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I lived right by Melt and could never get in. Almost forgot it was there. I keep thinking they'll suffer for being so backed up all the time, but I keep being wrong about that. Their legend only grows. I can understand their wanting to expand slowly, to prevent their brand from being diluted by poor approximations. That brand is red hot right now.

I bet they probably could do it, even with "park" in quotes, even if the overarching goal is clearly the MM/CC complex. As long as they do actually put a bench and a tree on that site, it's probably fair game. I can't say that with certainty but pretty close. I don't think a sand volleyball court equals a "beach" either, but words are like butterflies. Blight is not a factor in Ohio eminient domain. Even if the site were blighted, that would not help the city's case. The issues are public purpose and FMV. All that said... I doubt it comes to eminent domain here. It would not be hard to pay them more than they could make operating the place. And if that building has Landmark status (and OCPM didn't?) we may be tossing Landmark status around a bit loosely.

^ But Norwood presumably allows a taking for "park" purposes, doesn't it?

"Any book?" Funny how I managed to go through an undergraduate economics minor with a 4.0 and a legal research assistantship in law & econ without ever finding any such book. To which books might you be referring? If by "egalitarian" you mean "redistributive," then yes, redistributive principles are absolutely inimical to free market principles. If you missed it, then look to the texts your texts are citing to for the basic theory. The original authors of these theories stated their assumptions clearly... after which everyone has chosen to ignore those assumptions and hold onto the pieces-parts of the theories that justify what they want to belive. Free market idoelogy was conceived in an agrarian society. The archetype for the "free market" is a farm product exchange, in which each market player is small enough that his individual decisions cannot by themselves move the "invisible hand." The moment one farmer's market share or buying power becomes larger than the others, he gains a market advantage allowing him to steer value toward himself unfettered. He is no longer a hostage to market forces, he takes control of them. The invisible hand becomes a glove with his hand in it. At this point it stops being a free market. On another thread, it was noted that big-time executives always find a way to get paid massive sums, no matter what anyone tries to do to stop it. This is another example. The se people have sufficient control over their own market to dictate what their services are "worth." But that has nothing to do with any "free market." That's corporate ownership being severed, by law and by trick, from basic management decisions. Under what free market principle does an exec get paid 10 million for bankrupting their company? That's my version of "a system deliberately inefficient to preserve the spending power of a privileged few." Redistribution? Now you're talking about the Bible... Leviticus 25 beat Marx to the punch by a couple thousand years.

Any book on free markets will tell you, early on, that free markets are purely theoretical and can only work--even in theory-- when everyone in the market has equal wealth. So maybe we can Rise Again if we stop viewing egalitarian principles as being inimical to free market principles. Continuing with the example, sure we can eliminate workers with robots... but if the result is an entire region of ruined cities and a crashed economy, perhaps our net societal gain from replacing all those workers was never propery accounted. So what if the company is more profitable, so what if productivity has increased. The products made by these robots perversely become less affordable, not more, because the robots have displaced their own market. And there are places on earth where industry great and small is still performed by employed humans. And we all buy their products, so apparently that method still works well enough.

I wasn't clear there Scrabble, personal income that's spent obviously goes back into the economy. Income saved does not. And beyond a certain income level spending drops off, unless we're talking about ice sculptures that pee. The additional income just increases someone's personal fortune, which warps the free market. It doesn't provide any churning of the economy and its investment may or may not create jobs. For purposes of growing the economy, not all personal income is equal. That's a big reason why not all marginal tax rates are equal.

For those not privvy: Numbers seen, methodology questioned, and I don't want to rehash that either. So I'm asking... just off the top of my head, four massive shopping centers have been added in the past decade, one of which is just south of downtown. What is so different about the market 1/2 mile upriver that we could justify building all of Steelyard? Parking, yes, but that has nothing to do with market saturation. I think it's more a matter of policy than natural forces. I guess I'm in a completely different room on that. Regardless, things get better if some current non-retail proposals end up happening. Fill in the Colonial Arcade with sports exhibits, fill in the Galleria with a greenhouse, fill in the old department stores with offices and a temporary casino... available square footage declines. That should be a good thing, especially if oversupply really is the controlling factor.

