In truth, Team Gahan's politically-motivated ineptitude produced its Colonial Manor fiasco -- but neighborhood activists continue "moving forward."

We've established that Team Gahan is prone to being scandalously "butthurt" (as the kids like to say) whenever it is challenged with facts, as when city council finally asserted itself to the exclusion of secretive backroom redevelopment fixes like the one proposed at Colonial Manor.

Council rejects Gahan's, Redevelopment's Colonial Manor tax increment financing lollapalooza by a 5-4 vote. Alterations to come?

One major reversal in eight years, and they're emptying the lockers of rubber truncheons and doing that Goebbels jig.

As usual, the truth lies elsewhere.

Let's focus on Jeff Gahan's breathtakingly brazen string of fake facts and outright lies about Colonial Manor.

If one takes the time to unravel Team Gahan's ongoing Colonial Manor narrative, it is filled with imprecise cutting, sloppy pasting and inept choreography. In short, City Hall whiffed on three pitches. Yesterday councilman and mayoral aspirant (Independent) Dan Coffey brought us up to date.

I learned Wednesday that the offer from the Redevelopment Commission to purchase the Colonial Shopping Center is no longer an option. I was told there was a short time for the city to comply with the offer and could not do so with the conditions set forth by the council. Too many questions about this project went unanswered and the public's need to know didn't seem to be considered. Congratulations to the people who stood firm and wouldn't allow this project to happen without your input. Democracy still works if given the chance!

Josh Turner, the GOP's candidate for New Albany's 5th district council and a grassroots organizer seeking a future for Colonial Manor, agreed and replied to Coffey with an excellent point.

Just think, if this wasn’t over appraisal it would already be purchased and five people at Redevelopment would have complete control over the property.

Because the forever smug Team Gahan's "process" at Colonial Manor was strictly reactive, with election year political imperatives hastily brought to fruition in order to check the mortal threat of citizen participation, Redevelopment's proposed purchase price for the Colonial Manor property was higher then the appraisals, legally necessitating the council vote.

As Turner points out, had City Hall taken the time to finesse the price, Redevelopment already would be planning the mixed use development with its chosen no-bid, professionally contracted architects, engineers and consultants, all of whom are eager to tithe to the closed circle of pay-to-play patronage.

Gahan's first quarter CFA-4 has been filed, and it's another massive, quivering edifice of pay-to-play cash.

The most interesting thing about this Gahanesque fiasco has been the least documented. Redevelopment director Staten conceded that the city had sought the assistance of private sector developer Chad Sprigler, whose family owns apartments nearby on Slate Run Road, in order to "negotiate" with Colonial Manor's owners -- to speak their language.

This is weird even by David Duggins' tortuous standards of illogic. I asked an insider to comment.

Why use an apartment builder to negotiate a commercial lot for the city? They are under-qualified to do this because it is not their core strength. Sprigler must have been paid a fee for doing so. Moreover, how does this connect the dots to the Spriglers' deal at Cross Creek apartments on Green Valley? The Spriglers couldn't handle the expense of necessary repairs, and so the city bailed them out (at a loss to the Spriglers) via the New Albany Housing Authority. Now NAHA will spend $4 million to make them into voucher housing. Of course Sprigler took a tax deduction for the loss, and now they're doing the city's job at Colonial Manor. I've yet to see Gahan botch one as badly as Colonial Manor, but that's political desperation for you.

With Team Gahan pouting and churlish, we look to community organizer Kathy Copas for a nugget of genuine interest amid Redevelopment's smoldering wreckage. Take careful note of the significance. Without any "help" from the city, ground level networking has independent small businesses talking to Kathy and each other, providing a glimpse of what can happen at the grassroots prior to top-down, politically-motivated TIF solutions.

When politicians like Gahan seek mistakenly to take credit for things like the concentration of food and drink establishments downtown, the best route to dismiss the chugging of Kool-Aid is to think about the way entrepreneurs and investors actually make decisions: on the ground, talking to others like them, applying shoe leather to walking and networking -- precisely the way Kathy recounts her discussions with business owners.

This is the way sustainable critical mass comes about. Team Gahan can't grasp it because not one of the mayor's closest associates ever owned a small indie business. In truth, they haven't got a clue about the way small indie businesses really work.

Take it away, Kathy.

Hundreds more have now watched the video of last week's Colonial Manor Listening Session and many have joined with the rest of us in continuing to think, dream, and strategize around how we can all do more to give Colonial Manor a real future and a hope.

