Drake University Area: a neighborhood bigger than the campus inside it

The Drake neighborhood introduces itself with unusual confidence. The Drake Neighborhood Association says it is one of the oldest, largest, and most diverse neighborhoods in Des Moines, and the university’s own neighborhood page uses the same language. Both sources define the neighborhood broadly, stretching from 42nd Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway and from Interstate 235 to Franklin Avenue.  That scale matters because it keeps the area from being reduced to a college halo. Official Drake neighborhood materials describe it as home not only to Drake University, but also to century-old churches, mature trees, coffee shops, pubs, restaurants, live-music spaces, historic homes, and the city’s oldest independent art-house movie theater. This is a neighborhood with a campus in it, not merely a campus with some streets around it.  The neighborhood’s own organizational life reinforces that idea. The Drake Neighborhood Association says it is an all-volunteer association founded in 1979 and the city’s second-oldest neighborhood association, focused on celebrating history, building community, giving neighbors a voice in development, preserving natural beauty, and welcoming new residents. That language is important because it shows the area has long thought of itself as a neighborhood with agency, not just as university-adjacent real estate.  Invest DSM’s current neighborhood page adds another layer. It says the Drake neighborhood is minutes from downtown and highlights a mix of neighborhood-serving businesses, historic homes, apartments, and local amenities that make it attractive to both longtime residents and newcomers. That closeness to downtown helps explain why the area feels urban without feeling anonymous.  There is also a strong social texture to the place. Current destination coverage describes the neighborhood as laid-back but alive, with tree-lined streets, early twentieth-century homes, and a feel that is equal parts college town and classic Midwestern neighborhood. That is not an official planning phrase, but it rings true because it matches the neighborhood-and-university descriptions from primary sources.  So the best way to write the Drake University Area is as a neighborhood of overlap: students and longtime residents, rentals and historic houses, bars and churches, campus traditions and ordinary domestic life. The university is the biggest institution there, but it is not the whole story. The neighborhood has always been larger than the school inside it.