"The town is broke because there’s a structural gap between revenue and expenses due to a suburban land use pattern that can never pay for its own obligations or maintenance."

From the article.

What is a talisman?

1. a stone, ring, or other object, engraved with figures or characters supposed to possess occult powers and worn as an amulet or charm.

2. any amulet or charm.

3. anything whose presence exercises a remarkable or powerful influence on human feelings or actions.

That guy trying to cross the stroad (above) is a talisman of sorts, though most drivers wouldn't give him a second thought, at least until the point of impact.

The Talisman of Colerain, by Johnny Sanphillippo (Strong Towns)

As perhaps the world’s most lapsed Catholic I still instantly recognized this rusty bit of iron for what it is. It’s a relic. A talisman. It’s a distant cousin three times removed from a splinter from the Cross or a tiny fragment from a Saint’s robe. It’s meant to have special healing powers that will bring health and prosperity to the town. It’s a shield to protect the innocent and vanquish evil. All you have to do is believe and its blessings will be revealed. I’ll get back to that in a moment. But first, there’s that other image ...

The talismanic influence of certain objects can reflect the surroundings.

The town is broke because there’s a structural gap between revenue and expenses due to a suburban land use pattern that can never pay for its own obligations or maintenance. The memorial park is sitting in a sea of low-value surface parking lots, empty buildings, and buildings that are only occupied because they were bribed into existence with subsidies and tax abatements to keep up appearances. Meanwhile millions of dollars worth of public infrastructure sit underutilized.

And the verdict isn't pleasant (bold type mine).

I doubt the good people of Colerain are interested in transforming their old parking lots and dead strip malls into a thick Main Street downtown full of mixed-use buildings with shops on the ground floor and offices and apartments upstairs. I don’t think they’d even know how to build that sort of thing if they tried. They’re too obsessed with parking ratios and flower beds that look like the prosperous suburbs they no longer are. I’m not even sure there’s even a market for that kind of thing in this location. So I see continued decline and more desperate attempts at resurrection by pure faith. So be it.

But remember, kiddies -- we've got hospital sale money to make it all right.

Seven views of the New Albany Riverfront Amphitheater's deteriorating observation deck.

Thanks to N for the photos. This strange structure, which looks somewhat like a coastal defense facility from the Spanish-American War, is dilapidated even by the standards of the amphitheater itself (apart from the new canary yellow roof dating to England III).

Will anything ever be done to improve and actually utilize the amphitheater? It seems highly unlikely in the sort term, and it's a huge waste of potential.

"How our government helps investors profit from neighborhood decay."

Wow.

Investigative journalism really does exist.

Blight Inc. -- How our government helps investors profit from neighborhood decay, by Brian Eason (Indy Star)

 ... The story of urban blight is all too familiar. Indianapolis is pockmarked with 6,800 abandoned homes that stunt property values, attract crime and destabilize neighborhoods. But one of the primary causes is mostly hidden. And it is, in large part, enabled by our own government.

An Indianapolis Star investigation has found that, increasingly, the empty house next door is not owned by a bank or an individual, but by one of many investors, often from out of state, who are enticed by the prospects of cheap homes that can be purchased — sight unseen and in bulk — at government tax sales.

"Why community policing should focus on helping to resolve personal and domestic disputes, not signs of physical decay."

My hunch is that most of us would agree with the utility of community-oriented policing. While mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani famously subscribed to the "broken window" theory, which he extended to include the removal not only of visual signs of physical decay, but also humans he associated with them.

How's this theory holding up?

Private Conflict, Not Broken Windows: Why community policing should focus on helping to resolve personal and domestic disputes, not signs of physical decay, Richard Florida (City Lab)

... The authors’ key findings provide little support for the claim of broken windows theory that visual cues of neighborhood decay precipitate disorder and crime. As O’Brien and Sampson write, “Public denigration had no predictive power, belying the role of literal broken windows; and the link from public social disorder to later public violence was half the magnitude of the reverse pathway from violence to social disorder. Put more simply, both physical and social forms of public disorder were weakly predictive of future violence and disorder, if at all.” This is a big deal because these are the very things on which broken windows policing focuses.

