Born again? A rumination.

Mayoral candidate Doug England’s first big print ad ran in today’s Tribune:

Doug England Will Clean Up New Albany!

Garbage In Alleys … Street Litter … Unsightly Buildings … Weeds

ENGLAND FOR NEW ALBANY

The ad appears at the bottom of the Tribune’s Spectrum section, beneath an informative Robyn Davis Sekula feature article on the 1917 tornado, a piece that includes three photos of the devastation that bear a curious resemblance to certain areas of the city today, nine decades later – and the latter-day examples coming without an act of nature to blame for the mess.

Rather, today’s scenes of squalor and civic disintegration are the result of purely human decision making, much of it occurring over a period of thirty to forty years, a time when in retrospect, proclivities for future vision appear to have been entirely bred out of New Albany’s collective gene pool.

But, of course, none of it happened overnight. Successive generations of New Albany political leadership took their turns to snooze at the helm, either unable or unwilling to do more than shrug while permitting the worst angels of humanity’s nature to take their course, and abetting the expanding desperation in the city’s core neighborhoods by institutional shortsightedness, calculated political ignorance, and periodically, simple gross corruption.

Seeing as belated conversions are a characteristic both of ominous prospective deathbeds and eagerly resourceful candidates, the obvious question to ask of Doug England, who after all served two terms as mayor of New Albany, is whether any of these pressing matters, which were well along their way when Richard Nixon was in the Oval Office, ever came to his attention during eight previous years as mayor.

Among “these matters,” I would include the ongoing erosion of willingness and legal capability with reference to ordinance enforcement, an unprecedented and opportunistic expansion of unregulated rental properties at the expense of owner occupied homes in the city’s neighborhoods, the downward social immobility accompanying such shifts, and what might be termed as an inevitably deleterious and surely obvious ever-widening ripple effect of all this on the continued viability of the city itself.

And so I asked this question of Doug England, and his answer – one that I judge as perfectly sincere and truthful – is that no, these did not come to his attention, and they remained somewhat off his radar screen during his tenure as mayor.

He goes on to say that eight years away from local politics have made him humble, taught him how to listen, and broadened his field of vision, and that if given another (final, he adds) chance to serve as mayor, he’s ready to place an emphasis on improving New Albany’s neighborhoods by thinking in the future tense.

Fair enough. Please know that today’s posting is intended neither as a pro-England apologetic, nor as an anti-England polemic. Readers who have placed neighborhood issues into a position of importance in personal and political terms must judge according to their own consciences whether Doug England, or for that matter any other candidate, is capable of following through with substantive change when it comes to the city’s slowly awakening revitalization.

I note only that revitalization isn’t just about bricks and mortar, litter and slumlords, or short-term clean-up Band-Aids. A friend who is a participant in training provided by the Neighborworks Training Institute passes along this definition of revitalization:

Community and neighborhood revitalization is the strategic process of transforming neighborhoods and communities that lack vitality into places of choice through collaborations of residents, organizations and other stakeholders. These communities and neighborhoods strive to be resilient places where it makes sense for people to invest time, energy and money, where they are optimistic about their future, where they feel they have control over their surroundings and the capacity to respond to community dynamics, and where they are connected to each other and the larger region. The process addresses five key elements:

• 1. The neighborhood’s or community’s image
• 2. Market forces that act on the neighborhood or community
• 3. The physical conditions
• 4. The social conditions
• 5. Stakeholders’ ability to manage neighborhood or community issues and affairs

(Source: Strategies and Implementation Techniques for Creating Neighborhoods of Choice Through Revitalization, pg 29, Neighborworks Training Institute)

To be sure, cleaning up our neighborhoods in the physical sense is a large part of it, and yet the notion of revitalization does not refer exclusively to physical appearances, but to a collective regeneration of the urban human spirit and a restoration of a sense of community and our places within it. In this context, as important as it remains to address the need to enforce the city’s own laws and to exercise pro-active involvement, it’s immeasurably more important to foster manifestations of control, connectivity, management, resilience and optimism.

Speaking personally, qualities like these engender powerful feelings, especially when applied to one’s own backyard. The house next door to ours is for sale, and we’re keenly interested in the way that the “Hat Ladies” propose to market it – and to whom.

We hope they choose to do so via means like the Historic New Albany web site.

We’d cherish a sale to fellow conceptual travelers with an interest in the specific place in which we all live. We lament that there was a time when such homes would have been quickly abandoned to the speculative blood-suckers of the world, irrespective of location, and the conversion would have proceeded with little notice. Perhaps now, indifference and fatalism are no longer the accepted emotions when contemplating the city of New Albany’s future.

Meanwhile, it is encouraging to see Doug England putting his advertising money where the zeitgeist quite obviously is, and it is a good beginning, although far more substance from his camp is necessary.

Of the remaining mayoral candidates, Larry Scharlow (D) has a website, incumbent James Garner (D) a rental property trial balloon, little known challenger Bill Castile (D) a handful of yard signs, and Randy Hubbard (R) not a solitary public position on any topic at all, to date.

As an extension of a dialogue that we hope is emerging on these and other matters of importance, all candidates are invited to submit platforms and position papers to NA Confidential for publication, and if possible, further discussion.

See you around the neighborhood. After all, it’s where we live.