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I recommend Lakewood to all comers. You get more for your rent dollar there than you do in Cleveland Heights or the downtown area, in which I'm including Ohio City and Tremont. All of these are great places to live, and comparable, but I find Lakewood to offer a little bit more. Strong police force, but not overbearing. Easy commute to downtown via driving or transit. Lots of options for cable/internet service. Easy to get around and right off the freeway. As bustling and urban as any place in Ohio.

I would consider that a fantastic result at this point. It's been clear for a while that the county would be taking a bath on this, but I really think the public needs to get more proactive in redevelopment. How many years would these buildings have sat idle if the county did nothing? I'm not trying to justify the extent of the county's loss, or how it all went down with the HQ fiasco. I would have preferred that the county simply said "we're not going to have an empty hulk at our core anymore and we'll do whatever it takes to fix that." That should be justification enough to at least pay for the asbestos abatement. To the extent that there are obstacles to redeveloping Cleveland, we need to remove them by any means necessary.

Good point KJP, they could have done worse, and I don't even think the "lifestyle center" model is as bad as it's made out to be. If the rest of Westlake looked like that we'd all be overjoyed. Say what you will about where they're built, but at least they're a step away from sprawl.

I agree about Stanley vs. Columbia, but maybe a preserved Stanley would work well as a luxury hotel with the "welcome center" wrapped around it. But that's about the only thing I could see working there, and I'd much rather keep the Columbia.

Not many prominent corners in Cleveland without a CVS/Walgreens, and not many standards they were held to in siting or construction.

Just saying, there's a reason crosstown commutes are less desirable.

Google Maps lists Harvard and 271 as 27 min from Middleburg Heights, and Crocker Park as 26 min. 480 between 77 and Warrensville is often a hellhole in both directions during both rush hours. Middleburg to Westlake would be a breeze by comparison.

Applying the "low cost of living prevents development" axiom outside of Cleveland, one would think that development's not even possible in the developing world. Cleveland may have low price points for the US but I would imagine we're well above the global median. And we're well below it in terms of recent urban development. I find the part about the greedy landowners somewhat more persuasive. It only takes a few of those, sometimes just one, to really mess up a local market.

If you walk by the completed dorms in person there is clearly way too much siding and it looks cheap. It does not meet the expectations you'd have for a college campus, much less one that's located in a major city's downtown. It's not the end of the world, I'm still excited about all the new housing, but it's kind of a shame the way it turned out.

Hypothetcally, if the exit were placed along Ontario instead, how close would that come to solving the problem?

We're talking about the part of Prospect between 4th and Ontario, which is already not friendly to pedestrians. If you walk that way from 4th, you're going to have to deal with Ontario. Will it be a little less friendly, with the garage exit traffic? Perhaps. Probably. But IMO not a whole lot more than it is now.

I'm with Hts121 on this, there's nothing inherently pedestrian un-friendly in this design. Heavy traffic may be unfriendly, but that's an intersection I already avoid when on foot. First of all there's nothng there. Second the traffic. Ontario is one of the few N-S streets downtown that connects to the freeway. For the exact same reason, E9th is also pedestrian unfriendly and E14th is no picnic either. The casino is going to add more traffic to Ontario no matter where or how its parking deck is built, and it will need a parking deck. The skywalk also seems necessary, given that Ontario isn't all that pedestrian friendly to begin with. The only complaint I have about all this is that I wish they could somehow squeeze it around existing historic buildings.

Loans were made in housing because government incentives steered them there. In America, not Cuba. The fact that the US has had an unreasonable fetish for homeownership is no revelation. If we (via government incentives) had demonstrated the same level of interest in those items I listed off, a different situation might have resulted. In America, not Cuba.

Bottom line is that the economy for years has been far worse than anyone has been willing to admit. Construction of superfluous housing was just masking it, at the same time that other sectors were further sapped to pay for all that construction. Developers and contractors made out like bandits. That money had to come from somewhere. It should have been invested in other ways, be it factory upgrades, infrastructure, education, or just paying down the public debt. But instead we got millions of unneeded McMansions and retail plazas.

I'll check with my computer guy when next he's here. We have a lot of employees who ride RTA so I'd like to be able to fully access the site.

We're getting there and we're getting there fast. Props to Mr. Berkman, and to his predecessor who got the ball rolling on this.

I did hit OK. Just tried it again, same result. Could be an issue with my work computer. But it worked fine prior to the disclaimer being there. And I would never have thought the system map on RTA's website would be considered printed material. People on this site draw lines on maps, with labels, all the time. So I don't understand why RTA's online system map can only be updated once per year. It's not common for an organization's website to state that google's information is more current than its own. That disclaimer raises more questions than it answers.

Stark himself was once planning something big in that area south of Playhouse Square. I think he was calling it Gray's Green. No idea where that stands now. Also, there's a major concentration of surface parking in the NE part of downtown too. Much of it is owned by CSU and earmarked for their campus expansion, but not all of it.

I'm not trying to paint these developers as the devil, Hts121. It pains me to criticize people who have given so much to my alma mater. But I am questioning how we got from where we were to where we are, and suggesting that it could have been handled better. I'm not ignorant of the the need for broad based infrastructure improvements considering the plan originally proposed. But that isn't being built right now, and there is at least a chance it never gets built. Other sections of downtown Cleveland can attest to that possibility, as others have alluded to above. We have a habit around here of clearing acres and acres of our history and then building only a fraction of what was used to justify the extent of the teardowns. Rationales vary but results have remained remarkably consistent. It doesn't make sense to hold no one accountable for the current situation. As a communty we should at least be able to learn from it. Again, projects great and small have in fact been built during said lending crisis, and I'm not aware of any other world famous historic districts converted to empty space (with a boardwalk, yes) indefinitely for that reason and that reason alone.

It was razed and the result is vacant lots. That's what actually happened. Anythng else at this point is... what do you always call it... fantasy land. Dreams, hopes, aspirations. We have two other threads going where everyone's up in arms about tearing down a couple buildings that few locals are even familiar with, with a concrete and immedate plan to replace them. Here we have a famous landmark district that just went poof and will continue as poof indefnitely. I guess I find the outrage levels a bit imbalanced. It's an opinion, man, and not entrely uninformed. But then again maybe I'm just crazy/stupid/uneducated/etc.

There had been a campaign to empty everything out, so that result was a foregone conclusion. And yes I'd prefer to have had the historic structures there as long as possible, even empty, because that still beats a vacant lot. And if, God forbid, the lending environment were to never sufficiently recover, we could then proceed with reopening the Flats. But now that's off the table. I work in a building that was constructed, start to finish, during the same time period that the FEB project was paralyzed. So there's a clear difference between having the money to finish what you start and not having it. If Fairmount had had their ducks in a row, we wouldn't be going through years of vacant lots down there. Grass or no grass, vacant is vacant, that's a civic embarassment for everyone in this region. Can anyone supply another example of a nationally known historic district that was razed for vacant lots and blamed entirely on the lending crisis? The lending crisis did not shut down civilization, it did not shut down construction, and IMO it does not excuse this mess. Understanding the development process does not begin and end with "there's a lending crisis."

I just wish the historic teardowns had proceeded at the same pace as the "staged" buildout. No getting around it, that there's a screwup.

Sadly, there was no Q&A. I love Q&A.

By "ready" I mean "have the money." Not all construction was halted, just that for which "they" didn't yet have the money.

Immediate term? Yes, we extend service to where jobs are. Long term? Hopeflly we can defeat sprawl and begin pulling things back in. But that's not going to happen overnight and we can't make a generation of workers wait for it.