Morton Marcus
The Indiana General Assembly went home. We breathed a sigh of relief. Governor Holcomb didn’t veto any of their silly bills. We were disappointed, but silent. The primaries were over. We hoped for a moment of reflection.
But no; the City of Indianapolis, battered by a hostile legislature, announces a half-billion dollar subsidy for another private privy. This time it’s an 814-room hotel next door to another expansion of the downtown convention center.
Let’s be honest. Because of a two-century-long hostility to urban life, Indianapolis and its sister Hoosier cities have been strangled by rural fantasies. Suburbs (places that are inferior to urbs) abound. They manifest their rural nature by the amount of lawn each dwelling occupies. They announce themselves by the roar of the riding mower and the sonic screech of the leaf blower.
Suburbs begin as tentacles of housing along public roads on land sold by farmers who then, with crocodile tears, lament the loss of farmland.. With water and sewer lines, suburbs grow as nodules of housing with names like Mystic Meadows and Buckinghamtonshire Estates. These lead to the dispersion of retail trade and palatial High Schools.
What’s left in the cities? The aged and decaying investments of the past. New businesses are lured by improved infrastructure, subsidized in part by the federal government and more specifically by state and county entities.
So the cities like Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Fort Wayne, Richmond and the mosaic called Lake County turn to funding from visitors. Even fast-growing places like Carmel, Westfield, and Fishers begin to rely on the imported dollars of out-of-towners, conventioneers, youth athletic teams, and religious ruminators.
Thus, Indianapolis is determined to build more and more facilities for more and more conventions, ever larger conventions, growing to a multiplication of simultaneous overwhelming events. Imagine both the NRA and the ER Doctors converging on Indy just after MADD and the Bartenders have departed.
Now the City of Indianapolis proposes to own this new hotel which could not obtain funding from the primate, excuse me, the private market.
How bizarre is it that Indianapolis, sitting in the center of Indiana’s conservative, pro-business, anti-government government would own sports, convention, and now hotel facilities?
Yes, this is the same hamstrung city that cannot, thanks to the regurgitative state legislature, offer decent public transit, public schools, paved streets or effective recycling.
But wait, Indy’s private landowners are converting office buildings to private housing. Will the residents of that housing want a downtown populated by inebriates and preachers?
Remember, this is Indy’s downtown where the courts, the lawyers, the litigants, and the jailed have been exiled to a distant wasteland. A downtown that may soon have two empty city halls.
How soon will the Colts announce their move to Lebanon?
Mr. Marcus is an economist. Reach him at [email protected]. Follow him and John Guy on Who Gets What? wherever podcasts are available or at mortonjohn.libsyn.com.
