Here in New Albany, we spend much time over beer, coffee and various illicit pharmaceuticals discussing the perennial disconnect between theory and practice.
For instance, just about everyone taking a position on the future of downtown acknowledges that more people need to live there. Granted, our Slumlord Empowerment Districts (i.e., historic neighborhoods) lie only a short distance from downtown, but after a decade spent trying to make the point that ideas like walkability and complete streets apply to these neighborhoods just as much as free federal stabilization monies when it comes to effectively connecting them with downtown, the powers that be still look at messengers like us as though we were extras populating the cantina scene in Star Wars.
The only downtown housing solution ever advanced during the past decade of muddle was the catastrophic Mainland Properties proposal to use a $15 million parking garage as collateral to find the money its backers didn’t possess, perhaps leading eventually to habitation at DC-level prices. Meanwhile, empty buildings still sit, unused and rotting, and there hasn’t been a new building erected downtown since the Redmen’s Club (later Steinert’s) … which remains vacant.
Perhaps, in the end, our perennial disconnect reflects our enduring contempt for education. If one persists in thinking that an empty-nester is someone who didn’t get lucky last night at the Road House, and a millennial is a flower that returns to bloom each spring, then it’s hard to picture this city ever turning the corner on downtown housing.
After all, valuable corners are meant to be sacrificed for a farmers market, not for thinking outside self-imposed boxes. And so we stumble, dully, into the future.
New attitudes have fed Indianapolis area’s apartment boom, by Chris Sikich (Indy Star)
… Changing attitudes and lifestyles have boosted the apartment industry even as the new home market has emerged from the recession, said Drew Klacik, senior policy analyst at the Indiana University Public Policy Institute.
• Millennials, he said, are interested in living in an urban environment without the long-term binds of mortgages. Millennials are a key demographic, expected to grow from 36 percent of the workforce today to 50 percent by the end of the decade, according to Denver-based Progressive Urban Management Associates.
• Empty-nesters, he said, are ready to downsize and give up the maintenance headaches associated with home ownership. The first wave of baby boomers reached 65 in 2011, and the last will turn 65 in 2029.
“Millennials and empty-nesters want walkable new urban neighborhoods,” Klacik said. “The stuff Carmel and Westfield are doing is a really big deal, and that really is the trend.”
