"How America Ends: A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together?"

Medieval demographics, Ljubljana.

A long read, a good read. The Census Bureau projects that America will become “minority white” by 2045. If I'm lucky enough to still be around at the age of 85, I'll raise a glass.

How America Ends: A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together? by Yoni Appelbaum (The Atlantic)

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage,” Trump told the crowd at his reelection kickoff event in Orlando in June. “They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” This is the core of the president’s pitch to his supporters: He is all that stands between them and the abyss ...

Culture, demographics and territorial pissings: "Gen X Is Having a (Very Gen X) Moment."

Let us be the first generation to opt out of building monuments to our rightness. Let’s build no monuments at all.

Thanks to Bluegill (or as they refer to him in France, Bleugill) for drawing my attention to this essay.

Gen X Is Having a (Very Gen X) Moment, by Pappademas

Why the opt-out generation should reject its nostalgia bath

... Recently a card-carrying member of Generation X entered the race for President of the United States. His name was Beto O’Rourke. He is 46 and a father and a former senator from El Paso, Texas. He was identifiably One Of Us. He’d been part of the hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow. He’d been in a punk band with guys who went on to play in unassailably credible outfits like At the Drive-In and the Mars Volta. He posed for said punk band’s album cover wearing his girlfriend’s dress, seemingly less as a statement about gender and more as a big Novoselician goof. He was filmed tooling around on a skateboard and quoted about his admiration of Fugazi. He seems bright and eager to make a difference, and also completely doomed — and not just because attempting to ride the wave that swept history’s most racially and ethnically diverse Congress into office is an inherently room-illiterate thing for a handsome young white guy to do. He seemed doomed because every data point that emerged about his X-ness made him seem more like a traitor to that history. If listening to Fugazi inspires you to run for president — let alone to run against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as a centrist Democrat — you have perhaps not been listening to Fugazi correctly.

"America needs to regularise the status of millions of illegal immigrants, while further improving border security to win consent for that change."

We're wasting a lot of time in this country on the ephemeral. I can only hope the last sentence is prophetic.

---

Donald Trump’s real target is not illegal immigration but diversity, by Lexington (The Economist)

That battle is already lost

When Juan Garcia started work as an urban planner for the government of Gaston County in 1997, he reckons he was the only Latino among its 1,400 employees. Hub of a dying textiles industry, on the western edge of Charlotte, the county was missing out on the boom already rippling through the periphery of North Carolina’s most dynamic city. For that reason Gastonia, its altogether less zippy capital, was not seeing many of the Mexican immigrants then pouring into the state, to labour on the building sites erupting in Charlotte and revive the poultry industry in Union County, east of the city. But this was about to change.

Finding opportunities overlooked by others in Gastonia’s run-down factories and mills, migrants started settling in the town’s trailer parks and poor black neighbourhoods. Its Hispanic population soared, to around 6,000, or 9% of the total, within a few years. This caused friction with Gastonia’s white majority, recalls Mr Garcia, who was born in Colombia. “Mexicans like to get physically closer when they’re talking to you than Anglos do. They might slaughter a chicken in their yard. They play loud music there.” But the ill-will rarely went beyond grumbling about the migrants’ poor English. Some in Gastonia said this reflected the much deeper tensions in the South between whites and blacks. Resentment of immigrants was only a brief distraction from that main drama. In any event, the migrants, many of whom had either moved from Texas or come directly from the Rio Grande, expected no favours. “So long as you treat people the right way, you’re all right,” shrugged Elvira, who came to North Carolina to pick tobacco 25 years ago and now works at the “Las Americas” supermarket in Gastonia.

The influx of Hispanics to the town, and hundreds of unfashionable cities like it, illustrates how much they have changed America over the past three decades. The Hispanic population has risen ninefold since the 1960s, to around 60m. Its members, many of them second- and third-generation immigrants, are dispersing across the country, driving growth and changing the social fabric wherever they go. While the white population is on the cusp of declining, most states have flourishing Hispanic communities. North Carolina, which had around 40,000 Hispanics in 1990, now has almost a million. The high growth rates it has meanwhile sustained owe a lot to this migrant infusion.

To men like Julian, in other words, who had popped into Las Americas on a half-hour break between his jobs. From 5.45am to 3.30pm he works as a machinist in one of Gastonia’s surviving looms; between 4pm and 11pm he drives a fork-lift in a packaging factory. Thus have Gastonia’s Hispanics filled gaps in its old industries, taking low-skilled jobs that blacks and whites no longer want. Meanwhile the many small landscaping and construction businesses they launched have forged an overdue connection between Gastonia and the new services-based economy of the South, a 20-minute drive across the Catawba river in Charlotte. Recognising the community’s importance, as well as its needs, Gaston County now employs over 100 Hispanic public servants, with a premium on bilingual doctors, nurses and social workers.

This transformation is the essential context in which to view Donald Trump’s talk of a crisis at the southern border. The president appears to be motivated less by genuine concern for the state of the border than by his white supporters’ feelings of anxiety over demographic change. His promise of a border-wall, which few immigration experts think America needs, following a steep decline in the number of illegal crossings, is a sign of that. In fact, were Mr Trump not so obviously using his promised border-wall as a political device, he might have built one by now. Last year he turned down an offer from the Democrats that would have given him wall money in return for comprehensive immigration reform—far more money than his emergency is likely to get him. In short, the physical promise of the wall is largely a figment. It is a symbol of Mr Trump’s tacit pledge to his white supporters to defend them against the diversifying of American society that many fear. It is too late for that, however. Most of the growth in America’s Hispanic population is the result of natural increase, not immigration. Mr Trump’s nativist stand is positively Canute-like.