As we contemplate further actions by our city officials, one especially interesting and exciting thing has been consistently bubbling up, this time from a number of our community's existing small business owners. Several of them have emerged and said something along the lines of---"Well, my little business already offers that in another part of town. If people want that for Colonial Manor, and we had some help and support, we would love to expand to Colonial Manor, too!"

Wow. Does anyone else find that as full of incredible possibilities as we do? What else have you seen, heard, or been thinking about since we gathered? Let's keep the listening and conversation going! #colonialmanorrising

When it comes to what makes a good Main Street work, what is New Albany's grade?

Botched, but still might help. 

It's "Main Street" in the sense of downtown, and I think maybe a C, up from F just a few years ago. Give it another year or two, and maybe we'll make it to B.

But no grading on the curve. Something actually must be accomplished to graduate, Jeff.

What Makes a Good Main Street Work? (Planetizen)

What Makes a Good Main Street Work? Kaid Benfield uses Corning, New York, to illustrate five key elements.

"While some Main Streets seem well past their prime, others – like Corning, New York – remain thriving to this day. Why? A lot of it has to do with the towns and cities in which they are located, of course; it’s hard to have a well-functioning Main Street in a down-and-out community. But there are also elements of design and context that matter. What are they? The answers matter to sustainability, because traditional Main Streets tend to have central locations and good walkability, both of which reduce carbon and other emissions associated with driving; over time, they also recycle land, buildings and infrastructure."

Benfield muses on some essential elements for thriving Main Streets:

• A superior pedestrian experience
• Density, but at human scale
• Viable local businesses
• Nature
• Nearby residences

The power of "small-scale fixes" and "lightweight, self-determined urban renewal projects."

David Thrasher's garage door art, Bergman Building, alley side.

There are 1,001 examples around the world of "lightweight, self-determined urban renewal projects," that when taken together, combine to create larger success stories.

Capital-intensive construction projects, subsidized and charged to the TIF-One Card, and as undertaken in the hope of trickle-down, come to us from the top of the power structure, and at the top, smaller rivulets in need of even modest support are missed in the glare of vanity.

Top-down's great for re-election campaigns and political financing, but shouldn't the aim be to accomplish something?

A Case Study in Reviving a Dying Downtown: Marcus Westbury’s new book, Creating Cities, describes the small-scale fixes that helped Newcastle, Australia, by Sarah Goodyear (City Lab)

... Westbury acknowledges Renew Newcastle’s critics, who charge that the approach encourages gentrification, that it hasn’t produced change fast enough, that the successes are too small and the failures too many. But he argues that the initiative has transformed the way that Newcastle sees itself as well as the way outsiders see it, making it a model for similar cities around Australia and beyond. It is part of an international movement toward lightweight, self-determined urban renewal projects that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

"Small-scale developers around the county ... organizing around their central goals of revitalizing communities, one small lot at a time."

“There is no lack of places in the country where there is opportunity to renew more walkable communities, places that have the bones for this kind of economic success. People have lived in these places a long time, but they haven’t had the benefit of building the wealth for living there a long time.”
-- Jim Kumon (from the article)

As Jeff G pointed out on Fb, New Albany already has the bones, as well as a handful of precisely such developers. In fact, together with local entrepreneurs, they're responsible for a disproportionately high percentage of projects that have combined to create a measure hope for the historic business district.

And yet, the emphasis remains on corporate welfare and the usual smorgasbord of abatements and incentives for big ticket, plaque ready projects. I differ with this attitude. Given that these small-scale developers don't depend on corporate welfare, I think it's the city's job to get the other pieces of the puzzle, primarily infrastructure, into place.

This article is a great example of how little bits of progress add up to tangible and sustainable gains, resulting in the sort of business floor, upon which the large projects can be conceived and implemented organically, without so much need for taxpayer-subsidized fertilizer.

Developers Build Walkable Neighborhoods With Focus on Community Wealth, by Oscar Perry Abello (Next City)

 ... (Monte Anderson is one of a growing group of small-scale developers around the county that is organizing around their central goals of revitalizing communities, one small lot at a time. They typically don’t rely on local tax subsidies or other incentives, and beneficiaries are usually local entrepreneurs and neighborhood residents. They favor walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income, racially diverse communities.

Through the Congress for the New Urbanism, several of them got together and this year began gathering common resources and organizing a small-scale developer program, including small-scale developer boot camps. The first boot camp was in Duncanville, Texas, one of the communities where Anderson works. There are two more scheduled for later this month in Maine and New Hampshire, and one in Atlanta, Georgia, in October ...

