Phoenix Place

Phoenix Place - an early 1980s community development and historic preservation project near downtown Louisville in a historically mixed-race, working-class Phoenix Hill neighborhood - was where I lived in my first year in Louisville. Apparently thanks in part to the 1986 Reagan tax reform that taxed my grad school fellowship (and wiped out tax benefits for this kind of development) and to the longevity of the adjacent Clarksdale low-income housing project, this project supposedly never made money (even though now thanks to the demolition of Clarksdale and construction of more high-end housing) the area is gentrifying, a hospital group is acquiring. Lousiville's sprawling downtown hospital district is just blocks away. Already a decent number of people with the hospital - med students, lab techs, et al. - live in Phoenix Place (although most tenants are middle-aged African American professionals and African-American retirees). Rather than have the developer ditch the property, the city is helping one of the hospital groups acquire it - ostensibly for housing for hospital people (though the paper says they won't kick current tenants out). The president of the neighborhood association (Phoenix Hill Association) says she suspects the hospitals - which have already turned two parking lots between existing hospitals and the development into buildings - will eventually want to expand hospital buildings into the area. I saw the whole area from the 9th floor of one of the hospitals - where I was visiting a sick church member - while Stephanie and Frisco walked along the remaining parking lot and through my old development. (Pictured below is the outside front of my old apartment.)

-- Perry