We’re about to pave a small neighborhood park so that patrons of a bar in a government building will have a place to stash their cars while they drink. What better time than now to revisit a couple of previous columns about urban design? (More on the playground later.) Back in May, I wrote about local entrepreneur Tom Battista’s work to restore commercial life to the 800 block of Massachusetts Avenue and what’s left of the 900 block. The 900…
If you called someone a royalist these days, you’d probably just get a blank stare. But 200 years ago, you would have started a heated discussion and perhaps even a deadly duel. The accusation was often leveled toward those who managed the economy in those days, perhaps for good reason. Then, as now, bankers, financiers and the other moguls trusted with responsibility for national money matters were not always a democratic lot. While politically incorrect then as well as now,…
Every time Indiana experiences one of its summer cloudbursts, the rainfall sets into motion one of a real estate development’s most expensive and least appreciated systems. As rain hits the ground, it quickly collects into wellengineered courses to swales and gutters, through pipes and culverts and into detention ponds. Flowing around, over and through the land that once absorbed it, the water is efficiently collected and conveyed off the site. In other words, gather it up and drain it off….
I eat out a lot. Heck, I eat out more than I eat in. So I’m something of a restaurant whiz. From locals to chains, fast food to fancy fare, I can tell you who serves what, how well and for how much. But until my friend Cheri read a book called “Nickel and Dimed,” in which author Barbara Ehrenreich recounts a first-person social experiment working low-wage jobs, I never asked a waiter or waitress about the going rate for…
Bryan Ballard and Cody Feldman never dreamed they’d end up here, soaking up the sun along Indianapolis’ downtown canal, peddling frozen treats from their very own ice cream cart. They certainly never planned to become business partners when they met as adolescents playing Special Olympics basketball. But it happened anyway, thanks to a federally funded program intended to help significantly disabled individuals find work that fits their interests and skills. What makes the so-called customizedemployment effort unusual is its emphasis…
By my calculations, the U.S. population will reach 300 million on or about Oct. 15. There is no need to specify the hour and minute. The population clock at the U.S. Bureau of the Census indicates that we are adding to our numbers at a rate of nearly one person each 10 seconds. Even though our population growth rate has been declining, the absolute growth numbers, and their implications, remain staggering. For example, if we average two persons per housing…
The images are out there, reinforced almost every day. Big business is bad, led by overpaid executives who are out of touch and hire lobbyists to get laws changed in their favor. Or, worse yet, they drive smaller companies out of business. Small business, in contrast, is noble, led by energetic people following their dream, facing special challenges and deserving of our support. Nobody, it seems, is rooting for Wal-Mart to get bigger, and no one ever made a movie…
SMALL BUSINESS PROFILE JP PARKER CO. Business blooming for specialty florist Flower farm, retail shop feed green thumb’s growth More than 300,000 sunflowers are in various stages of growth on Needham, Ind., farmland, where a third generation carries on the family tradition with a modern twist. These tall summer annuals follow a spring where 1,000 blooming peony plants yielded at least 11,000 stems for a Chicago broker. Smaller plots of delphiniums, larkspur, zinnias, coneflowers, mints, herbs and other greenery also…
We know that, relative to the United States, Indiana is neither a rich state nor one growing with vigor. Two weeks ago in this space, I discussed our more recent employment experiences. A friend read the column and asked, “How much of our lack of job growth is due to the slump or collapse in manufacturing jobs?” Nationally, only three states (Nevada, and the Dakotas) had any gain in manufacturing jobs between May 2001 and May 2006. Alaska and Wyoming…
No layoffs. No seven-figure budget cut to sweat through. IU School of Medicine Dean Dr. Craig Brater had many reasons to raise a toast this month, when a new fiscal year began and the school left behind an old one marked by the worst budget cuts in decades. Indeed, Brater said he is breathing a little easier as the school starts fiscal 2006-2007 with a budget of more than $815 million. An increase in clinical revenue and grant money helped…
Those of us who spend a lot of time in airports get an effective education in the economics of competition by observing-and paying-the fares charged by airlines. It’s really quite simple. Fly a route served by several airlines, especially if one of them is a low-cost, no-frills carrier such as Southwest, and fares will be reasonably low. But if you are unlucky enough to fly to or from a smaller city, or even a large one where a single carrier…
In her social work class, my friend Cheri was assigned a paper on hate groups. The professor sent her master’s degree students to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Web site. There, they were to find the map of active hate groups in America, read about those operating in Indiana and discuss their reactions to what they learned. Cheri was left wondering why so many people are so afraid of those they perceive as “different,” and why “different” so often equates…
Economists are not stupid people. They are timid and tend to hide their timidity behind a wall of overbearing self-confidence. But they are not stupid. In fact, often they are too smart to talk about what they do and do not know. As they wiggle over the rocks of uncertainty, they appear to others as either sneaky or formless. Let’s take interest rates as an example. Economists like to talk about how, if the Fed raises interest rates, home mortgage…
In an environment where we’re all being asked to pay a larger share of our own health care costs, it’s interesting to see how little time we spend thinking about major decisions that have an impact on our health. Like selecting a primary care physician or any medical specialist, for example. According to a recent Managed Care Weekly Digest survey, 67 percent of U.S. adults ages 18-64 said they spent eight hours or more researching an automobile purchase, yet only…
I got something in the mail recently. Now, from my friends’ overwrought reactions, you’d have thought it was an invitation to go hunting with Dick Cheney. But no, to my colleagues, this was even more frightening. “This” was my summons for jury duty. As for me, I thought it was kind of cool. OK, so it’s not the prize patrol delivering my earlyretirement check. But the constitutional romantic in me was moved by the fact that I’d been summoned to…
A new law that’s designed to protect Indiana consumers changes the way businesses interact with their customers living in Indiana. Public Law 125, passed in the last session of the Indiana General Assembly and effective as of July 1, requires businesses to notify customers that reside in Indiana if there’s been a security breach in which personal data has been stolen. The law defines “personal information” as a Social Security number that is not encrypted or redacted, or a person’s…
As I write this, two of the biggest titans on the planet have just fought each other to a standstill. In one corner is the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). In the other corner, the search engine company Google. In 2005, the DOJ wanted to revive the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which had already been swatted down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. The law didn’t address child pornography, as has often been assumed in the case, but only…
I was going to play smart aleck this week. I was going to write in hick dialect. I was going to lambaste us Hoosiers over our stubborn adherence to the status quo, our penchant to take things slow, our preference for partisanship, our pooh-poohing of progress and our bull-headed gumption to go it alone in a global economy. Then news broke that Indiana has the highest high school dropout rate in America. So I figured that for two reasons, I’d…
A touch-screen directory, a grove of potted trees and a muffin-bearing kiosk greet visitors entering the six-story atrium at the new Clarian North Medical Center in Carmel. A much milder scene awaits people walking into Westview Hospital a few miles away, on the west side of Indianapolis. There, a lonely player piano spills soft tunes into a one-story lobby filled with clusters of chairs and pamphlets on volunteering. “Quiet! Healing in Progress” reads a nearby sign. Indiana’s lone osteopathic hospital…
Fifty years ago, economist Charles Tiebout expressed a vision of how freeing local governments to pursue their own unique strategies for setting taxes and providing services could produce an efficient outcome much like the private marketplace. He called it “voting with your feet.” The idea was simple-by moving, people could sort themselves out and live in communities that came closest to providing the tax and expenditure combinations they valued most. Reality is quite a bit more complicated. When people move…