It also carries great costs. The most important is the forgone opportunity to cauterise America’s immigration sore that his presidency represents. The anxiety of Mr Trump’s followers is exacerbated—explained, even—by the chaotic legacy of decades of illegal immigration. It stands to reason that America’s roughly 11m illegal migrants, most of whom are Hispanic, are willing to work harder, in tougher conditions, than indigenous people. Economists may argue over the effect of that on wages; but it is a theoretical disadvantage to natives that they are bound to resent.

Meanwhile the insecurity illegal migrants live with is a barrier to assimilation, which also causes tension. It was fairly amazing that most of the shoppers in Las Americas, despite having spent years in America, spoke little or no English. The answer to these tangled problems has long been clear. America needs to regularise the status of millions of illegal immigrants, while further improving border security to win consent for that change. Given Mr Trump’s hold on the nativist right, he could have done this. Yet that would have required him to want to fix the mess, and not seek to profit from it.

A wave is coming

The pay-off for his party will be short-lived, however, because of another development among Hispanics. For several reasons, including the fact that many are illegal and unable to vote, their political clout has lagged behind their numerical rise. In North Carolina, they are 10% of the population and 3% of registered voters. Yet Hispanic citizens are now entering the property-owning middle-class in vast numbers. The looming calamity for Republicans, who have done so much to alienate them, is that such people vote.

Republican women over the age of 65 are most hostile to #MeToo.

Odd that we must rely on a razor company to make a statement of principle, but on the other hand, apart from Christmas presents, I'm guessing few Republican women over the age of 65 are buying Gillette razors.

What group of people is most hostile to #MeToo? (The Economist)

Republican women over the age of 65

No group has swung against #MeToo more than older women who voted for Donald Trump. They have gone from barely worrying about false accusations of sexual assault, with only 8% agreeing in November 2017 that these were worse than unreported assaults, to 42% saying so, according to two polls conducted for The Economist by YouGov, a pollster. They are now the most likely group to agree that a man who harassed a woman 20 years ago should keep his job, and that a woman who complains about harassment causes more problems than she solves.

Two things stand out. First, even though Americans on average, and Republicans in particular, have become more negative about #MeToo over the past year, the change among this particular group is spectacular (chart). Second, a generational gap now yawns between Republican women who are over 65 and those under 30, the cohort least hostile to #MeToo within the Republican Party.

The conclusion is unexpectedly brutal.

One explanation of this partisan gap is that it reflects a difference of opinion over what true feminism is. Some conservative women resist what they see as special treatment for women as vaguely patronising. There is another explanation, too. Ms Pierotti Lim of Republican Women for Progress remembers campaigning in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016 and being astonished by the number of older women who were afraid to even talk to her and who let their (Republican-voting) husbands fill in their ballots.

"Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict."

I'll be perfectly honest with you.

My 40th high school reunion took place earlier this year. I had a previous commitment one of the two nights, and I was busy the other night but might have been able to be there for a little while had I chosen to expend the effort.

I didn't, because my preference is to remember my high school classmates as they were, not as they've become, at least some of the ones with whom I was closest, because I'd rather not listen to higher-income white guys have a few too many drinks and begin prattling on about the wonders of Trump.

That's bullshit.

In fairness, I know for a fact that many of my old friends from school don't feel this way, and of course not all of them are higher income. Yes, I know it's very complicated. But Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and to insist that this disease emanates solely from working class Americans when the national Democratic Party has itself promoted trickle-down economic inequality for decades, while merrily cashing checks from the same donors as Trump's, is bullshit on top of bullshit.

Sorry about my better-heeled pals from days of yore. At the same time, nothing much occurred prior to the advent of Trump to suggest their outcomes would be any different. I've no clue how I managed to escape the contagion. Travel? Core values? Plain dumb luck? I'm just grateful I did.

Now, please read this article in its entirety.

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans, by Sarah Smarsh (The Guardian)

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

 ... Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.

These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: "Millennials haven't killed pubs – pubs just haven't kept up."

St. Radegund Free House, back then.

So here we are at Pints&union in li'l 'ol Nawbany, trying to emulate (if not copy outright) the soulfulness of the institution of the British pub, even as the British pub is the subject of incessant existential debate -- and in fact, has been for decades.

Are pubs doomed?

Theirs is a different culture; more specifically, it is a different licensing and taxation regimen. As can be gleaned from the following, there also are the cultural markers; prices are one thing, and potentially adjustable, but all is lost if coming generations decide to refrain from drink entirely for health reasons. 

What of cask-conditioned ale, that most glorious of beers when done correctly? It's almost exclusively British, and always fragile in modern economies of ease and scale.

The author's conclusion no doubt is true. There's be something new and different arising from the ashes of what came before. But when it comes to pub culture, it's a dialectic I'll be seeking to circumvent, even if I'm not British.

Millennials haven't killed pubs – pubs just haven't kept up, Devarshi Lodhia (The Guardian)

Rising prices and social diversification have scuppered the institution, making the boozer less of a priority for the young

From mayonnaise and diamonds to cinemas and golf, it seems no industry is safe from being killed off by millennials. Now pubs look to be suffering the same fate, closing at an alarming rate with net numbers down by almost 700 this year alone – and piling yet more misery on the Great British high street.

The most obvious reason behind the sharp decline in pub numbers seems to be the cost of going out. The average pint in London costs upwards of £5, while the national average of £3.60 is 60p more than most people think is reasonable ... and it’s not just financial reasons that are putting people off, the reality is that fewer young people drink, with research showing that 25% of people aged 16-24 described themselves as “non-drinkers” while between 2005 and 2015, the percentage drinking above the recommended limits had dropped by 15%. Often this has very little to do with cost, with most of my friends who don’t drink choosing to do so for their physical and mental wellbeing.

Forecastle steps in it.

If you're going to join the chorus led by asscaps like Matt Bruenig and praise corporate monopolies even as you're decrying corporate monopolies, then maybe a spate of research into audience demographics is merited.

We know women are attending (Forecastle) and others like it. We found this 2014 study from The Nielsen Company that says about 51 percent of the 32 million people who attend at least one music festival every year are women. So we think there's probably an audience for female performers.

