New Albany has been put up for sale. All of it. Every last building must go. Okay, so that’s obviously an exaggeration, but walking around the New Albany downtown, it does seem that every other building has a for sale sign on it. So these photos aren’t hot off the presses. They were taken just before the Harvest Homecoming on October 8th, but the fact that New Albany is for sale is still a current topic. A New Albanian told us that this “for-sale-phenomenon” is in part due to the Harvest Homecoming and the thousands of visitors that will flock the streets of the city center. Eager property owners are out to make a buck, and the prospective buyer has quite a selection to choose from.
The Sunny-Side town has torn down a lot of its historic architecture; some of the best is now only a memory. However, the New Albany city center still has a sizable amount of building stock to choose from and it is generally situated into one dense area. Local leaders like Mike Kopp, who has many of the properties listed, have a strong desire to see New Albany become a vibrant urban area and are constantly excited about the town’s potential. Hopefully as the economy improves, we’ll see some of these signs start coming off the buildings, but it will likely be a slow process. Southern Indiana is set up for cars and suburban sprawl and unless something drastic changes (the return of high gas prices, maybe?), we’ll keep hearing about Veterans Parkway and not Main Street.