"Asheville's de facto motto was: 'That will never work here - don't even try.'"

Where have I heard that one before?

Asheville Just 'Happened' to Develop a Nice Downtown—Or Did It?, by James Fallows (The Atlantic)

In the immortal words from Liberty Valance, "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Herewith the legend and reality of Asheville.

... Now the expected further shoe has dropped, with readers from Asheville writing in to say: We drifted our way into success? Hah! Some "drift!"

Here is a sample, from J. Patrick Whalen, who has lived in Asheville since the mid-1970s. I'm quoting him at length because the issues he mentions connect the stories we've heard in every corner of the country. I'm also including some of the photos Mr. Whalen sent, of Asheville before-and-after its recent renaissance.

Welcome to the Germantown Times.

Solid satire, nicely rendered in slightly gentler Onion style, but at times with more of an edge.

GERMANTOWN RESIDENT EXPRESSES CONCERN THAT NEW PIZZA PLACE ON GOSS MAY INSPIRE OTHER GOOD IDEAS, by Frank Thompson (Germantown Times)

“I’m telling you, this is how it all starts,” said Gray. “I’m not trying to be a negative nancy, but just watch. Before we know it, everywhere you look someone’s gonna be trying to do something nice for the neighborhood.”

According to the blog ...

All articles are written by Sandy and Frank Thompson. Both are Germantown born and raised, and love their town. They both started writing last year to “keep things interesting” several years after retiring from UPS. They hope to keep the blog going as long as they can still “keep the AOL turned on!”.

Revitalization is a two-way street: A rigorous study of traffic calming impacts.

We've been saying it for the entire history of this blog. Perhaps the city of New Albany (read: Democratic Party grandees) finally will listen and DO SOMETHING.

Two-Way Streets Can Fix Declining Downtown Neighborhoods, by John Gilderbloom (Planetizen)

Here is one simple and affordable strategy to renew our downtown neighborhoods: immediately convert multi-lane one-way streets back to two-way traffic. Such conversions reduce car speeds and encourage greater pedestrian and bike mode-share. As a response of calmer residential streets, neighborhoods become more livable, more prosperous, and safer.

While 100 cities have rushed to convert multi-lane one-way streets, few researchers have performed rigorous studies of traffic calming impacts. Under my supervision, University of Louisville planning graduate students and faculty (Winston Mitchell, Nick York, Zaria Murrell, Brad Cronin, Wesley Meares, Billy Riggs, and Samantha Alexis Smith) produced a rigorous study of just two streets in Louisville (Brook and First streets) that were converted nearly three years ago from, in effect, multi-lane freeways to slow and sane streets, available to all users. We examined the before and after conditions of the conversion of Brook and First and compared the newly converted two-ways with the unconverted multi-lane one-ways (Second and Third) next to them. We also explored another street that was part one-way and two-way.

 The results were stunning. Two-way conversion improves the livability of a neighborhood by significantly reducing crime and collisions and by increasing property values, business revenue, taxes, and bike and pedestrian traffic. Outside consultants, with price tags of millions of dollars, never predicted this in places like Oslo, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Atlanta.

And this.

By every measurable aspect, First and Brook streets are better places since they were converted to two-way traffic supplemented by smartly designed bike lanes. While there is no magical, quick-fix when it comes to turning around neighborhoods, converting multi-lane one-way streets to two-way streets is a smart and affordable policy. Neighborhoods will also blossom if one-way conversions are coupled with other proven infrastructure improvements, such as street trees, bike lanes, community gardens, public art, and adaptive reuse of abandoned properties.

"The bleak future facing many parts of rural America is enough to make you weep – or get to work."

I confess to thinking little about the rural side of the story, primarily because I harbor no desire to be rural. But one can't help thinking about the other side of the coin, especially while out in the country.

Speak Your Piece: Dry Your Eyes, Revitalize, by Timothy Collins (Daily Yonder)

... So, let’s turn the idea of subsistence on its head and consider an alternative for rural communities. Can we envision a basic, but clear public and private commitment to provide everyone with tools for a comfortable life? Can we assure that basic human needs will be filled: food, shelter, clothing, health care, education and fulfilling life’s work with adequate wages?

Subsistence — defined here as treading lightly on the earth while living a good life — can be a positive alternative and a lifestyle choice supported by rural communities and state and federal policymakers.

Let’s banish the notion of global competitiveness as the primary goal for rural areas and communities. Let’s focus on capacity building and improving the quality of life. We need to create jobs with adequate pay for bountiful, but sustainable subsistence. We need to consider the crucial importance of reversing environmental damage and building small, manageable, and sustainable communities.

