City-County Government and Promises of Economic Development: A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract

The prevailing opinion in Louisville is that its central city, like many American cities, is terminally ill. People have moved to the suburbs and retail stores have located into the malls. All this has left the city with fewer people and fewer shops. But is the city really worse off? A great many claims about Louisville's imminent death are made by politicians anxious about a shrinking electoral base, by businesses concerned about declining investments and by newspapers worried about lost circulation. “Fragmented” Louisville is invidiously compared to the consolidated urban county of Lexington-Fayette especially on the population count. Since 1970 Louisville has lost 25 percent of its residents and today is down to 269,000 people. During the same period Lexington-Fayette registered a 108 percent gain and it holds 225,000 residents. Louisville's haunting fear is that Lexington Fayette will overtake it during the early part of the next century (Savitch and Vogel 1999,4).