Selling out is such a dreary business, eh Matt?

Hey Forecastle, please don't take this the wrong way. But where are all the lady performers?, by Bailey Loosemore (Louisville Courier Journal)

So the 2018 Forecastle Festival line-up was released today and we have to say, we're pretty pumped.

Really. Chris Stapleton, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse: We're super excited for all of them.

But, uh, we do have one small question for the organizers, if that's OK. We're not mad or anything, we just thought we might ask — where are all the ladies at?

Don't get us wrong; this isn't an outrage thing. Forecastle is huge for Louisville, and we all love it.

BUT. We did notice that the first female performer — Courtney Barnett — isn't named until ninth on the list. And only eight of the 45 named acts that include female singers.

Park demographics: "Many public spaces like parks are currently lacking age-friendly infrastructure."

"No seniors on the artificial turf, please."

Warren, as City Hall's token senior ... would you like to weigh on on this one?

ARE PARKS ALIENATING THE AGING POPULATION? by Emily Matlovich (Strong Towns)

If you stroll through a park you’re likely to find a dog fetching a frisbee, children playing on the equipment, teenagers jogging with headphones, and families having picnics. What you're less likely to find is senior citizens.

For the first time in human history the amount of individuals aged 65 and older will surpass the population under the age of 5. To put this into further perspective, by the year 2050, a third of the U.S. population will be 65+. Despite urban planners' best efforts to accommodate this demographic phenomenon, many public spaces like parks are currently lacking age-friendly infrastructure. This means that seniors miss out on the physical and social benefits that parks can provide.

A pirate looks at '15: "In the U.S., Almost No One Votes in Local Elections."

I was a year ahead of my time, but that's okay. The point was made, posterity will be generous, and I can't thank Seven Percenters often enough.

In the U.S., Almost No One Votes in Local Elections, by Kriston Capps (City Lab)

... As if incredibly low voter turnout weren’t dispiriting enough, mayoral elections in the U.S. are also barely representative of the population. In the most recent mayoral elections across 50 U.S. cities, the median voter age was 57—evidence of an enormous gap in civic participation between retiring Baby Boomers and rising Millennials. Worse still, perhaps, voters are overrepresented in some neighborhoods and dramatically underrepresented in others.

A new report from Portland State University finds that almost nobody bothers to vote in mayoral U.S. elections. Those who do tend to be much older than the median resident and hail from more affluent neighborhoods to boot. That’s not necessarily a surprise, although the degree of disparity in local voting patterns is alarming.

Sunday long read redux: "For Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016."

Hillbilly Elegy was half the topic in this morning's previous post.

Sunday long read: "Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has."

If you're experiencing a snap judgment of how this interview with Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance is going to read, you're probably mistaken. I was. The best way to correct your assumption is to click through and read the story. Thanks to Bluegill for the link.

Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People, by Rod Dreher (The American Conservative)

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.

Sunday long read: "Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has."

Nothing glib out of me. Just read. A teaser appears here.

The Original Underclass: Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has, by Alec MacGillis and Propublica (The Atlantic)

Two new books—one a provocative, deeply researched history and the other an affecting memoir—are well timed to help make better sense of the plight of struggling whites in the United States. Both accounts converge on an important insight: The gloomy state of affairs in the lower reaches of white America should not have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has—and mobilizing solutions for the crisis will depend partly on closing the gaps that allowed for such obliviousness.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
By J. D. Vance

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans—the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate—obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts—Sarah Palin’s “real America”—who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity. A party losing touch with it was a party unmoored.

"A recent transplant’s view of Cincinnati" is relevant to us, too.

If the Gahan administration really comprehended what millennials want, would the flunkies be allowed to use the words "millennial" and "luxury" in the same sentence?

Of course not. It's what you get from the suburbs, looking in, uncomprehending.

How do we foster a culture designed to retain our best and brightest, to support localism in business, and take care of our own by exceeding the lowest conceivable political denominator?

Looking in the mirror.
Asking questions.
Listening.
Making lists.
Involving people.

Then again, I'm hardly a serious commentator, am I?

A recent transplant’s view of Cincinnati, by Fatima Hussein (Cincinnati Enquirer)

 ... I found out last week that a large portion of young people living here, both home bred and transplants, are itching to move to bigger cities throughout the country.

In Cincinnati, the youth exodus phenomenon is a huge issue for business leaders. Leaders such as Mary Stagaman worry that if nothing is done to attract and retain young talent, we can’t expect to have a vibrant economy, and the corporations that have long called Cincinnati home will have less incentive to stay ...

 ... And it doesn’t help that for every study that says Cincinnati is up-and-coming or an affordable place for families, there are others that say Ohio and Kentucky are some of the unhappiest places in the country – or that Cincinnati is one of the most unwelcoming cities on earth.

"The Clearest Explanation Yet for Why Millennials Are Driving Less."

In New Albany's case, information such as this might come in handy when the familiar refrain is heard: "We need more parking."

No, we don't. We need to do a better job with what we have.

The Clearest Explanation Yet for Why Millennials Are Driving Less: Shifting demographics matter, but shifting attitudes may matter more, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

... McDonald’s work isn’t likely to put the debate about Millennial driving habits to rest, but it does add a highly informed layer to the discussion. And her advice about what planners and cities can do while all the data points find their place—encourage alternative travel modes, and improve forecasts about driving trends—is sound regardless of the exact reasons behind the shifts.

It's the Harvest Homecoming Friday, dear -- and that means it's time for the Swill Walk.

Yesterday: Where to find better beer in downtown New Albany during the Harvest Homecoming onslaught.

The essay below was written and published at NAC in 2007, a full year before NABC staged its first Fringe Fest "alternative" at the Day Old Bread Store, which had just started to be remodeled in anticipation of Bank Street Brewhouse.

