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We don't have HR, but yes that would mean ominous tidings for anybody.

It is scary right now. My day job is at a law firm, and I need to quit posting on here so much and do some paperwork.

All of them. SS seems a bit pricey for my immediate situation. I'll be looking a lot more there in 6 months, assuming I'm still in Cleveland.

No, but everything I do is downtown. So good transit access helps me as much as anything.

Thanks for all the suggestions. My lease is up and my roomate wants his own place now. Me too, but I hadn't planned on getting one quite yet. I graduate in 4 months, take the bar exam in 6 months. After that I may need to be mobile.

No time to gather up pix, and I'm not sure if you mean good developments in Cbus or bad ones here. In Cbus: The Gay St project for sure... even if the brick is precast, precast brick is 1000x better than precast unnatrually colored smooth plastic surface. Also, everything that's been built along N. High, through the Short North and including the new S campus gateway builldings. I drove up that stretch recently and the appearance of the newer buildings really blew me away. I didn't get a great look at it, but the arena district looked pretty decent too. Even some of the newer stuff along Lane and through Upper Arlington looks nice, despite the fact that it has too much setback and parking. If our new Cedar Center turns out half as nice, I'll be happy. But no, I see corrugated aluminum and sheets of plastic in our future. Which brings me to Cleveland: Many recent debacles are chronicled in that rowhouse thread from the previous page. Beacon Place, which fronts Euclid Avenue with some kind of an access road. Plus, it looks stylistically worse than the similar low income stuff they built along Woodland. That also shouldn't be there. All those cheap new single family homes with big yards in Central, within view of Terminal Tower? Ridiculous, huge mistake. The newer houses near W40 S of Lorain Ave... ugly siding, ugly plastic sheeting that wasn't even attached well, boring design "spruced up" with random upturned corners. Nice inside but awful curb appeal. Montana Townhomes, cheap and fortresslike. The insanely out of place McMansions along Chester. The new CSU dorms. Good gravy that's a lotta vinyl for downtown. The Chicle Townhomes. I'd look for something more attractive to store mining equipment in, so I find it absurd to view this as a viable residential style. Most of the townhouse units proposed around town kinda suck, unfortunately. They're variably decent, but the aversion to natural looking materials is just killing me. I think the designs of Battery Park and the Avenue District townhouses are better because they have at least SOME brick, but why they didn't go all the way is a mystery to me, and the "brick" in BP looks kinda like cinderblocks. As others have noted, the porches on these aren't so hot either.

Some of the streets in the Buckeye-Shaker area or in Glenville could match that Dorchester pic in their heyday. I'm talking about the streets where the doubles are more likely to be triples, and the porches all have greco-roman columns. Totally agree with your main point though. As I read through that 2004 rowhouse thread, it struck me how much general disgust was being expressed about the quality of Cleveland's recent construction. I feel like this stuff is so abominable it shouldn't be going up, but it seems like the UO consensus is much more comfortable with the trend than it was 5 years ago. "Vinyl is cost-effective, futuristic design is a value in itself, you don't know what it's like to be a developer, etc." Bullcrap. The stuff going up in Columbus for the past ten years makes our new construction look like cardboard. And we're being told this is the way, we have no choice. Bullcrap. It is possible not 200 miles from here to build with brick, stone, and classical styling-- Cleveland has got to get on the ball.

Thanks for the link. It still floors me that Cleveland has so selctively destroyed its better building stock. Not even Detroit did that. They level entire blocks. Here, we only level the most impressive building on the block and leave all the rotten shacks standing. It surprises me there has never been a strong movement against this practice, even right now. This is simply not done anywhere else, and I think it has had a massive impact on our city's image. It's not like people are saying "they tore down a disproportionate share of their nice buildings" because they don't even realize that. Instead they're saying "this place looks like crap, it's not even like a big city... I can't put my finger on why but it's really obvious."

I prefer them too, compared with woodframe singles and doubles. Chicago also has a lot of detached housing, but they built theirs out of brick and stone. I've never seen woodframe rowhouses. Maybe that factor made the typical Lakewood stock cheaper to build. I've heard multiple comments from Chicago people that Cleveland looks cheaply built. Based on what's left here, I agree. If we still had more of those larger apt buildings lining our main streets, and mixed in with the duplexes on the sidestreets, Cleveland would look a lot better. That was our high-end building stock, and for some ungodly reason it was the first to be destroyed. I think it's critical going forward that we replace as many of those buildings as possible and quit putting up woodframe houses w/in city limits.

