"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 ...

Campaign Diary, Chapter 5: Essential reading about urbanism if you're interested in correctives to Jeff Gahan's suburban dreck.

"The idea that compact, mixed use, pedestrian friendly development is somehow alien to American families or productive capitalism is so strange. It’s exactly this type of building that made America financially and culturally strong from the very beginning. It’s actually all the low grade scattershot construction smeared across the landscape that’s concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer distant hands and impoverishing ordinary towns and families."

Anyone seen Scott Blair?

I hear that his bank stands ready and waiting to ignore the lessons herein -- early and often.

If you're still confused by what we've been saying with regard to urbanism, please read the article linked here. It's about how we build and use cities, and the point comes down to this:

"Form ... dictated by practical considerations based on what worked well on a tight budget."

In short, what Jeff Gahan has spent the past four years NOT doing.

Consequently, you can consider the article a de facto Baylor for Mayor campaign speech. Can either of my opponents touch any of this, either in terms of conceptual grasp or actual performance while occupying various offices over a period of years?

(crickets chirp, pins drop ... somewhere, a Gahan billboard is erected at the headquarters of a downtown neighborhood association, and a tsunami borne of cognitive dissonance threatens our collective existence as rational human beings)

I didn't think so, but go ahead and delude yourselves.

Do exactly what the tone-deaf local Democratic Party wants you to do, but at least have the good grace to remove the "Gahan for Mayor" blinders first -- and seriously, do away with your anti-GOP "chickens vote for Colonel Sanders" bumper sticker, because the closer to New Albany's historic center you live, the more your support for Gahan becomes this fowl analogy.

Cluck it.

I've highlighted just three passages, but you really need to read the entire article. Thanks to JeffG for calling my attention to it.

Middle of the Road Kentucky, by Johnny (Granola Shotgun)

... It also happens to embody all the tenets promoted by the Smart Growth “coastal elite”. Except Bellevue was founded in 1870 by some profoundly conservative market oriented families. Bellevue isn’t New Urbanism. It’s just plain old fashioned regular urbanism like every other town built before World War II. Its form was dictated by practical considerations based on what worked well on a tight budget. From the beginning there was a good balance of taxable private property relative to the public cost of providing quality municipal services ...

... Some people like living in a walkable neighborhood. Other people prefer a driveable suburban living arrangement. It’s a big country so there’s room for everyone to find a place they really love and want to call home. But there are inherent benefits and drawbacks to each kind of development. Notice that everything that makes the old part of Bellevue pleasant for people on foot makes it less conducive to people in cars. The opposite is true in the newer part of town. The more a place is made effortlessly driveable the less it works for pedestrians or cyclists ...

... Most municipalities and states (and the federal government for that matter) are consistently spending more than they collect in revenue. A majority of towns are already deep in debt and servicing that debt is becoming a larger and larger portion of the budget. The usual conversation of, “Teachers are paid way too much” and, “We just need to entice a big employer to our town” or, “If we widened the highway the new Target and Walmart will arrive to provide tax revenue” has entered an era of diminishing returns. This approach isn’t going to fix what’s broken. In fact, this set of policies is what’s slowly destroying our towns.