These being the community principles we ignore in New Albany.

In New Albany, starting about a year and a half ago, a process was initiated to spend more than a million bucks toward creating a place -- in this instance, a downtown park meant to honor the city's Bicentennial --  conceptually trickling from the top down, as it's always been done, and stewarded by a relatively small group of surely well-meaning persons who nonetheless cannot seem to grasp that the planet is filled with useful ideas, and maybe every now and then, it might be a good thing to be "lower case" democratic about such matters. Unfortunately for the noblesse oblige theory of civic management, our movers and shakers possess too narrow a conceptual vision, which isn't always very obliging. When one's prime objective at every turn is retaining control, it discourages involvement, which in turn becomes the rationale for retaining control: See, no one else can or will do it. It simply isn't true, and I wish "they" could see that.

As an example of what I'm saying, here are eleven principles for creating community spaces. Did any of them feature in the development and implementation of Rent Boy Park?

Eleven Principles for Creating Great Community Places

Didn't think so.

The art walk was a great success.

Who needs the Louisville Crashers when you have Ten Penny Nail?

Art Walk organizers report a more than five hundred registered art walkers as well as numerous others who didn't sign in.

The crowd at the beer garden on Bank Street was steady all night long. It cooled off considerably for the last two hours, and the music was stellar.

Hats off to Mickey Thompson for the set-up and tear-down, and big thanks to the Dandy Lion crew, the musicians and DJs, Bank Street Brewhouse staff, and of course, the heavy hitters at the Carnegie: Karen Gillenwater and Laura Wilkins. The artists deserve props, too.

Events like the Art Walk require literally hundreds of hours of cumulative background work to produce an atmosphere lasting only one night. But memories of the overall effect are priceless. It hasn't been long since the only time folks came downtown was during Harvest Homecoming. Now, smaller crowds congregate during orchestrated evenings (rest assured, the St. Mary's picnic attendees had a wonderful show with the Crashers even as we "occupied" Bank Street), and also most weekends, even when nothing special is happening.

It's getting there. If you took part in the Art Walk, consider filling out the survey linked below.


Did you attend the Art Walk yesterday, Saturday June 23? Please help us make the Art Walk even better next year by taking this brief online survey!

Spend 5 minutes telling us what you think and you might win a Public Art Project t-shirt. The deadline to complete the survey is July 14, 2012.

Click HERE to take the survey.

THANK YOU, from all of us, to everyone who attended the Art Walk yesterday, and for your continued support of and interest in the Carnegie Center and the New Albany Public Art Project.

Karen Gillenwater, Curator
Laura Wilkins, Director of Marketing & Outreach

Another reminder to CM CeeSaw as he cowers in his bunker: “One-way streets in our city helped hollow out the core, and still do to this day.”

Such craziness. You actually start thinking subversive thoughts, like what if you designed it to encourage good outcomes?

LINQ: Businessman speaks out against one-way streets (TheSpec.com)

 ... “That, in a nutshell, is what we’ve created: a place to get through as quickly as possible. That’s the legacy of one-way streets and they have worked well to achieve it.”

Problem is, a downtown should be much more than a place “to get through as quickly as possible,” Newman says.

A note on community.

It's beyond absurd when anyone who works so hard to force their own will upon a community without input or consensus from that community responds to any criticism with claims of anti-community bias, negative outlook, and/or cynicism on the part of others. Using personal friendships and political clout to dominate proceedings and get one's way is the opposite of community building.

To the extent that certain "community leaders" ever grasp that, broader cooperation and collaboration may be possible. To the extent that they don't, conditions will continue to devolve. As a matter of that devolution, the only thing for which those "leaders" will be able to take credit is the destruction of potential and the unnecessary and counterproductive imposition of self-inflicted limitations on community strength.

A special addendum for Mayor Gahan: I very much hope that you understand the above in ways that your predecessor, who exacerbated said devolution, did not. A lot of the people currently whispering in your ear don't get it, either. If you pay close attention, you'll notice that their calls are most often not for increased inclusiveness but instead seek favor for their own very limited decision making.

There are numerous examples from around the region and country as to how to facilitate broader participation in community planning and implementation but they have consistently chosen not to employ them, even as they have continued to erroneously insist that they somehow represent community will or "good" sans the communication needed to establish what that actually is. Strong-arm tactics from the mayor's office in support of such absurdity will be counted as such, though I strongly prefer that not be the case and suggest we will all be better off if it isn't.