Today’s track: “Staring at the Sun” — TV on the Radio

In January 1937 it rained on Louisville for twelve days straight.

Fifteen inches between the 13th and the 24th. Nineteen for the month. No snow — just rain, falling on ground that was already full, into a river that was already up. On January 27 the Ohio crested at 52.15 feet on the upper gauge downtown. Flood stage there is 23. Below the falls, the lower gauge read 85.4 feet — same water, different zero. You'll see both numbers quoted as "the crest," usually by people who don't know there are two gauges.

Seventy percent of the city went under. About 175,000 people left their homes — more than half the town. Across the river, ninety percent of Jeffersonville was flooded. Somewhere around ninety people died in Louisville. The city's health director counted 90 that February, the deputy coroner told the AP 130, and the mayor's office said over 200. Nobody agreed then and nobody agrees now.

The details are the part that gets me.

The only dry link from downtown to the Highlands was a pontoon bridge at Baxter Avenue — 1,400 feet long, floated on whiskey barrels, because this is Louisville and that's what we had. Roughly 25,000 people crossed it. Water came on two hours a day, and a tugboat's steam engine ran the city pumps. Everyone got a typhoid shot. Nobody got typhoid. Trenches were dug at Cave Hill for the dead everybody expected, and nobody ever needed them.

The main library at Third and York took water over the shelves. Thirty thousand soaked books went into three freight cars to Philadelphia and got baked dry in automobile-enameling ovens — the ones built for car paint. The newsreel narrator's line, twenty years later: "In 1937 Abe Lincoln walked on water." That's the WHAS documentary, fourteen minutes, and it's the best thing I've seen on this city in a year.

The Courier-Journal printed in Shelbyville, then Lexington, and never missed a day. WHAS stayed on the air running rescue traffic, and WSM in Nashville dropped its own programming for 82 hours to relay Louisville's "send a boat to…" messages down the valley. A country station went dark for three and a half days so strangers could get pulled off rooftops. The L&N Railroad ran an ad afterward: "Sorry you were delayed, neighbor, but we had water down our way."

Shippingport disappeared. The Point disappeared. Rose Island never reopened.

Then we built the wall.

Congress moved in 1938. The war stopped it. Ground broke in March 1947, and the first seventeen miles — Beargrass Creek out to Rubbertown, with the first pumping stations — were done by 1957. The southwest reach out to Pond Creek finished in 1989. Forty-two years of building, for twelve days of rain.

What's out there now, per MSD and the Corps: about 29 miles of floodwall and levee — 4.5 miles of concrete, the rest earthen — roughly 150 floodgates, a few dozen street closures that get bolted shut when the river comes up, and 16 flood pumping stations. Beargrass Creek and Pond Creek are two of the largest inland flood pumping stations on Earth. Designed for a crest three feet higher than 1937. Protecting 110 square miles, 200,000 people, 87,000 homes, and somewhere between $24 and $34 billion in property, depending on whose page you're reading.

And the line from an MSD engineer: if one of those pumping stations fails, "it would be like plugging a bathtub and leaving the shower on — we would flood the city from the inside."

Read that as an investor. The wall keeps the river out. It also keeps the rain in. Every drop that falls on 110 square miles behind that wall has to be pumped over it, through machinery that in a lot of cases was built in the Eisenhower years. Paddy's Run dates to 1953 — MSD's director said it's been doing "a 21st century job with 1950s technology" — and its $230 million rebuild is supposed to wrap this December. MSD's number for what the whole flood system needs is $683 million. Its five-year critical-infrastructure list is $1.2 billion. Your MSD bill went up 3.9% on September 1. That's what you're paying for.

Now the map part, because I wrote Monday about why the reef put us here and yesterday about why capital drives past us, and this is the third piece of the same map.

The popular explanation for why Louisville grew east goes like this: in 1937 the Highlands stayed dry — that's why the pontoon bridge went there — and afterward, new construction got steered uphill and east, out of the floodplain, while the wall took forty years to reach the west and southwest. That's the popular version. Here's the settled one, and I want to handle this part sensitively — as a realtor, and just as a proper human being, if you will.

In 1870, a Black activist named Robert Fox walked with two companions from Quinn Chapel AME Church, boarded a segregated streetcar, and sat in the whites-only section on purpose, while two hundred supporters watched. It was planned in advance. The ride-ins that followed made Louisville the only city in the entire South where Black riders successfully kept Jim Crow off the streetcars during Reconstruction. That's not the story most people know about this city. It's the one I'd lead with.

In 1914, Louisville passed a city ordinance making it illegal for a Black family to buy a house on a block that was majority white, and illegal for a white family to buy on a block that was majority Black. A Black attorney named William Warley put in an offer on a house owned by a white seller, Charles Buchanan, on one condition: the sale only went through if Warley could actually live there. Both men knew that was impossible under the ordinance — it was a test case, built on purpose, backed by the NAACP. By 1917 it reached the Supreme Court, and the Court struck the whole ordinance down, unanimously. Buchanan v. Warley is still taught in law schools as the case that ended government-mandated residential segregation in America. It started here, on a residential block in Louisville.

Striking down the ordinance didn't integrate a single block, though. It just meant the same outcome had to get built by other means, and this city spent the next fifty years living through exactly that.

Private deed covenants picked up where the ordinance left off — the ruling never touched those, so a house could still carry language barring a sale to a Black family, and thousands did. Then, in the years right after that same flood, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded every Louisville neighborhood for mortgage risk. West End neighborhoods — Russell, Portland, Smoketown, the same streets the flood had just devastated — came back graded D, "hazardous," shaded red on the map. That's where "redlining" comes from. The appraisers weighed who lived there more heavily than the flood damage itself. The Highlands, St. Matthews, Indian Hills, already carrying those same deed covenants, got graded A and B.

Below the river, a community called Little Africa had grown up in what's now Park DuValle — self-sufficient, with its own grocers, schools, nightclubs, and trades, thriving from the early 1900s through the 1920s. Between the 1940s and the 1950s, the city condemned it under eminent domain to build the Cotter Homes housing project and clear ground for the Watterson Expressway. One woman got less than $5,000 for her home in 1950. A few miles over, the Russell neighborhood was living its own golden era — in the 1940s it earned the name "Louisville's Harlem," Walnut Street lined with Black-owned theaters, restaurants, and nightclubs. Urban renewal came for Russell in the 1960s the same way it came for Little Africa: the business district demolished, replaced with public housing.

Redlining officially ended in 1951, but what replaced it was worse in one specific way — it was profitable. Speculators would walk into a West End block, warn a white homeowner that values were about to collapse because a Black family had just bought two streets over, and buy the house cheap on the spot. Then flip it, often on predatory contract terms, to a Black buyer at a markup. It's called blockbusting, and it's the actual mechanism behind the version of this story you'll still hear passed down as "white folks sold their houses for nothing and moved east." They did sell fast and cheap. It wasn't panic. It was a business model, and real estate agents were the ones running it.

In 1954, an electrician and WWII veteran named Andrew Wade tried to buy a house in Shively after being turned down repeatedly by agents who wouldn't sell to him directly. Two white allies, Carl and Anne Braden, bought the house instead and transferred it to him. The neighborhood answered with a burning cross, gunfire, a rock through the window, and finally dynamite planted under his daughter's bedroom, which leveled half the house in the middle of the night. No one was hurt. The people arrested afterward weren't the ones who planted the bomb — they were the Bradens, charged with sedition, accused of a Communist conspiracy to start a race war. The Wades sold at a loss in 1957 and moved to West Louisville.

By 1967, this city was marching over the same ground Buchanan v. Warley had supposedly settled fifty years earlier. Near-daily open housing demonstrations that spring, crowds pelted with rocks and bottles. Martin Luther King Jr. joined a march that year and took a rock to the head, and kept going, saying, "Upon this rock, we will build an open city." It took an election that November, with Black voters organizing as a decisive bloc, to seat a Board of Aldermen that would pass an open housing ordinance. It happened that December — Louisville became the first major city in the South with one, four months before the federal Fair Housing Act made it national policy, and six months before its own city caught fire.

That fire was Parkland, six weeks after Dr. King's assassination. About 400 people gathered at 28th and Greenwood in May 1968 to protest a white police officer's possible reinstatement after he'd been suspended for beating a Black man. A false rumor that Stokely Carmichael's plane was being deliberately delayed helped set it off. Three days of unrest followed, two teenagers were killed, roughly 472 people were arrested, and white-owned businesses and residents left the West End in earnest after that.

A year later, on the other side of the West End, Fontaine Ferry Park — 64 acres of rides and a carousel on the river, whites-only for 59 years — had its own integration story. It finally opened to Black families in 1964, and by every account business was fine, it thrived. Then on opening day, May 4th, 1969, a riot broke out. The owner didn't rebuild. He liquidated the whole park rather than reopen it, and white flight out of the surrounding Shawnee neighborhood picked up fast.

It would be easy to tell this whole story as "integration happened, there was violence, so people left" — and that framing quietly puts the blame in the wrong place. The riots were the visible moments. The ordinance, the maps, the covenants, and the blockbusting contracts did the actual damage, for fifty years before and after any single one of them.

None of that is the whole story, though, and I don't want it to read like it is. The West End never actually emptied out. Black families kept buying homes there, building churches, opening businesses, raising kids, and organizing block by block, holding these neighborhoods together straight through the decades when the HOLC map, the deed covenants, and the blockbusting contracts were actively working against them. That's not a footnote to the disinvestment story. It's the reason there's still a neighborhood here to invest in at all.

Here's the part I actually get to write about with some excitement, because it's happening right now, not in an archive.

Start with the one an out-of-state investor would never guess. West Louisville got its first hospital in over 150 years. Norton West Louisville Hospital opened in November 2024 on 28th Street — a $90 million build with a 24/7 emergency department, inpatient beds and operating rooms, full imaging, a retail pharmacy, and specialty care running from cardiology to oncology to neurosurgery, employing more than 350 people. Not a clinic. A hospital, built from the ground up, in a neighborhood that had gone a century and a half without one.

A few blocks from the river, Waterfront Park is finally finishing the piece that was always supposed to reach West Louisville. Twenty-two acres west of 10th Street, groundbreaking back in 2022, the first piece — PlayPort — opened in March 2025, and the governor has another $10 million teed up in the next state budget to keep building it out, on top of the roughly $50 million already committed. A downtown park system finally extending into the neighborhood it was drawn to reach on the original map.

Across the river, the same river, Southern Indiana is pouring money into the same stretch of water at the same time. Origin Park just picked up $37.5 million in the latest Indiana state budget. A 14,000-square-foot event center opens there this spring. Jeffersonville is finishing a 50-meter competition pool by fall, built to pull regional swim meets. Four hundred-plus acres of riverfront, visible from the Shawnee side, getting built out on the same timeline as West Louisville's own waterfront.

Then there's what's already finished. Beecher Terrace — a $213 million, nine-year rebuild of severely distressed public housing into 620 mixed-income units — fully reopened as of last October. And the Louisville Urban League's Sports & Learning Complex on the old Heritage West site: $43 million raised to build a 24-acre facility with an indoor 200-meter track that now hosts USA Track and Field and NCAA-level meets, a few blocks off Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

The West End Opportunity Partnership is a 12-square-mile tax increment financing district covering most of the historically redlined West End, capturing 80% of new tax revenue above a 2022 baseline through 2042 and steering it back into the neighborhood instead of the general fund — seeded with $30 million. As of this year it's put roughly $15 million to work across seventeen projects: a $4.6 million loan to the Gateway on Broadway apartments, $1.97 million for a 233-unit development at Park Hill and Algonquin, $1.29 million for 25 new single-family homes on Elliott Street, $2.5 million into an 84,000-square-foot distillery build-out in Portland. Buildings, dollars, dates — real capital moving into the same twelve square miles the HOLC graded "hazardous" in the 1930s.

Stack all of it up — the hospital, the waterfront, Origin Park across the river, Beecher Terrace, the sports complex, the West End Opportunity Partnership — and you're at north of $475 million of built, funded, or under-construction investment in and immediately around West Louisville. Not announcements. Not renderings. Money that's already poured.

There's also REVERT — Restoring Each Viable Economically Redlined Territory — which works almost like a rewind button. Families who can trace their roots back to a neighborhood the HOLC graded "hazardous" can apply for forgivable money, up to $50,000, to repair, renovate, or rebuild a home in that same neighborhood. Real estate attorney John Borders, of the Louisville firm Borders & Borders, has written about it and tracked it closely, and he's pointed out the uncomfortable part: the city set aside roughly $13 million, and as of his last count only 17 of 216 available loans had closed, with the federal deadline to spend the money closing in fast. The map that graded these neighborhoods "hazardous" ninety years ago is the same map deciding today who qualifies to undo it.

That's the question I want every investor reading this to sit with, not just the ones applying for REVERT. The number that actually matters here isn't how much capital is moving — it's who it's moving with. Is it building housing stock people can own, or just flipping equity out the other side? Hiring and buying local where you can? Stabilizing a block instead of extracting from it? Letting the families who held these neighborhoods together through the worst of it actually participate in the value being created, instead of watching it get created around them? That's the bar I hold a deal to before I put it in front of you.

I keep an updated page on what's actually moving in the West End specifically, project by project: the Winner Realty South & West Louisville Investor Corridor. And I'll have the fuller citywide version of what's actually funded — not just announced — for you soon.

The right to buy a house here without your race deciding it for you was settled by the Supreme Court in 1917. It took the rest of the century, block by block, to actually become true — not because the people here waited for it, but because they kept building anyway, on ground a federal map had already written off. What's moving into West Louisville now isn't outside money discovering an undervalued neighborhood. It's capital finally returning to a community that's been investing in itself the whole time. That's the same lesson underneath everything else in this issue: the wall keeps the water out, but it can't undo who was allowed to own the ground behind it in the first place — and it doesn't get to decide who benefits from it now.

I've been a Realtor here since 2013, and I pull the flood map on every property before I write an offer. Not because most Louisville houses have a river problem — most don't. Because the map tells you which kind of water problem you'd be buying. The checklist, shortest version:

Pull the FIRM. LOJIC Online Maps has the layer — turn on "Jefferson FEMA 100 Year (1% Annual) Review Zones," then also turn on "Jefferson Floodplain Ordinance Review Zones," because Louisville's local regulatory floodplain is bigger than FEMA's. Or type the address into MSD's Floodplain Determination tool at apps.lojic.org/msdflooddetermination and get a letter. Zone A or AE means a lender will require flood insurance. Shaded X labeled "reduced flood risk due to levee" means you're behind the wall.

Ask whether the wall is FEMA-accredited. That "reduced risk due to levee" label only exists because FEMA currently credits the system. If accreditation ever lapsed — the Corps' 2024 inspection was clean, so it hasn't — those parcels flip to AE and flood insurance becomes mandatory overnight. Ask MSD, not me.

Get the elevation certificate. A surveyor's document that says how high the first floor sits relative to the base flood elevation. Under Risk Rating 2.0, that's the number that moves your premium. This is also such a killer hack. Find properties in flood zone, get flood zone certificate (if you can and it qualifies), then this would pull it out of the flood zone potentially…..increasing the value significantly. Plus no insurance premiums! Pro move!

Pull the CLUE report. Seven years of insurance claims on the property, not the person. If the basement took water in 2018, this is where it shows up. The seller can order it in a day.

Buy the sewer-backup rider. This is the one. Flood insurance does not cover sewer backup. Standard homeowners does not cover sewer backup. It's a separate endorsement, and it's cheap. Inside the wall, your risk is the pump and the pipe, not the river. Insure the risk you actually have.

Don't read Zone X as zero. FEMA says more than 20% of its flood claims come from outside the high-risk zones. Jefferson County: 2,341 NFIP claims and $48.5 million paid out over 20 years, against about 2,000 policies in force in the mapped hazard area. Louisville is a Class 3 community in FEMA's rating system — up to 35% off an NFIP premium. Use it.

Know which side of the wall you're on. Behind it: downtown, Butchertown, Portland, Shawnee, Chickasaw, Russell, Rubbertown, out through Valley Station to Pond Creek. Outside it: the river frontage up toward Harrods Creek and Prospect, and the creek bottoms along Beargrass, Pond, and Mill Creek that the wall was never built to cover. Behind the wall is a pump-and-sewer question. Outside it is a river question. Two different underwritings, two different insurance conversations.

A wall built for one flood tells you where the next one can't go. It doesn't tell you where the water goes instead.

Perhaps, share this with a friend if they didn’t know about Louisville’s history.

📊 Yesterday's poll — “If you had to own one rental for the next ten years — one — where is it?”: Nashville led at 33%, Indy or Cincy and wherever the cash flow is tied at 21% each, Louisville pulled 17%, and 8% said they'd rather just own the bourbon. Fitting — the room already benchmarks itself against Nashville, same as yesterday's numbers did. Wow, this tells me people are asleep at the wheel.

🏆 The Top Five is ready as always — five real deals on the Louisville MLS this morning, five that are ripe for a lowball, and my number on every one. If there aren't five great ones, I don't send five. Reply "FIVE" if you want today's.

Earnestly,
Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.

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PS:

Today. 11 AM Eastern. Steal My AI Stack — the live webinar where I open my laptop and show you every AI tool I run Winner Realty and OffMarket.deals on, in the order I actually use them. No theory, no slides about the future. If you're reading this at 6 AM, you have five hours: SIGN UP! 40+ people have deemed it worth their time this morning…maybe you should too!

PSS: Next time you're at Baxter and Broadway, look down. In 1937 you'd have been standing on whiskey barrels.