The rolling hills that begin where the city of New Albany ends are called the Knobs.
Native American wisdom has it that a Knob is a place where Louisville bedroom communities sprout like dandelions in an eroded gully.
One morning earlier this year I was biking in the Knobs, navigating Skyline Drive in a profuse yet satisfying lather, when to my left opened a vista of frantic activity, with muddied earthmovers maneuvering through the open, formerly green pasture like tanks in wartime. Elsewhere, sullen Hispanic conscripts dug with shovels, landscaping right next to the road I was traveling.
Glancing over, I spotted a man wearing a pith helmet who looked to be in charge of the proceedings, conjuring images from colonial India. It was all I could do to avoid saluting and offering to make tea. At the last minute I realized that the man was in fact an acquaintance from school days past, graduated now to a position as a moving, shaking pillar of the homebuilding community.
His job title says it all: Developer.
He is a generator of property taxes, employer of contractors, provider of domiciles to those seeking homes … and since home ownership is reckoned to be one of the founding, guiding principles of the Republic, then those who build the nation’s homes apparently are among the very highest priests of capitalism.
It is certain that Ayn Rand, apostle of egoism and the only known author to build a seduction scene around a piece of steel, would approve of the many subdivisions dotting the overwhelmed side roads of Floyd County.
Did I mention that Floyd County is one of Indiana’s smallest?
Hardly a week passes without a news item detailing the latest instance of Floyd County’s land developers and homebuilders challenging zoning restrictions that only now, two decades after the barn door was opened and the paving commenced, are so much as being considered, much less implemented in any meaningful sense.
Thinking back to the last election, I’m struggling to remember if the names I saw on the ballot were those of the home builder/land developer politburo that seems to have decided that it, not local elected officials and civil servants, runs the county.
These non-elected pillars of development generally hold a lawsuit in one hand and a gasoline can in the other, the first for wielding as a club against those foolish enough to disagree, and should that strategy of intimidation fail, the second for dousing themselves and flicking their Bics on the courthouse steps.
Homebuilder self-immolation has cheerful and poetic aspects, but we mustn’t forget that these people are developers, not poets, unless chainsaws can be said to hum in iambic pentameter.
Readers younger than forty might not remember the time not so long ago when there actually were shady oak groves in Floyd County, and not just garish signs on gaudy brick subdivision entrance walls suggesting that the area filled by all the cookie-cutter homes without adequate sewage disposal actually occupies a site where oak trees once stood.
I must concede that in terms of marketing potential, it’s probably a better idea to name a subdivision for the natural feature obliterated to make room for the houses (Oak Grove Manor) than to name it after the developer (Philistine Parasitic Capitalist Acres).
Call me a sentimentalist, a literalist, perhaps even a Communist, but when I see a pasture or woodland, I see grass and trees. My view of this landscape does not automatically morph into geometric considerations of development potential. My tastes run more toward reviving communities that already are here.
Of course, this is a conundrum. Grass and trees originally covered the city block where I live in a century-old house. Someone a long, long time ago took the lead in developing the properties that now make up this city block. Someone made money doing it.
Nevertheless, my conceptual wheels turn not at the thought of converting a pasture into a subdivision, but at the sight of a building in need of remodeling and a plot of land requiring development. I imagine developers hard at work in the urban setting, making fresh opportunities out of venerable, sometimes dying areas rather than chewing up and spitting out the last of Floyd County’s dwindling open spaces.
My school chum in the pith helmet knows the economics of his profession, just as I know the ones of mine. Perhaps this is why he’s not often seen standing at a job site downtown. I understand he makes plenty of money, and I’m sure that he’s quite good at what he does.
This doesn’t mean that I’m under any obligation to respect him for it.
And I don’t. The first round of petrol’s on me, mate.