It's ironic: As Florida's essay was being disseminated, Giuliani was back in the news.

Rudolph Giuliani’s Outrage on Homelessness, and Richard Gere’s, by Ginia Bellafante (New York Times)

... In an interview with NBC’s local news channel in New York, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani explained, with both glee and self-regard, that not long ago he had paid a visit to the 19th Precinct station house on the Upper East Side to complain about a homeless man who had taken up residence on his block.

“Do you know when people lived on the streets and didn’t use bathrooms inside?” he said. “It’s called the Dark Ages.”

Needless to say, Mr. Giuliani did not pause and follow up that remark with, “And how disgraceful that so many centuries later we are still not able to house all of our neediest.”

He instead went on to remind us how in the 1990s, his “brain” and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton’s “people” got rid of the homeless, the panhandlers, the nuisances. “You chase ’em and you chase ’em and you chase ’em and you chase ’em, and they either get the treatment that they need or you chase ’em out of the city.”

ON THE AVENUES: Homegrown New Albany, but not in a good way.

ON THE AVENUES: Homegrown New Albany, but not in a good way.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Last week I was walking the alley between Spring and Elm, headed east. True, the garbage can be smelly in high summer, but the stretch between St. Mary’s and the old Reisz school isn’t so bad.

Approaching the eternal aesthetic and drainage nightmare otherwise known as 15th Street, an expanse that summarizes the daily streetscape squalor that we as a community apparently have decided to accept as irrevocable, I cursed yet again at being unable to see to my left owing to a huge expanse of foliage.

It wasn’t a tree, but one of those nasty, fibrous weeds masquerading as trees, or perhaps steroidal bushes. I call them “garbage trees,” and usually sprinkle epithets around references to them. They’re invasive and seemingly impossible to kill.

Speaking of murderous, be aware that walkers in auto-centric New Albany understand quite well their obligation to be the vigilant “seers” in our dysfunctional transport equation. I couldn’t begin to enumerate the times I’ve seen drivers not paying attention, this being another factor that we as a community apparently have decided to accept as irrevocable, such is the need to shave seconds off the next visit to the drive-through.

Peering around the greenery for perhaps the 20th time this summer, I looked across 15th and saw the Yield sign and RR Crossing marker, both erected atop a heavy wooden pole for the benefit of westbound alley drivers. I’d seen it oft times before, but why wasn’t there one where I was standing?

I looked up and abruptly realized the matching sign pole indeed was there, albeit enveloped and completely hidden by the giant amok garbage tree, which I couldn’t see past when walking the alley – and if it was an issue for a walker, just imagine the issue for a driver, who wouldn’t be able to see cars, bicycles or walkers, the latter barely having sidewalks to use in the first place.

I’d recently been chided for making viral photo sport of a poke weed plant leisurely growing from a storm water drain in a city that just spent $9 million for a water park where you can’t swim, but where neighborhoods experience pop-up splash blocks each time there’s a big rainfall.

One thing led to another, and the following day I took a saw and pair of lopper shears, walked down the alley to 15th Street, and did to that garbage tree what needs to happen to the political career of the recumbent incumbent come November, which is to say it was systematically deconstructed.

I’m neither implying street department slacking, nor suggesting that every blade of grass or weed can or even should be cut. What I will say is this: If the Board of Public Works and Safety intends to spend its time dithering over street pianos and pretending to be the arbiter of public art, then it might consider being truthful and dropping “Safety” from its title.

If Warren has to buy new business cards, tough.

Clearing brush, removing trip hazards, keeping the sidewalks clear of automobiles parked there by the terminally ignorant (and periodically spiteful) are not sexy tasks – except they’re fundamental needs, and constitute what local government is supposed to do, as opposed to posing as concert promoter, amusement park operator and aquatic center carnival barker.

Fundamentals?

They're precisely that. It’s why the best athletes in the world continue to practice. The fundamentals have to be done, and they have to keep being done. The city’s infrastructure needs to be managed, and its physical assets tended.