Most tower city retail has been gone for years too... it's those other functions I listed above that keep the mall itself open. And in the current economy, of course all these other cities are losing stores. But they're still an order of magnitude ahead of us in downtown retail, while they're behind us by a similar margin in downtown population. The correlation just isn't there, when you measure for it. I'm not suggesting these places are merchandise meccas... but I am suggesting that Cleveland should probably explore more than one theory on this issue at some point in the coming decade. There are too many counterexamples for the dominant theory to persist, and it hasn't done us a lot of good anyway. Why that theory gets such an ideological monopoly here I have no idea. But ideological monopolies are rarely for the best. I would love to find that out. It's not like the patchwork map we have here is all that unique. It's not unique at all, really. And the maxim that retail/industrial provides more tax revenue than residential is true nationwide. I'll never deny that suburban overload is a factor here... but it has ZERO impact on the population of the city proper and much of the inner ring. Those populations are not well served by any of this suburban retail largesse. They can get downtown more easily than they can to the exurbs, and many of them have direct transit access to do it with. But instead our urban population has to drive out to the exurbs anyway. And so they do. Self-fulfilling prophecy, and look who benefits from it... exurban municipalities and exurban retail developers. Keeping Cleveland retail-free gives them a lot more market than exurban retailers typically have. They each get a slice of the market that's supposed to be served by downtown Cleveland. And all they have to do to perpetuate this situation is convince us we have no choice.

How about St. Loius, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Providence? Not one of them got the memo. Not one of them. All those cities have fractured metro areas, wrecked economies, substantial ghetto and sprawl... and all have at least one mainstream downtown anchor store, sometimes several. None of these cities has even a fraction of Cleveland's downtown population, and none of them had to acquire these downtown anchor stores through niche-development. These "rules" we cling to are demonstrably and conclusively false, and moreover, they're self-perpetuating and self-defeating. It is imperative that we let go of them. Please consider that if our downtown retail situation appears uniquely impossible, it might be because our analytical approach is uniquely wrong.

I think this is a big source of our "mainstream retail here requires 20k downtown residents" canard. That claim is proven false by countless other struggling cities... and it's a flat-out ridiculous excuse when one's own policies are neglectful or non-competitive.

A mall with no anchor store is an automatic FAIL. This is not MBA-level knowledge, this is very very basic. It would be professional negligence to set up a retail center of this scale with no anchor store. Considering how long ago Dillards left, I think they've done remarkably well. It helps that they have RTA, plus downtown's movie theater, plus the only food court that stays open past 3pm. The new casino could come close to filling an anchor store role for Tower City. We shall see.

Sounds like we better get moving on this.

Gramarye, your scenario is a strong argument for reducing educational costs. That is the variable screwing up our incentive system. Your example also throws into stark relief what a privilege it is to get your higher education for free. If a steep income curve is the expected payback for student loans, then people in these positions without student loans are living like medieval nobility... to an extent previously unheard of in this country.

^^ Yes in many cases the problem is the parents, and no this doesn't come up nearly as often in Chagrin Falls. Agreed. But I do not gather from those facts that the solution is to turn the screws on dysfunctional low-income families, and I do not think the kids of these families should be held hostage to their parents' situation 24 hours a day. A kid shouldn't have to spend his days bouncing between a bad home and a bad classroom. A bad classroom has 30+ kids in it and 1 teacher. That also happens less often in Chagrin Falls. VV tedolph I think you've hit the true issue and stated it very clearly.

Oh how I stressed over that term "directors," changed it 2 or 3 times. Clearly you catch my drift. These are people who are unlikely to criticize another transit project, due to conflicts of interest. I'll believe they support the Healthline when they turn around and start advocating the same thing for their own constituency-- BRT down the middle of main street, BRT running parallel to existing rail, BRT instead of extending existing rail. Meanwhile, the Healthline is so unpopular locally that RTA publications spend more effort defending its costs than those of the WFL... and the WFL is defunct.

