Your Tuesday hot potato: "Why Historic Preservation Districts Should Be a Thing of the Past."

Remember that affordable housing discussion we refuse to have in New Albany?

Here's an interesting flip side. I'm guessing those medians on Main Street are of sufficient width to allow a lean-to or eight.

But seriously: Food for thought.

Why Historic Preservation Districts Should Be a Thing of the Past, by Kriston Capps (City Lab)

... When local- and state-government bodies grant preservation status to historic districts — sometimes entire neighborhoods — they do not always simply protect culture, architecture, and history. Sometimes they also shore up wealth, status, and power.

Charleston and the Confederacy ... or, the thoroughly depressing week that was, Part 1.

Once again, in the absence of any shared commitment to historical truth, we turn to a comedian to provide critical insight.

I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. And I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah. That’s us.

Meanwhile, sorry if it hurts your feelings, but the Confederacy was all about racism, folks. History just shouldn't be an elective.

What the Confederate flag really means to America today, according to a race historian, by Roberto A. Ferdman (Washington Post)

 ... But I also think that people invoke the flag because they want to endorse on some level, even if secretly or subconsciously, the very rationale for the Confederacy. When people say 'heritage not hate,’ they are omitting the obvious, which is that that heritage is hate. When someone says it’s about history, well, that particular history is inseparable from hate, because it is about hate. It’s about racism, and it’s about slavery.

Mayor puts people on sidewalks and sells his own ideas. In Charleston, that is.

A local leader as a salesman of his own ideas.

Imagine that.

It really isn't the same thing as trotting out John Rosenbarger to obfuscate rigged plans already made in backrooms, or insisting that what one's own two eyes say about 18-wheelers speeding through "reviving" residential areas must be ignored pending the results of a study.

Maybe the problem is this: First one must have ideas and respect their power. Perhaps local politicians suckled in the vapid Heavrinist embrace of the Floyd County Democratic Party can be excused for having no previous exposure to ideas.

It doesn't mean they need to be elected.

The man behind Charleston's rebirth, by Joie Chen (Al Jazeera)

(Joseph P. Riley) understood the opposition, he said. Urban areas were becoming depopulated, as people fled for the suburbs. They were afraid.

"I knew that the only way to bring the city back to life is to have it energized with people living in it, and people visiting it and people on the sidewalks," he explained. "You put people on the sidewalks and it’s like irrigating a parched lawn. All of a sudden, it comes back to life" ...

... It works, he says, because a local leader’s primary duty is to be a salesman of his ideas.