Seven editions of Fringe Fest later, we've never really been considered part of the Swill Walk's route. For this, I'm suitably grateful. BSB is perfectly content to offer a variant of the daily program, and to serve those in search of good beer -- like the visitor from Indianapolis yesterday, who came to the taproom for a Progressive Pint, not realizing Harvest Homecoming was in progress.

He asked me, "What have you done with your nice downtown"?

"It's our own peculiar institution," I replied.

And then there's the Swill Walk. Now we rewind, back to a time before Obama was around to blame for the prevailing stupidity of white people.

Has anything changed?

---

Harvest Homecoming's "swill walk" emblematic of clashing demographics.

New Albany’s annual Harvest Homecoming festival started life quite small and inconspicuously four decades ago, and it has since grown into what its organizers claim is the second largest gathering of its type in the state of Indiana, trailing only the Indianapolis 500 celebration.

There are numerous themed events for two weeks preceding the yearly parade, then four “booth days” during which streets in the heart of New Albany’s historic business district are closed, yielding to what amounts to an enormous food court with games, information and music thrown in for good measure. At its best, the ideal of Harvest Homecoming is civic-minded and predominantly local in nature, with generations frequenting the same rolled oyster booth or chicken dinner emporium run by the same church or charity.

When Harvest Homecoming took its embryonic shape in the late 1960’s, and unbeknownst to most people living at the time, New Albany’s downtown was about to commence a long, painful and degrading descent into dormancy. As my ruminations today are not intended to constitute an essay about the familiar phenomenon of inner-city urban decay, I’ll leave it at that, and observe that Harvest Homecoming’s governing committee might plausibly say that for a long period of time, certainly by the 1990’s, the festival was about the only game going downtown.

Harvest Homecoming has been planned accordingly. Now, with stirrings of downtown revitalization far too strong to be ignored, the plan likely will have to be modified in coming years. Unfortunately, a case can be made that Harvest Homecoming’s demographic and the demographic spearheading downtown revitalization are heading in opposite directions, with potential difficulties that might as well be addressed now rather than later.

For those who have glimpsed a bit of the planet outside New Albany, and who have had the good fortune to be exposed to post-secondary education and its expansion of consciousness, there almost inevitably exists a measure of ambivalence about Harvest Homecoming as the institution has evolved – some would say “devolved – over the years. This ambivalence does not imply rejection of it, but simply a recognition that sometimes the closer one is to something, the harder it is to see how it really looks.

The festival’s stewards are “lifer” volunteers who work hard year-round, and while any fair critique of their performance might point to a deeply ingrained conservatism and a general reluctance to think outside the Bud, their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable.

Admirable, yes, but certainly not easy to ensure, and no single Harvest Homecoming “event” grandly compromises the committee’s goal of a family friendly festival like the Friday afternoon “beer walk,” which might be termed the “swill walk,” and so I think I will call it that.

From the outset, make no mistake: The official Harvest Homecoming committee is no friend of the swill walk, and bristles when people contact the organizers for information about it. Although in the past, I merely shrugged and considered the committee’s attitude toward the swill walk to be an extension of its customary stodginess on other matters, this year I made it a point to observe the swill walk in progress.

It isn’t a pretty picture.

In fact, the swill walk is a civic embarrassment, and as part and parcel of a litigious society, it’s probably only a matter of time before something ugly occurs and the torts begin flying. Speaking personally, at a time when many in my sector of the beer business are trying to raise the bar when it comes to responsible beer consumption, the swill walk sadly reminds us that neo-Prohibitionists occasionally have something approximating a valid point, and that the activities of the nation’s mass-market swill merchants are as much of a daily threat to our ability to offer the populace a changed paradigm as those who would eliminate alcohol entirely on grounds of its intrinsic “evil.”

Like many other aspects of life, there surely are evils intrinsic to the consumption of beer. Most of us are devoted to the ideal of lessening these, so why encourage their exaltation?

The way it works is this. Every year on the Friday afternoon of Harvest Homecoming, a “style” show is held at the riverfront “beer tent” (“swill tent” is more like it) during lunchtime, and the show’s conclusion is the unofficial signal for hundreds of people to begin, or in many cases to continue, drinking -- while traversing a jagged route through the blocked-off and humanity-packed downtown streets where food and activity booths hold sway.

The ubiquity of gratis Anheuser-Busch advertising paraphernalia, which is generated in-house at the local wholesaler at a scale that would humble the propagandistic Communist and Fascist regimes of old, provides ample evidence as to the underlying grease that lubricates the phenomenon of the swill walk, namely, that the local A-B wholesaler has agreed not to cash the checks written to pay for two-story-tall stacks of Bud Light until the week following the festival’s conclusion, something that is of borderline legality in the state of Indiana.

Meanwhile, duly oiled, the denizens of the swill walk surge through the most congested harvest Homecoming area, participants stumbling from one bar to the next, slamming liquor shots and chugging beer from cans that are seldom recycled while screaming obscenities in proximity to children, then urinating in places that even someone like me – a veteran of Oktoberfest in Munich and Pamplona’s festival of San Fermin – is hard pressed to imagine.

Once I saw a port-a-can being nearly toppled by drunks. Around the corner, bikers clad in ominous black costumes queued a short block away from where this year’s “teen scene” stage was erected. How Pamplona manages to achieve a balance between its children and an invading wave of Euro trash is beyond me; perhaps we might ask, because the New Albany way doesn’t seem to be working.

The family-unfriendly effect of all this is hard to exaggerate in print, and when taken in the context of an overall festival that sadly has devolved over the decades into low, lower and lowest common denominators – a metaphor applicable to the city as a whole – it’s frustrating, indeed, to witness the chaos and know that I’m in the same business.

I’m neither naïve, nor out to bring the furies crashing down on the urine-stained drunks gracefully bellowing at each other during the swill walk. It is not my intention to frown on the profit motives of downtown bar owners, who probably reap several weeks of revenue in three days during Harvest Homecoming, and who are happy to accept largesse as offered by wholesalers eager to see the cash registers hum.

