"Not all development is fiscally productive. Urbanization, or more accurately, sub-urbanization, is not necessarily prosperity."

File under "Things that occur to me as I listen to the mayor brag about Breakwater and Summit Springs."

Or, "Things that I know local media won't ask when the mayor brags about Breakwater and Summit Springs."

Now, can we talk about the extreme degree to which "Summit Springs" sucks as a name for a development?

PLAYING “MONEYBALL” WITH YOUR CITY - AN APPEAL TO FELLOW CITY MANAGERS (AND OTHER STRONG CITIZENS), by Michael Kovacs (Strong Towns)

If you’re a sports fan, especially a baseball fan, you’ve probably seen the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt. It's the true-to-life story of the Oakland A’s and how manager Billy Beane, with a small budget to pay salaries, uses the expertise of his assistant’s math and statistics to figure out that players who get on base can make a big determination of whether a team will win or lose. They go on to win their first playoff series in years and made the playoffs for four consecutive years on their low budget. It's a great movie. I highly recommend it.

Cities are a lot like a sports team, and what we do is similar to what Billy had to do. He had salary money and used it to get players for a value, who could get on base. As City Managers, we help set the direction of our cities with our planners and councils, and as we build out, we have a finite amount of land along with our finite ability to maintain and replace (ideally) the infrastructure we accept. We use up land in our respective city limits/extraterritorial jurisdictions, and accept infrastructure dedicated from developers in order to create tax base from the value of private investments made.

SNIP

It’s time to start deploying tactical planning, growing slow and steady, building on our existing grids, getting denser while creating place, and showing the real costs of developments to our policy makers. Let’s start going for walks and base hits. Get on base, and our cities will start winning.

Seriously, the "luxury" apartments at the Coyle site will be called The Breakwater. No, really.

Fiction simply can't keep pace with Team Gahan's content providers. The name is real. My description is satirical:

Break YOUR wind at The Breakwater, New Albany's chic millennial-friendly housing for luxury-loving millennials who prefer their champagne on a PBR budget. Which is to say, how hard must we work to arrive at such consistently awful names for bright, shiny, TIF-bonded objects?

Consequently, and not unlike an anchor ...

... which keeps a boat firmly in place, we have yet another piece of water-based symbolism.

Breakwaters are generally shore-parallel structures that reduce the amount of wave energy reaching the protected area. They are similar to natural bars, reefs or nearshore islands and are designed to dissipate wave energy.

How very, very depressing, though it could be worse. You could be the police chief going door to door for the mayor's re-election in New Albany, the city dignity forgot.

Salute! Language and grammar casualties as Erika picks her fave gals.

Read about these ten great women, as presented on a boilerplate list repeated year after year.

Notice the merry juxtaposition of caps, bolds and italics, so often heedless of playing by the (grammatical) rules, but then again, them little folks tend to have their word allergies, eh?

Giggle softly when the "alphabetical" list isn't alphabetical ... er, twice.

Cherish your Freedom to Screech, folks. To whom would we laugh aloud, if not that nutty faux transgendered trognonymous professor?

FREEDOM OF SPEECH SALUTES 10 OUTSTANDING WOMEN OF 2012 ...

These 10 Outstanding Women have embarked on becoming a new class of leaders for the City of New Albany and that means "Commitment to our community."