327

Adding a few chains to the mix would go a long way toward erasing negative perceptions. We don't have to eat there, but some visitors might prefer to. If we want more visitors we need a full range of options.

It is what it is. Perhaps some outreach would be helpful. Right or wrong, a lot of blacks do feel that way.

I'm torn. I'd have a hard time taking Bowers or Fairley or Quinn at 6. They all have issues. Dareus, yeah, but he won't be there. So do we take an iffy DL over the best WR prospect in recent years? Tough call. I agree that the need on DL is greater, but only by a little, because our passing game isn't even competitive.

No, you can't make a law that applies only to one dude. A simple recall provision would suffice, but it should be limited to actual corruption or criminality. Having an affair? No. Making policy decisions, however unpopular? No. Hate to say it but an electorate that chooses a one-party state government, including the judiciary, deserves whatever it gets. Hopefully the same mistakes won't happen again, and it takes a whole series of mistakes to get to this point.

To answer the thread question, I'd remove the innerbelt and connect it with 490, as once proposed by KJP. But I also agree with ss14 that evidence does not support the notion that highways have destroyed the west side.

I'm hoping it goes that way, but at present, CSU's plans still include building their own separate ballpark on campus. That seems wasteful in the abstract and wasteful of a really cool opportunity.

Urban "Growth" Boundaries isn't the best way to describe it... sounds like growth itself is being limited, and that's surely not the idea... Urban Sprawl Boundaries sounds more accurate and more palatable.

Another concentration of Indians in the high rises on E 12th downtown, overwhelmingly CSU students. Similarly, Little Italy is now home to a lot of Asians who go to Case. Job centers = gateways, no different than when European immigrants were drawn to factory neighborhoods. I would be surprised if those in-city Slavic concentrations still exist in any meaningful way. There are still some scattered holdouts but most are long gone to the suburbs. When the diocese suggested that Hungarians start going to church on Buckeye again, the response was far from positive. The Puerto Rican area of the west side is pretty widespread. OC, OB, Tremont, D-S... and moreso Brooklyn Center, Clark-Fulton and the Stockyards. I don't know that there's a PR majority in any of these neighborhoods but certainly an observable presence and influence. Interestingly a lot of them are Pentacostal.

Some parts of downtown are better served by restaurants than others. Seems like keeping the trucks around E9th and CSU would cure a deficiency, while still protecting the restaurant-heavy areas closer to Public Square. How is sending the truck to Tremont for lunch any better? Tremont is loaded with restaurants. The eastern half of downtown, not so much. It does seem like an odd fit though, and I think the concerns about unfair competition are legit. Pretty sure food trucks originally developed to serve factory crews, where tons of people worked in areas that had few dining options. What they oughtta do is hit up the office parks in places like Beachwood and Independence. People working in those places may have driveable options for lunch, but none walkable.

I agree there are issues to resolve, and it sounds like a decent solution is in the works, but this story refects very poorly on city council.

How many committes are we talking about here? Which ones? Why? It's a 19 member council, why would they need to run something like this through multiple committees?

I'm not so sure about this. If a muni pays its employees way too much, it could start a bidding war between that and other nearby munis. And if a muni pays way too little, that could set off a race to the bottom. Labor markets are intertwined, and players respond to the moves of other players. That sounds like extraterritorial impact to me.

The best way to expand Rapid use is to expand the Rapid. If the casino really takes off, rail expansions could move closer to getting funded and approved. As it stands the Rapids only serve a small segment of the county in any practical meaningful way.

Maybe they're not so shitty.

Same here. I wish we could treat the littering aspect as the separate issue that it is, though it's undeniable that butts and tips constitute a lot of litter. Food wrappers are also frequently littered, but we're not trying to ban food, are we? Oh wait, yes we are. I stand by my orginal assessment: this is dumb. I don't think we're going to ban or exclude our way to a better tomorrow.

We really don't want to open the "I think your behavior is nasty" bottle. That gets ugly quick. Smokers in this county pay for a lot of public goods and they help sustain the arts community.

The only reason we should be paying for that much work is the re-installation of trolley lines. Barring that, it's much ado about nothing because, as you note, commuters rarely use the right lane as it is. I don't disagree with this idea in the abstract, I just can't fathom how it's getting such priority right now. And tearing up Lakewood's just-paved portion of Clifton is wasteful no matter how you slice it.

There used to be several of them plus a Big Italy. Detroit-Shoreway was a Little Italy, or at least it had one. The ward boundaries are gerrymandered to high heaven. In many cases they prevent neighborhood cohesion. Shaker Square, for example, is split among at least two wards. This is because Mt. Pleasant was intentionally cut in two in a failed attempt to eliminate Zack Reed. Tremont is attached to downtown and parts east, even though you have to travel through other wards just to get from Tremont to downtown. Old Brooklyn and South Broadway are now combined. It's all goofy. Foraker I completely agree that we need to nurture our neighborhood downtowns. I think they're key to getting the city turned around. Like Strap's tag says, Cleveland is a bunch of grapes (love that quote), and these commercial districts are the seeds from which we can regrow it.

Indeed. Trans fats are a growth industry around here.

All lanes are being narrowed and one lane is swtching to bus-only. That's a reduction. I see the neighborhood growing and prospering as well, in fact I'm moving there later this month. And while I like the median idea, I just don't think it's all that necessary in a time of fiscal strain. It would be nice to have, but there's a cost-benefit issue and myriad other capital needs for RTA. RTA should not be in the treelawn business at a time like this (if ever). That said, I fully support upgrading the bus stops and repaving the Cleveland portion of Clifton.

In my experience people use Kamm's Corner or West Park, but don't use any of the other sub-names around there. Jefferson is West Park. I've heard people from "Jefferson" state this with great conviction, and I think that's because it's on the border of not-West-Park. Another example of this is NORTH Collinwood. South Collinwood is Collinwood, but North is decidedly North. And on the neighborhood-downtowns thing, Kamm's Corner is definitely the downtown of West Park. Maybe that's why those terms get used interchangeably. I would define a neighborhood downtown exactly as skorasaurus and TMH did. There's some fairly big ones that don't have a "neighborhood" to call home, like Lorain Station. As far as what constitutes a neighborhood, I don't think there's any way to answer that. Or too many. Cleveland used to be intricately balkanized on ethnic lines. "St Clair-Superior" was several distinct enclaves, as were many of the current designations. I think that context makes the whole idea of a Slavic Village or an Asiatown seem weird. Next we'll be calling Clark Avenue the downtown of Hispanic Heights. Here's some Lithuanians, let's call this The Baltic District. Or Baltic-vania, who cares if the word makes no sense. Those kinds of over-generalizations have an out of touch vibe and I don't like them. Not sure what the answer is but that ain't it.

Many neghborhoods have a focal point, like a main drag or a main intersection. Some more than others.

That would be a cool map item. Don't know if it's ever been done before. The closest I've seen is the city kiosks, which at least note commercial districts. But they seem to miss a lot of them.

There's already a list of "don't do this, don't do that" on every signpost that says Welcome to Cleveland. The last thing we need is another such addendum. This is dumb.

I do think C-Dawg has a point, in that homegrown YP's often can't afford what few deluxe accomdations our area offers. Incomes too low, educational costs too high. But I believe the only long term solution to that is improving the economy, which means attracting investment from outside the region, which means we have to make our cites presentable.