Of course, I well understand that my “good beer” segment of the marketplace is small, but I also maintain that this niche is upwardly mobile and in keeping with humanity’s constructive (as opposed to anarchic) instincts, and furthermore, that it is capable of sense and sensibility in addition to windfall weekend profits.

If NABC’s projected downtown brewing project comes to fruition, we hope to be able to illustrate that beer quality can be good, not bland, and that better beer can be consumed responsibly in a wholesome, entertaining and better atmosphere – which, after all, is the lesson any thinking human being takes away after sitting for a couple of hours drinking beer in a Bavarian beer garden, with playground equipment and young children generally in close proximity. Our future beer sales during Harvest Homecoming will be contained and controlled as far as humanly possible, and we’ll try to offer a higher common denominator. We may fail, but we’ll try.

Disclaimers aside, and in spite of my reluctance to tempt unfavorable karma by saying it aloud, the swill walk that takes place during Harvest Homecoming is aided and abetted by a blind eye to illegality, and while I can understand this coming from the local gendarmes, I find it curious that the state tolerates it.

You’re free to disagree. On this call, I suspect many of you will.

Harvest Homecoming's booth days negatively impact downtown.

These thoughts were first published here on September 25, 2012, but have been augmented for 2014. An extensive Facebook thread documents these and other points.

It is undoubtedly true that Harvest Homecoming draws large numbers of visitors to “booth days” downtown. This fact alone will strike many readers as sufficient reason to let time-tested matters rest; after all, throngs for any event are a good thing no matter what, right, and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

As with AWOL councilman Bob Caesar's rote insistence that one-way arterial streets slicing through a new-age revitalizing downtown are peachy keen, the reaction from some when it comes to criticizing Harvest Homecoming is visceral and faith-based:

Why would these ungrateful businesses downtown complain when they have such a wonderful opportunity to market themselves to big crowds?

Because it’s not at all that simple.

For the type of businesses now calling downtown New Albany home, some crowds are better than others. It isn’t as much about the crowd’s size as its composition. Or, as Ryan Rogers of Feast BBQ eloquently wrote after a commenter said, "I could sell dog turds and make money at Harvest Homecoming":

(He's) right, I could sell dog turds and make money, but I try to have some integrity in the way I do business. It's hard to compete with the traveling barbecue pits that undercuts our price by $3-4 dollar because they are running an entirely cash business, probably committing tax fraud (though maybe not), and definitely not paying the utilities, taxes, maintenance, and initial startup restoration of a 133 year old building. Not to mention the fact that we pay our employees all multiple dollars above wage. That being said our barbecue isn't pump and dump, all of our meat is brined 24-72 hours prior to ever being smoked (unlike the traveling pits that literally dump their meat from the box onto their smokers), and we have the capacity to do the volume we do in house.

So tell me why again I should spend more money just to recapture the money I am losing because the normal clientele that actually spends money in local businesses (and in turn those businesses generate tax revenue) 51 other weeks a year have no where to park because we've got a made in China trinket fest going on.

Naturally, there are mercantile possibilities inherent in Harvest Homecoming's invading legions, and commerce is not only possible, but likely, and yet there are considerable differences between target clienteles and business models, as Ryan clearly explicates in the preceding.

Our new downtown businesses offer goods and services tailored to particular modes of thought, and while Harvest Homecoming’s vibe endeavors to be egalitarian, and occasionally succeeds, the festival also is understandably narcissistic. It is about itself, drawing attention to itself and the street vendors who pay to play, not its surroundings.

The old axiom about “location, location, location” grows ever less relevant. It applies to some businesses, not necessarily to all. Niche businesses can survive and thrive by choosing specialized product lines, and catering to consumers who know the difference. They do not necessarily need high traffic volumes such as those we were raised from childhood to insist are essential for success.

Especially in an evolving downtown setting like New Albany’s, numerous niche businesses must be viewed as a collective entity, with their ideal location not being an interstate ramp’s indiscriminate spewing of speeding autos, but a distinct sense of place itself as a destination for those making a calculated decision of where they’ll spend both time and money.

In effect, Harvest Homecoming arrives once yearly to remake and remodel downtown to suit its own purposes, and its own business model. With passing time, the festival overlay bears less and less resemblance to daily reality. In truth, this can hurt local businesses in the long term even if there is a short-term boost in trade.

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In New Albany, primarily because of the mechanism known as the riverfront development three-way permit for alcohol sales, revitalization has been led by restaurants and bars. A second wave of galleries and shops slowly follows. More downtown residential opportunities via existing lofts and upstairs spaces hopefully will come next.

Virtually all of these improvements are dedicated to a demographic proposition intended to be practiced 365 days of the year, so how do the crowds convening downtown during Harvest Homecoming booth days fit into the intended future demographic, especially given that an increasing number of the street vendors do not hail from this area?

In all probability they don’t fit, but at the very least, even if we are to concede the utility of the festival as currently operated, should businesses already in existence downtown, year-round, be forced to cower for four days behind the reeking facades of food purveyors from Keokuk? We tout downtown as a foodie paradise, then hide restaurant entrances behind elephant ear stands.

Conversely, if they so desire, shouldn’t those businesses already in existence downtown have the same chance as Harvest Homecoming’s paying vendors to profit from the hordes, if they choose to try reaching them? Moreover, shouldn’t they have the very first chance?

As usual, Jeff Gillenwater gets the last word.