Still waiting to meet a person to whom this timeless adage actually applies. "I don't want to share another marginal 10% of my proceeds, so I'll just stop working. If I have an idea that will make me money, I'll choose not to go ahead with it, because my ROI would be reduced by taxes. Never mind that this would result in zero ROI. I'd rather have no return at all than pay a higher marginal tax rate on it. That'll show em."

Stop being poor! Stop it! Stop it! You're not getting a dime of help until you already have enough money to quit your second job and be a better parent in the evenings.

I have. And some are nationally respected transportation leaders who have led some tremendous public transit projects on the East Coast, Minnesota and Pacific Northwest. They thought the HealthLine was very well thought out and conceived. Ha! Transit directors think transit directors do a good job. Astonishing. Not exactly the sort of focus group I would convene for this purpose. I'm guessing this is how Joe C won his 2007 award too... it's not like anyone passed out surveys at the bus stop. I don't know about Minnesota, but the east coast and northwest are places that serve their populations with trains and not BRT. Their people aren't clamoring for BRT any more than Joe C's are. I realize there are other examples of BRT nationwide, but how many of these transit directors would actually want it in place of a trolley on their city's main street? Their actions tell me the answer is zero.

Spending is what makes the economy go, so it's curious to me why everyone wants to tax it more. Personal income is the act of taking money out of the economy. Tax the heck out of that. If I were going to get rid of one existing tax it would be the payroll tax, because once again why would we want to tax employment? Employment is a good thing. Fund social security instead with a more steeply graduated personal income tax. And no, that would not be an attack on small businesses... business income put back into the business would not be taxed as personal income.

Well, it's a modern art museum, so I guess modern architecture is appropriate. Please no Borg cube though. EDIT: Apparently it's to be a hexagon shape... can't wait to see Uptown renderings that include this.

A guess: they don't see the sales coming, so why wait. I was so thrilled with the exterior design of this building that it didn't really occur to me how bad the location was for their target market. Unlike the townhouses, these units were built and priced for suburban empty nesters. But the immediate area features a concentration of public housing and social service agencies. The loft building itself is a couple blocks down from a strip club and a bath house. This package of amenities is unlikely to lure back the very same people who fled the city in their youths... their interests long ago switched from partying to shopping. Sure they might like fancy dining, but they're on the wrong side of downtown for that, and they've spent their adult lives learning how not to walk anywhere.

The founding fathers were not upset about taxes... they were upset about the lack of government spending to match their taxes. Britain wasn't spending enough of the colonies' tax revenues on the colonies. The colonists were left to carry the cost of several campaigns against the Indians, protection they felt they were owed from Britain. After the revolution the former colonies had no problem with taxing themselves and each other. The difference was that they now had the spending to go with it. Their rallying cry wasn't "no taxation," it was "no taxation without representation" because they believed that if they had seats at the legislative table, parliament could no longer treat them as donor states. Today, the blue states are donor states and the red states generally aren't. Ironic.

Blarg indeed.

There needs to be some recognition at RTA of how poorly BRT has been received. Ridership doesn't tell the story, since ridership was already high on the 6. But the system really hasn't gone over well. I have yet to meet anyone who isn't disappointed in the end product. This goes for buses, stations, landscaping, all of it. Poorly done. Don't do it again.

I liked "KJP's Reasons" a lot more than I liked "KJP's Mythbusters." Excellent work. This gets to the heart of the matter. If 90% of the 400 million directly applies to high speed rail, while only 10% applies exclusively to the quick-start aspect, it sounds like WE ARE in fact building high speed rail with this money... it just won't achieve high speed at the current stage. This sounds a lot better than quick-start as a discrete project does. The big picture here is what counts, fiscally and promotionally.