the culture of Bloomington by decorating your new digs with items from local stores around town? Skip Bed, Bath & Beyond and opt for our favorite local stores below — you'll have so many unique pieces in your room, you'll become everyone's go-to for dorm decorating and design.

Bloomington Antique Mall

If you're a passionate vintage shopper at-heart, you'll fall in love with the Bloomington Antique Mall the moment you set foot inside the three-story building. They have pretty much everything you could ever think of — vintage signs, clothing, dishes, furniture, wall art, books, artificial plants, jewelry, and much more. Each of the three floors are jam-packed with items, and each display is very thoughtfully put together. Grab your parents or some friends and spend a few hours perusing the antique mall to see what kind of unique treasures you can find for your room.

Gather :handmade shoppe & co.:

Gather is a trendy handmade goods store on The Square, and they have a variety of eclectic, unique items to decorate your dorm with. Pick up an assortment of stickers to put on your mini-fridge or laptop, some plants to scatter around your room for good energy and a new hobby, a few decorative pillows to throw on your bed or in a chair, a bunch of locally-made wall art to hang, some pins to personalize your backpack, a few staple dishes for your small kitchen area, an LGBTQ+ Pride flag to show your support, and a few candles to keep your place smelling fresh.

Goods for Cooks

Looking for cute/cool dishes to stock in your kitchen-area? Goods for Cooks is a great place to find some. The local store has tons of different dishes, kitchen towels, cookbooks, and even a robust selection of gourmet food items. Grab a few of your favorite cups, bowls, plates, and towels, and expect your friends to ask where you found such unique kitchen accessories!

Habitat for Humanity ReStore

If you're on the hunt for a bargain mini-fridge and small furniture items for your dorm room, the Habitat for Humanity ReStore is the place to go. They sell gently-used furniture and appliances of all kinds at unbeatable prices, as well as odds and ends like wall art & lamps. In addition to finding incredible bargain items at the ReStore, you're also supporting the environment by preventing usable items from being put in landfills. The ReStore's inventory is constantly changing, so pop in frequently to see what treasures you're able to find.

The Indiana Shop

The Indiana Shop is a great place to find IU-themed items. They carry a large selection of kitchenware, flags & banners, magnets & stickers, picture frames, and wall art. The ever-popular Pubs of Bloomington and Pubs Too posters are available at the shop, as well as the NCAA Championships basketball banner — a few great Bloomington/IU items to hang in your dorm, and in your house or apartment as an upperclassmen, too!

Lola + Company

If you love a rustic, farmhouse-chic vibe, Lola + Co. is a must for you. The downtown store carries a beautiful assortment of home goods items — pick up a few throw pillows to scatter around your dorm, a cute lamp for your desk, some crocheted potholders for removing hot dishes from your microwave, a collection of framed plant prints for your walls, a few darling mugs to enjoy coffee or tea (or ramen, let's be honest) from, some throw blankets to drape across your bed and desk chair, a few candles for good smells & warm ambiance, and a variety of faux potted plants to simulate gorgeous live greenery in your room (a fantastic option for those lacking a green thumb!).

oak.

Calling all plant people: oak. is going to be your new favorite place. oak is now at their new location on 6th street and carries a huge variety of plants big and small, as well as pots, stickers, hanging planters, potting mix & seeds, throw pillows, wall art, and more. You can create your own personal greenhouse inside your dorm room with the cute, quirky, and cool selections at oak.

Urban Outfitters

We're breaking our promise of local Bloomington stores a bit here, but there's an Urban Outfitters less than a block from Sample Gates on Kirkwood, and they have a great selection of trendy home items. Grab a set of sheets and a bedspread, a lamp for your nightstand, floor pillows to lounge on, a Hydro Flask to stay hydrated day & night, a laptop tray to comfortably work or watch Netflix while in bed, a set of decorative vines and string lights to hang from your walls & ceiling, and an assortment of vases, figurines, planters, and prints to further customize your space.

Looking for more on new student life in B-Town? Check out the following:

If you’ve made it through the expected dense traffic around and in Bloomington and you’ve managed to grab a parking spot somewhere, you’ll likely encounter your next hurdle to eclipse-viewing pleasure: How to get to where you want to go.

While events around the community are offering parking opportunities and the city has on-street, on-lot and in-garage parking, you may find yourself some distance from your destination(s). Bloomington Transit, the city's bus service, will not be an option for most of the day, as the buses won't run from 1:10 to 5:10 p.m.

Bloomington city officials said the best way for people to get around the busy city will be to use bicycles, scooters or your feet.

Can I get around using a rented scooter or e-bike?

If you’re hoping to rent an e-bike or e-scooter, you may be struggling: The mayor’s office said that to its knowledge, scooter companies are not providing extra vehicles, and these transportation options are usually already in short supply during busy downtown festivals. With the potential for significantly more people downtown, scooters may be scarce.

Another note about scooters: City law prohibits scooter use on sidewalks in the city center, and even outside of the city center allows them only on “uncrowded” sidewalks. Scooters are allowed on streets in the city center and on multi-use paths and trails.

How far it is to various event locations in Bloomington

Distances between prominent city spots and event locations:

Will there be any road closures in Bloomington during the eclipse?

You are likely to encounter heavy vehicle traffic in and around Bloomington, but the city is not closing any streets during the eclipse. However, Indiana University staff will close one street for emergency vehicles and some others intermittently to allow pedestrians to cross.

IU will close David Baker Avenue between East 17th Street and North Fee Lane. That means people going east or west on 17th Street will not be able to turn north onto David Baker Avenue, and people going north or south on Fee lane will not be able to turn east onto David Baker Avenue. IU is closing the avenue to provide an extra route for emergency vehicles. The avenue is about a half mile from the IU Health Bloomington Hospital and just east of the Ind. 45/46 Bypass.

IU also will position staff along a half-mile stretch of 10th Street, from Woodlawn Avenue in the west to Eagleson Avenue in the east — along Woodlawn Field and the Bloomington Arboretum — to temporarily close the street to allow groups of pedestrians to cross.

IU staff will do the same for a quarter-mile stretch on Woodlawn Avenue, from 10th Street in the north to Seventh Street in the south, or roughly from the Indiana Memorial Union to the Asian Culture Center.

Amanda Roach, the university’s director for emergency management and continuity, said staff will wear vests and may use temporary barricades to stop vehicle traffic at those locations.

She said the university expects the city to have to deal with crowds similar to “five football games at the same time.”

Roach said the university is “more than ready to welcome folks to our campus,” but she cautioned that heavy foot, bike, scooter and vehicle traffic will cause disruption and delays.

Where are first aid stations on the IU campus during the eclipse?

Memorial Stadium will have additional first aid and information available, Roach said.

Boris Ladwig can be reached at bladwig@heraldt.com.