Every year, business owners and residents rightfully complain about negative impacts. Every year, HH officials scoff at them as has occurred in this thread. What's been called "tired" is only that way because HH never listens. To me, it's simple: As HH is the entity consistently seeking to disrupt so many, the onus to prove substantial positive impact to justify that disruption falls on them. As others have noted, they don't even try to do that beyond their own self-serving claims sans any evidence or dialogue in support. Until that changes, street closures to the extent HH demands shouldn't be allowed. Do I think the mayor's office, development staff, and/or Board of Works has the fortitude to hold HH to what should be an obvious standard? Nope, not for a second. People who have rehabbed commercial buildings and residences, started new businesses, and implemented new programs - none of which have anything to do with HH - have done their part to initiate and sustain positive change. It's past time for HH to do theirs or face some disruption of their own. Broken record like, I repeat: business owners and residents have to work together against what's unfortunately become a common nuisance.

Harvest Homecoming is back. Will it ever evolve of its own accord?

Some of these thoughts were first published here on September 24, 2012. Updates have been made. On Sunday, there was a good Facebook discussion of these issues.

My personal position on Harvest Homecoming has remained fairly consistent, and so at the risk of offending the swill walk’s perennial night crawlers, let’s recap the argument.

First and foremost, no offense is intended toward Harvest Homecoming’s many volunteers. They're lifers. They believe. They work hard year-round, and their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable. None of us want Harvest Homecoming to disappear. We merely want it to begin marching in step with changing times, so as to better incorporate today's evolving New Albany into the festival's design.

Fact: Harvest Homecoming has gone as far as it possibly can while retaining an operational model built for the 1970s and 80’s, when downtown was utterly deserted and no one much cared either way. Back then, downtown was withering, but now it is returning to life -- entrepreneurs are doing something with it -- and the yearly clash of demographic priorities can only become more starkly evident as years pass. This will become even more of a problem as downtown apartments and condos come into existence and are occupied by residents expecting a certain ... that's right: Quality of life.

Today’s Harvest Homecoming must be persuaded, cajoled, prodded and/or threatened into commencing a reinvention of itself and a subsequent evolution into the sort of annual civic event better representing where and what the city is now, and in conceptual terms, a civic event that both passively mirrors and actively enhances the ongoing revitalization of downtown New Albany. Currently, it does neither.

A Facebook discussion participant explained it very clearly.

I grew up in California, so I speak as one who attended a lot of wine and art events. I think it might be time for our HHC officials to look around the United States and see what works as far as festivals. HHC is a good event, but I think it could be a signature event which combines the old with the new. I also think the art at this festival should be of high quality invited artists rather than the mundane. We should be celebrating all that is the best quality in Southern Indiana rather than settling for vendors who specialize in merchandise that is there for the short sale. I would not even mind high quality food coming over from Kentucky or even Ohio, if it improved the quality of our lives. We excel at beer, goat cheese and new restaurants. It seems to me we should be reveling in it.

The festival no longer should be permitted to be the short-term tail wagging an entire city’s 7/24/365 dog by advocating restrictive terms of downtown engagement, and in pursuing a plan of operation that routinely scuffles downtown’s fragile seedlings, whether planted in the dirt, or located behind those previously unoccupied storefronts.

Yes, it is true that progress has been made on this score, but not quickly enough. For so long as those downtown businesses located on Harvest Homecoming’s core street grid – businesses investing in the city and operating in the city year-round – must continue to fight for the simple right to have access to their own front doors during the festival’s booth days, and furthermore, be compelled to pay Harvest Homecoming a rental fee for a clear pathway to their own place of business, then something’s still awry in Come Pay City.

This begs the first of many questions, as hinted at yesterday:

How can the Board of Public Works countenance this pay-to-stay-open scheme?

Which precedent allows a four-day-yearly festival unattached to the city to charge for frontage on the city’s own streets and sidewalks?

Aren’t these businesses already paying taxes for this access?

Has anyone ever thought to ask them other stakeholders if they'd like to play, too?

More thoughts tomorrow.

Declining youth participation in team sports -- more in the 'burbs, less in the city and rural areas.

When I was a kid, I played baseball and basketball in organized leagues, both in and out of school, though never to the saturation level of some children playing today. Being on a team in a team sport can be a fine learning experience, so long as it's an actual team, although I've long held that I learned more about teamwork singing in choir and being in a play than from sports.

Consequently, the most fun I've ever had in "athletics" came from walking, biking and hiking -- often alone. Make the entire city a playground, and it will be used as such. Any other way, and the wealthier kids will get more of the rewards.

First, data suggesting that young people are less interested in team sports than before.

online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579350892629229918">Youth Participation Weakens in Basketball, Football, Baseball, Soccer ... Fewer Children Play Team Sports, by Ryan Wallerson (Wall Street Journal)

... While high-school baseball participation rose 0.3% in the period, some data on the next generation of players presage a decline: Little League baseball—the biggest children's baseball league—reports that U.S. participation in its baseball and softball leagues in 2012 was 6.8% below that in 2008.

Then, following the data all the way to the 'burbs.

"Hey, data data -- swing!": The hidden demographics of youth sports, by Bruce Kelley and Carl Carchia (ESPN The Magazine)

 ... Indeed, Sabo's WSF data paints a distinct picture of suburbs where swaths of kids in elementary and middle school, especially boys, play on three, four or five teams, and the culture revolves around their practices, tourneys and getting to their games. In contrast, childhood in cities and rural areas isn't as intensely sports-focused.

A theory of river towns, civic assets and underperformance.

It's remarkable how at various points in their lives, New Albanians glance around them and remark, "well, we're just a dirty ol' river town, and things will never change here."

Seems Aaron Renn has heard it, too. Bluegill recommended this essay, and it's a stimulating read. It may actually be less of "it's in the water" than bad habits learned during two hundred years of practice.

On the Riverfront, by Aaron Renn (Urbanophile)

Thursday I took a look at my “Cincinnati conundrum,” namely how it’s possible for a city that has the greatest collection of civic assets of any city its size in America to underperform demographically and economically. In that piece I called out the sprawl angle. But today I want to take a different look at it by panning back the lens to see Cincinnati as simply one example of the river city.

