Gahan's magical kingdom of denial: On the one hand, there's 8% and 40 years, while on the other, 20 years to escape poverty ... maybe.

As well as a percentage it can't even recall. 

Recently one of the mayor's public housing consultancy minions emitted a deep and abiding yawn, then cut, pasted and doodled a purported statement that Jeff Gahan duly signed, as though in some parallel universe he'd actually written it himself -- you know, like Andrew Jackson was alive during the Civil War and shit.

Additionally, any new private housing development that received local government support will be required to reserve a percentage of the units for low-income residents. New Albany is a generous, welcoming community and this plan reflects that spirit.

The minion was too damned lazy to look at the recently minted (and just as quickly forgotten) city comprehensive plan to find the exact percentage, though why would he? The stacked board's votes already were purchased. At least two of the new white male board members refused the customary board training primer. Had they all died on the spot, the posthumous vote would have been the same.

For the record, it's 8%. We showed it to you weeks ago.

Gahan has been planning the public housing putsch for years, and naturally he waited until his knights in shining pasteboard (Flaherty and Collins) showered the city in bocce-intensity luxury before revealing this purely non-binding percentage, which you can bet your sweet bippy will be contested in the future, and when the howls of developers penetrate the Down Low Bunker, the "requirement" will be conveniently flushed downstream, via luxury plumbing enabled by sewer tap-in waivers.

Though once again, I digress.

At the current yearly pace of the city of New Albany serving as "partner in the development of housing through public incentives," and assuming (stupidly) that the city actually enforces the non-binding "requirement," it will take approximately 40 years for the 8% to yield the number of affordable housing units lost to Gahan's bulldozers.

In entirely unrelated news ...

Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong, by Gillian B. White (CityLab)

MIT economist Peter Temin argues that economic inequality results in two distinct classes. And only one of them has any power.

A lot of factors have contributed to American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the power of lobbying, globalization, and so on. In their wake, what’s left?

That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by Peter Temin, an economist from MIT. Temin argues that, following decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political influence and a much larger, minority-heavy (but still mostly white) lower class that is all too frequently subject to the first group’s whims.