Dan Coffey would fit just fine over there in Prospect, except Prospect wouldn't allow Coffey to live there.

As Gerth notes, the property in question was approved for use with nary a second glance when the proposal called for luxury housing.

When luxuriousness was discarded and the topic shifted to affordable housing, suddenly "them people" (in Dan Coffey's famous words) became a pressing issue, requiring even Sam Swope to be exhumed.

Plenty of parallels with New Albany's luxury-obsessed City Hall team and the city officials it coddles, eh?

Old, poor and black? The city of Prospect doesn't want you, by Joseph Gerth (Louisville Courier Journal)

Here's hoping the Louisville Metro Council and my neighbors in Prospect are happy with themselves.

They’ve succeeded in keeping old, poor, disabled and (they believe) black people out of the eastern Louisville city. Hurrah.

I'm talking, of course, about their opposition to the Prospect Cove apartment complex that the good folks in Prospect decided they didn't want right across the street from the Kroger, where they go to buy groceries — where I go to buy groceries.

A Louisville company had proposed building 198 apartments for low-income seniors on nearly 10 acres. Under rules of the complex, the apartments would have been leased only to families in which at least one person was over age 55.

Rent for a one-bedroom unit would have been about $930, and a two-bedroom unit would have been about $1,000.

Additionally, no one under 18 would have been allowed to live there.

The fact that the apartments were designed for people below a certain income threshold screamed "black people" to some of the folks who opposed it, and so the city of Prospect spent some $200,000 fighting the development ...