Design elements: Is it Market Street beautification or Il Duce's Italy?

Who knew Jeff Gahan was a student of pre-WWII fascist history? It's only a matter of time before Dear Leader channels Il Duce: "We must create a new art, an art of today, a Gahanist-HWC art."

As Bluegill wisely noted:

New Albany’s Market Street project is depressingly familiar - big money, long time, the usual political patronage, generic ugly car-centric result. New Gahania in a nutshell.

This nutshell includes the beautiful people rushing to praise the emperor's nudity as they overlook what he's done to terrorize the less fortunate among us.

Therein lies the biggest part of our city's problem -- that, and street light poles made out to look like Roman plinths for enormous ceremonial statues, which they might yet become during a third Gahan term.

We'll be invading Clarksville before you know it.

#FireGahan2019

Windmill dunk by Richard Florida: "America devotes far too many of its precious resources to parking."

Outside, it's New Albany, and in this map prepared a few years back by Jeff Gillenwater, parking areas in downtown are colored red. Granted, not all are public auto-friendly spaces, and perhaps pieces of the wasted acreage have since disappeared for infill, as with Breakwater.

The point remains: the red splotches should be vastly reduced -- and as far as Harvest Homecoming's parking needs for one week each year are concerned, just don't go there.

Would you rather generate income 51 weeks each year, or only one?

The article at CityLab is Parking Has Eaten American Cities, and Richard Florida's conclusion is the place to start.

America devotes far too many of its precious resources to parking. This is especially troubling given that driving is in decline. For example, the share of Seattle households with a car has fallen for the first time in at least 40 years, and the percentage of U.S. high school seniors with a driver’s license is at “a record low”—down from 85.3 percent in 1996 to 71.5 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, ride-sharing is up, and cities and real estate developers are striving to reduce parking requirements.

Joni Mitchell famously sang: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” It’s time we reclaim our cities from car storage and use the space for what we need more of, from housing and bike lanes to sidewalk cafes and parks.

As always, Florida offers statistical evidence.

Parking eats up an incredible amount of space and costs America’s cities an extraordinary amount of money. That’s the main takeaway of a new study that looks in detail at parking in five U.S. cities: New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming.

The study, by Eric Scharnhorst of the Research Institute for Housing America (which is affiliated with the Mortgage Bankers of America), uses data from satellite images, the U.S. Census, property tax assessment offices, city departments of transportation, parking authorities, and geospatial maps like Google Maps to generate inventories of parking for these five cities. (The inventories include on-street parking spaces, off-street surface parking lots, and off-street parking structures.)

Friday evening is going to be an interesting test case. There'll be two food and drink openings downtown, and maybe a third, and also Schmitt Furniture's birthday concert is at the amphitheater. Friday's always the busiest night of the week for eating out, anyway.

If all this comes down on Friday and the top two levels of the (free) parking garage are still mostly empty ...

This memo goes out to One Southern Indiana: "Handing Out Tax Breaks to Businesses Is Worse Than Useless."

With a courtesy copy to Mr. Duggins.

Handing Out Tax Breaks to Businesses Is Worse Than Useless, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

A new study exposes the futility of the $45 billion that states spend on economic development incentives.

Even before being sworn in as President, Donald Trump jumped up and down at the chance to showcase the great deal he and Vice-President Mike Pence made to keep a Carrier plant in Indiana. The company pocketed $7 million in tax breaks in exchange for about 800 jobs. But the broad consensus among economists who study the subject is that such business incentives do little to alter the location decisions of companies. In fact, they’re often worse than ineffective—they’re counterproductive. My own take on this site is that they are a useless waste of taxpayer dollars.

Timothy Bartik of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, who is perhaps the leading student of incentives and economic development, has a new report that provides the most detailed assessment of incentives across states and their effects on economic development. His database contributes a useful tool for state and local economic developers and others to take a hard look at incentives, what they cost, and whether they are worth it or not.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Basically, states hand over the money to companies and then do not even follow up to see if they are working or not. As Bartik puts it:

Incentives are still far too broadly provided to many firms that do not pay high wages, do not provide many jobs, and are unlikely to have research spinoffs. Too many incentives excessively sacrifice the long-term tax base of state and local economies. Too many incentives are refundable and without real budget limits. States devote relatively few resources to incentives that are services, such as customized job training. Based on past research, such services may be more cost-effective than cash in encouraging local job growth.

Personal change, political change, and why the orangutan sleeps tonight.

When you've been in the principled position of political opposition for 35 years, having realized long ago that the problem isn't so much Republican or Democrat, but America's non-thinking, two-party dysfunction itself, then election results so disappointing to others are like water off a duck's back.

Floyd County hands its Democrats a purely epic, top-to-bottom beat down.

Here's an essay from a few years back. I like it because of this impeccable conclusion:

We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Exactly.

Forget Shorter Showers; Why personal change does not equal political change, by Derrick Jensen (Orion)

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance.