Economy, finance, and budgets
Even some large American cities aren’t known nationally for any particular thing. Midsize Lexington, Kentucky, is famous for three: bluegrass, bourbon, and basketball. Bluegrass is its glamorous horse industry, where the global elite come to buy or raise thoroughbreds. Basketball is the powerhouse University of Kentucky Wildcats, the most successful team in college basketball history. And bourbon is America’s super-trendy signature spirit, most of it distilled in Kentucky, near Lexington.
Less well known is that the city is also an innovator in urban planning. Lexington implemented a highly successful city-county merger in the 1970s. More notably, Lexington drew America’s first urban-growth boundary in 1958 to protect the horse farms that begin immediately outside the developed area. The planning decisions that Lexington makes in the coming years may profoundly shape the city’s future in particular, what happens to its signature horse industry.