There are four major cities laid out on an east-west corridor along the Ohio River: Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis (which is not on the Ohio River, but close enough. I’ll leave Memphis and New Orleans out of it for now). All of these are richly endowed with civic assets like Cincinnati is, having far more than their fair share of great things, yet they’ve all been stagnant to slow growing for decades.

REWOUND for 2013: Revisiting the Swill Walk (2007).

As the white-bread Bicentennial Junta parties like it’s 1913, the city of New Albany somehow continues to inch forward, into a future that we seem intent on ignoring. As urbanist Brent Toderian has said, "Leadership is about addressing the 8 most frustrating words in the English language - 'we could never do that in our city.'" 

Yep. We can't do it in New Albany because our euphemistically termed civic leaders "just never had to think about this." In the end, the 6th district CM who used the words "no brainer" to describe a $20 million parks project was correct, though not for the right reasons. 

Are they ever the right reasons? There are times when one questions how we manage forward progress at all, but somehow we do.

Harvest Homecoming, our most reliable indicator of deeply ingrained civic conservatism, lies just ahead. Indeed, the carbohydrates are massing as I write. This year, amid the autumnal New Albany family tradition, Bank Street Brewhouse will continue its own alternative of Fringe Fest (volume six) during booth days, with beer, food, music and more, offering a calculated contrast to the prevailing bedlam. As always, we’ll be intently watching on Friday afternoon (October 11) to see how much of the sodden “beer walk” crowd spills over into our aerie of opposing yeast cultures. 

We will greet them with drams of Hoosier Daddy and a message: Yes, we CAN get better.

The following essay originally was published at the conclusion of Harvest Homecoming, 2007. Six years later, how much has changed?

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Harvest Homecoming's "swill walk" emblematic of clashing demographics.

New Albany’s annual Harvest Homecoming festival started life quite small and inconspicuously four decades ago, and it has since grown into what its organizers claim is the second largest gathering of its type in the state of Indiana, trailing only the Indianapolis 500 celebration.

There are numerous themed events for two weeks preceding the yearly parade, then four “booth days” during which streets in the heart of New Albany’s historic business district are closed, yielding to what amounts to an enormous food court with games, information and music thrown in for good measure. At its best, the ideal of Harvest Homecoming is civic-minded and predominantly local in nature, with generations frequenting the same rolled oyster booth or chicken dinner emporium run by the same church or charity.

When Harvest Homecoming took its embryonic shape in the late 1960’s, and unbeknownst to most people living at the time, New Albany’s downtown was about to commence a long, painful and degrading descent into dormancy. As my ruminations today are not intended to constitute an essay about the familiar phenomenon of inner-city urban decay, I’ll leave it at that, and observe that Harvest Homecoming’s governing committee might plausibly say that for a long period of time, certainly by the 1990’s, the festival was about the only game going downtown.

Harvest Homecoming has been planned accordingly. Now, with stirrings of downtown revitalization far too strong to be ignored, the plan likely will have to be modified in coming years. Unfortunately, a case can be made that Harvest Homecoming’s demographic and the demographic spearheading downtown revitalization are heading in opposite directions, with potential difficulties that might as well be addressed now rather than later.

For those who have glimpsed a bit of the planet outside New Albany, and who have had the good fortune to be exposed to post-secondary education and its expansion of consciousness, there almost inevitably exists a measure of ambivalence about Harvest Homecoming as the institution has evolved – some would say “devolved – over the years. This ambivalence does not imply rejection of it, but simply a recognition that sometimes the closer one is to something, the harder it is to see how it really looks.

The festival’s stewards are “lifer” volunteers who work hard year-round, and while any fair critique of their performance might point to a deeply ingrained conservatism and a general reluctance to think outside the Bud, their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable.

Admirable, yes, but certainly not easy to ensure, and no single Harvest Homecoming “event” grandly compromises the committee’s goal of a family friendly festival like the Friday afternoon “beer walk,” which might be termed the “swill walk,” and so I think I will call it that.

From the outset, make no mistake: The official Harvest Homecoming committee is no friend of the swill walk, and bristles when people contact the organizers for information about it. Although in the past, I merely shrugged and considered the committee’s attitude toward the swill walk to be an extension of its customary stodginess on other matters, this year I made it a point to observe the swill walk in progress.

The committee is right on target. It isn’t a pretty picture. In fact, the swill walk is a civic embarrassment, and as part and parcel of a litigious society, it’s probably only a matter of time before something ugly occurs and the torts begin flying. Speaking personally, at a time when many in my sector of the beer business are trying to raise the bar when it comes to responsible beer consumption, the swill walk sadly reminds us that neo-Prohibitionists occasionally have something approximating a valid point, and that the activities of the nation’s mass-market swill merchants are as much of a daily threat to our ability to offer the populace a changed paradigm as those who would eliminate alcohol entirely on grounds of its intrinsic “evil.”

Like many other aspects of life, there surely are evils intrinsic to the consumption of beer. Most of us are devoted to the ideal of lessening these, so why encourage their exaltation?

The way it works is this. Every year on the Friday afternoon of Harvest Homecoming, a “style” show is held at the riverfront “beer tent” (“swill tent” is more like it) during lunchtime, and the show’s conclusion is the unofficial signal for hundreds of people to begin, or in many cases to continue, drinking while traversing a jagged route through the blocked-off and humanity-packed downtown streets where food and activity booths hold sway.

The ubiquity of gratis Anheuser-Busch advertising paraphernalia, which is generated in-house at the local wholesaler at a scale that would humble the propagandistic Communist and Fascist regimes of old, provides ample evidence as to the underlying grease that lubricates the phenomenon of the swill walk, namely, that the local A-B wholesaler has agreed not to cash the checks written to pay for two-story-tall stacks of Bud Light until the week following the festival’s conclusion, something that is of borderline legality in the state of Indiana.