The mayor’s favored Wizard of Oz costume should be reserved for the annual Halloween party, not weekly duty high atop the 3rd floor.

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I’ll close today’s column with Jeff Gillenwater’s succinct introduction to a cogent quote, as provided by an unnamed correspondent, who is referring to a photograph of overgrown grass in and near city streets.

If you want to know how New Albany works, understand two things: 1. the following comment and 2. that there are any number of "first families" who still consider themselves pillars, a bunch of political party stalwarts, and any number who qualify as both who won't respond to this kind of truth at all as we dump tens of millions into the sort of frivolous projects for the already wealthy where they like to cut ribbons and pat each other's derrières.

"That's been the view from our front porch for decades. My husband mows the sidewalk every time he mows the lawn.....the parts of the sidewalk that don't have huge chunks of broken concrete bending up. (You could break your mower blade if you try to mow there. So, parts of the sidewalk get the weed wacker treatment).

“Wait....there's something missing in this photo....oh, yes.....the healthy stand of Johnson grass that grows from the busted asphalt on our entire street. That grass is super-healthy this year from the many episodes of standing water that sets on the asphalt because the sewer drains don't take care of the problem when it rains. We don't use rain gauges. I just measure the number of inches away from our front step that the lapping flood water has crept.

“In our front yard, my husband and I have one of the few remaining working vintage gas lights in New Albany. Did you ever see a gas light with flood water lapping at its base in the middle of the night with the moonbeams shining down? If you use your imagine, you can imagine yourself standing on a riverbank with a beautiful lighthouse in front of you. And, we don't need the waterpark. After a good rain, we could water-ski down (our street) in the standing water out front.

“It's never really mattered who the mayor was. It never mattered what political party was in office. This is the first impression that many people get when they come to New Albany. This is the reflection of a city that doesn't care. So, let me be the first to say....this is not a new problem. Some of us taxpayers have been watching this ongoing deterioration with every mayor who has ever been in office.

“We have lovely old homes, and we do our part by making our property look good. But, the views from our porches are infuriating. This is the reflection of a city that has its priorities askew, and has for decades. I hold little hope of ever seeing improvement in the infrastructure. The deterioration has simply been too great. It's gone on for way too long.

“Regular basic city maintenance is a thing of the past. No mayor will ever be able to overcome the mess that's evolved around us. The city can't afford to fix everything now. Fixing all of New Albany's infrastructure now would be like trying to pull a junker car out of a junk yard and trying to restore it to a show-quality vehicle. It would cost a fortune."

This might well be true. Hell, it probably is true.

But someone has to try.

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Recent columns:

July 23: ON THE AVENUES: A citizen's eloquent complaint about the parking debacle at River Run reminds us that planners and brooms go hand in hand.

July 16: ON THE AVENUES: Louisville Beer, then and now ... and cheers to Rotary.

July 9: ON THE AVENUES: A mayoral petition as prologue to history.

July 2: ON THE AVENUES: "Water on the brains: Much less for far more will keep us swimming in it."

June 25: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Red scarf, white shirt and San Miguel beer (2012).

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: These 10 definitions will help you speak local politics like a native.

Send away the tigers.

I ducked into Kaiser’s Tobacco Shop yesterday afternoon to purchase stogies, and in the process came under the watchful eye of Councilman Dan Coffey.

We exchanged patently insincere pleasantries, and I proceeded to the case to select my babies. Meanwhile Bluegill stepped through the door, and for a brief moment the progressives outnumbered the regressive two to one.

The moment quickly passed, and as we exited onto Pearl Street I looked straight across at the parking lot currently owned by one of the slumlord Gregory gang, recalling early childhood memories of the post office that used to stand there until it was leveled by an earlier generation of movers and shakers who couldn't be bothered with tiresome tasks like thinking.

And so less than fifty years separates the last sunrise for an example of public architecture that signifies an ascendant city’s willingness to succeed, from the sunset decline gleefully presided over by semi-literate hack politicians and their "property investor" paymasters.

Strange place, this.

But the cigar was quite good.

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Photo credit: www.epodunk.com