I wonder about that all the time. I've always assumed there used to be more and they were torn down, but maybe not. Cleveland does seem to have more of the 3+ story Spanish-style apartment buildings w/ balconies than you find in Cbus or Cincy. I think of Cleveland as more of a Great Lakes city than East Coast, more like Detroit, which also has few rowhouses but lots of these larger Spanish things. The ones in Cleveland, particularly on the east side, are more Tudor-style than Detroit's. To me the East Coast cities, which I've only seen in pictures, have a more London look, with lots of rowhouses. The Great Lakes cities have a more Paris or Mediterranean look, with the tiles and the balconies.

Can't wait to find out what that means!

Does anyone know of any good places with 5-6 month leases? I need a single, cheap, as close to downtown as possible.

It has not always failed, it's done the world over. Most modern countries protect their home industries more than we do ours. We are in a unique position in that it is very hard to find a country with higher labor prices. We are therefore the only country in which the owner of just about anything can benefit from outsourcing.

Another victory for intellectual property over decency. Any bank that refuses to divulge why it has trouble can keep it. If we go to a bank for help, they want to know everything and then some. The rules they apply to others should apply to them.

If the road's empty, nobody should have to sit at red lights. But any cars that already passed you before that light, with whom you caught up while they waited, will be forced to pass you again (and again and again) if you treat the lights as stop signs. This is unnecessary and dangerous for everyone involved. Then again I ignore safety rules too, so who am I to talk.

The entire county should become Cleveland immediately. Republican? It costs a lot more to run all those little governments, and it makes many people pay double local income taxes. Democrat? The current map exists to segregate wealth. It also makes large scale planning more difficult by giving too much power to NIMBYs.

I didn't know there was such anti-bike sentiment. I do get irritated at how bikers seem so cavalier about traffic laws. I know it isn't everybody but it's the majority. Nobody waits at lights, and people ride on sidewalks through tons of people. I would never do it but I've felt the urge to knock one down before. When there's thick 2-way traffic on a narrow street, one biker can force a line of cars to go 10 mph for several blocks. If nobody can pass you, get out of the way for a few seconds and let them go! Neither bikes nor cars own the road.

I had about half those teachers. We had 3 or 4 Kings, including Dennis with the polio arm. Best math teacher ever. Officer Cranston was a Howland cop, had nothing to do with the school. He was a major character in the 90s. Archenemy of all kids. He guarded the park at night and looked for curfew violators. Turned out he was a pretty cool guy but we were all afraid of him for years.

Graduating in 04 you wouldn't have met my younger brothers either. Was Officer Cranston still on duty when you went to school? I'm sure he's retired by now.

1994

A friend at work just told me the red line WB has been stopping for long periods with no explanation, over and over again. Her outlook was that a little notification would go a long way.

Sure, if someone misses a few bills they should freeze to death. Check on your uncle or the electric company will slaughter him, over a miniscule debt. How much are electric bills in a small house with a gas furnace? $50 a month? That's enough money to kill an old man for? Seriously? Public utilities are not "products" for a reason.

I think the concern is potential eventual lakefront access, which could only be realized in 30 years or so when the port moves. At which point, the port area would sit squarely between the CC and the lake. Tons of access, no blockage. If we really want lakefront opened up, we need to move the salt mines and the shipyard and the waterworks and the airport and the stadium and Bratenahl.

Can someone tell me: are bicycles required to stop and stay stopped at red lights? In my experience it's rare for this to happen. The result is that each car must pass the same bike many, many times because it keeps shooting back ahead of them despite going a fraction of their speed. So, the same cars are constantly going left-of-center. In many cases the bike and the cars would all have smooth sailing if allowed to separate, which would happen if the biker waited at lights like everyone else.

I made that up about the football teams, nobody cares about that. But I'm from Howland and I thought its reputation was accurate. There were plenty of cool people but way too much 90210. Not not as much as Poland or Boardman probably. I always assumed it was about the same at Lakeview. Who can tell? You only get to do one of them, one time. Man I wanna be in high school again.