Meanwhile, duly oiled, the denizens of the swill walk surge through the most congested harvest Homecoming area, participants stumbling from one bar to the next, slamming liquor shots and chugging beer from cans that are seldom recycled while screaming obscenities in proximity to children, then urinating in places that even someone like me – a veteran of Oktoberfest in Munich and Pamplona’s festival of San Fermin – is hard pressed to imagine.

Once I saw a port-a-can being nearly toppled by drunks. Around the corner, bikers clad in ominous black costumes queued a short block away from where this year’s “teen scene” stage was erected. How Pamplona manages to achieve a balance between its children and an invading wave of Euro trash is beyond me; perhaps we might ask, because the New Albany way doesn’t seem to be working.

The family-unfriendly effect of all this is hard to exaggerate in print, and when taken in the context of an overall festival that sadly has devolved over the decades into low, lower and lowest common denominators – a metaphor applicable to the city as a whole – it’s frustrating, indeed, to witness the chaos and know that I’m in the same business.

I’m neither naïve, nor out to bring the furies crashing down on the urine-stained drunks gracefully bellowing at each other during the swill walk. It is not my intention to frown on the profit motives of downtown bar owners, who probably reap several weeks of revenue in three days during Harvest Homecoming, and who are happy to accept largesse as offered by wholesalers eager to see the cash registers hum.

Of course, I well understand that my “good beer” segment of the marketplace is small, but I also maintain that this niche is upwardly mobile and in keeping with humanity’s constructive (as opposed to anarchic) instincts, and furthermore, that it is capable of sense and sensibility in addition to windfall weekend profits.

If NABC’s projected downtown brewing project comes to fruition, we hope to be able to illustrate that beer quality can be good, not bland, and that better beer can be consumed responsibly in a wholesome, entertaining and better atmosphere – which, after all, is the lesson any thinking human being takes away after sitting for a couple of hours drinking beer in a Bavarian beer garden, with playground equipment and young children generally in close proximity. Our future beer sales during Harvest Homecoming will be contained and controlled as far as humanly possible, and we’ll try to offer a higher common denominator. We may fail, but we’ll try.

Disclaimers aside, and in spite of my reluctance to tempt unfavorable karma by saying it aloud, the swill walk that takes place during Harvest Homecoming is aided and abetted by a blind eye to illegality, and while I can understand this coming from the local gendarmes, I find it curious that the state tolerates it.

You’re free to disagree. On this call, I suspect many of you will.

Harvest Homecoming 2013, Part Two: No longer what downtown is about.

These thoughts were first published here on September 25, 2012. 

Yesterday: More evolution, less fear.

See also: A message to Harvest Homecoming food vendors ... and your PourGate update for Monday, September 30.

It is undoubtedly true that Harvest Homecoming draws large numbers of visitors to “booth days” downtown. This fact alone will strike many readers as sufficient reason to let time-tested matters rest; after all, throngs for any event are a good thing no matter what, right, and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

As with AWOL councilman Bob Caesar's rote insistence that one-way arterial streets slicing through a new-age revitalizing downtown are peachy keen, the reaction from some when it comes to criticizing Harvest Homecoming is visceral:

Why would these ungrateful businesses downtown complain when they have such a wonderful opportunity to market themselves to big crowds?

Because it’s not at all that simple.

For the type of businesses now calling downtown New Albany home, certain crowds are better than others. It isn’t as much about the crowd’s size as its composition.

Naturally, there are mercantile possibilities inherent in Harvest Homecoming's invading legions, and commerce is not only possible, but likely, and yet there are considerable differences between target clienteles. Our new downtown businesses tend to be specialized, offering goods and services tailored to particular modes of thought, and while Harvest Homecoming’s vibe tries to be egalitarian, the festival also is understandably narcissistic. It is about itself, drawing attention to itself, not its surroundings.

What makes a revitalizing downtown like ours increasingly vibrant isn’t necessarily what makes an exurban Wal-Mart packed, or a stadium filled with college football fans exuberant. It all depends on the composition of the crowd. An opera house may or may not be a good place to sell fried chicken, or a ballpark Gucci, although lately, in places other than white-bread Louisville Slugger Field, enlightened minds have started to see the virtue of offering sushi and craft beer to baseball fans.

The old axiom about “location, location, location” grows ever less relevant. It applies to some businesses, not necessarily to all. Niche businesses can survive and thrive by choosing specialized product lines, and catering to consumers who know the difference. They do not necessarily need high traffic volumes such as those we were raised from childhood to insist are essential.

Especially in an evolving downtown setting like New Albany’s, numerous niche businesses must be viewed as a collective entity, with their ideal location not being an interstate ramp’s indiscriminate spewing of speeding autos, but a distinct sense of place itself as a destination for those making a calculated decision of where they’ll spend both time and money.

In effect, Harvest Homecoming arrives once yearly to remake and remodel downtown to suit its own purposes, and with passing time, the overlay bears less and less resemblance to daily reality. In truth, this can hurt local businesses in the long term even if there is a short-term boost in trade.

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In New Albany, primarily because of the mechanism known as the riverfront development three-way permit for alcohol sales, revitalization has been led by restaurants and bars. A second wave of galleries and shops slowly follows. More downtown residential opportunities via existing lofts and upstairs spaces hopefully will come next.

Virtually all of these improvements are dedicated to a demographic proposition intended to be practiced 365 days of the year, so how do the crowds convening downtown during Harvest Homecoming booth days fit into the intended future demographic, especially given that an increasing number of the street vendors do not hail from this area?

In all probability they don’t fit, but at the very least, even if we are to concede the utility of the festival as currently operated, should businesses already in existence downtown, year-round, be forced to cower for four days behind the reeking facades of food purveyors from Keokuk? We tout downtown as a foodie paradise, then hide restaurant entrances behind elephant ear stands.

Conversely, if they so desire, shouldn’t those businesses already in existence downtown have the same chance as Harvest Homecoming’s paying vendors to profit from the hordes, if they choose to try reaching them? Moreover, shouldn’t they have the very first chance?

More tomorrow.