Jump to content

327

Jeddah Tower 3,281'
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by 327

  1. 327 replied to a post in a topic in Ohio Politics
    And don't forget dirt bike parks! That's still there, I'm just giving credit where credit is due.
  2. 327 replied to a post in a topic in Ohio Politics
    Jackson's new plan involves getting more retail into the neighborhoods, so points for him on that.
  3. It's almost time to start discussing what else could be done with that parcel. This thing was a monumentally bad idea from the outset.
  4. In my experience things open up pretty regularly throughout the warm part of the year. If there's plenty where you're looking right now, there should be plenty in July too.
  5. Not bad at all, except that it's a high school and therefore closed to the general public. Unless you attend there it's just a very long object to walk past before you can reach anything of potential interest. Considering nearby developments, this land has the potential for much more impact as mixed use. In fact, it's hard to imagine a stretch of land in Cleveland with more mixed use potential than this.
  6. The courthouse square arrangement is less common in major cities, where presumably that kind of real estate is worth more. Maybe we could do something like Franklin County's? It's a tower/complex on the south edge of downtown.
  7. It just needs to not be brutalist. Public Square offers some transit benefits but I agree it's not an ideal location. Certainly not for the county jail.
  8. I meant literally boxes, as in metal crates not intended for human occupancy. The nucleus tower design is a bit boxy for my preference but that's a matter of aesthetics. There we're talking about an actual building, a significant one, rather than recycled trailer parts. I hope we can agree that recognizing this distinction is more than just a failure to think outside the box.
  9. Keep notes on what direction they run, post observers along the route, eventually you figure out where they're garaged. Not so hard. I agree the main problem is, once again, bad choices made by local leadership. The police refuse to work and the city should be fighting back. It's been this way for years now.
  10. 327 replied to KJP's post in a topic in Mass Transit
    Not a significant distinction here, apart from requiring less staff. It still excludes people in the prime of their lives. The whole point of it is to accommodate a diminished capacity for independent living, in terms of income and physical mobility. Still not an ideal driver of incoming or outgoing transit usage, still not an ideal contributor to car-free living. Nursing homes are big employers, so locating them near transit is very helpful to the workers, but since most of those jobs are low wage, it's not quite the same as extending the rapid to Lincoln Electric, or putting future Lincoln Electrics near existing transit lines. And none of this makes mixed-use anything less than an absolutely essential TOD element.
  11. 327 replied to KJP's post in a topic in Mass Transit
    Transit adjacent doesn't mean transit oriented. The new nursing home by W 117 is merely adjacent, since nursing home residents have limited economic impact and many are unable to leave the premises at all. And of course it's a single-use building. It doesn't interact with the rest of the city any more than any other nursing home does. I recently heard someone say you should avoid nursing homes located on bus lines because that suggests a lower quality of staff. He was wrong; the staff at the other ones just walks further from their bus stops. So the transit-adjacency of this one is at least beneficial for its staff, but that still falls short of TOD. I live right by it and have no reason to visit that building. If I did, security would turn me away. Most of my neighbors don't even know what it is. For pedestrians and transit-users alike, it merely takes up space. Parcels for possible TOD around that station include the self-storage facility to the south and that first few blocks of Madison across from the factory. There's even a vacant lot on the corner of Newman, ready to roll. All of these parcels could benefit from extending the "Birdtown" branding, as could the station itself. RTA calls it "Highland Square" even though that's in Akron.
  12. Do you mean geographic center? I think Ryan is great but would not call him a centrist. He was trying to pull the party leftward against Pelosi's coastal centrist orthodoxy, economically speaking. His point in running for leader was to refocus the party on economic populism, which goes hand in hand with granting more influence to the rust belt.
  13. We do need these and they can't all be on the main drag. I go by the "what if you need TP and don't have a car" principle for distribution of corner stores.
  14. Germanesque, with particular focus on the city of Hamburg.
  15. No one has said the Clinic should have zero greenspace or zero campus-type features. But the Clinic doesn't seem to want urbanity anywhere nearby, it would rather have an absolute campus with an ever-increasing buffer zone around it. That doesn't sound like middle ground to me.
  16. I'll add one more caveat: it needs to be open to the public. Seems like a given, but IIRC that new CSU housing building on the former JCC site has ground floor retail that is forbidden to all but residents.
  17. Start with Steve Loomis. He has the rank-and-file dragging their feet on calls to increase pressure for more officers (and be a pain in the a$$ to the city under a consent decree). Loomis is a walking embodiment of why people distrust unions. And police.
  18. Your standards must be pretty low if you're trying to defend this atrocity. So I'm not going to defend this particular building given its location and the nature of its green space. However, I think you guys are dismissing his general point out of hand and that the Clinic gets a little too much flak for its love of green space. There is a growing body of evidence that the ability to look at green space outside of your hospital window really does aid in patient recovery. Quite a few hospitals around the country are attempting to add green space in urban settings for this very reason. So while I agree 100% that a lot of what the clinic does is horribly designed from an urbanism perspective... I think we should keep in mind that they're probably attempting to balance good urban design against the desire to have a pretty green campus for their patients to look at out the windows. That said, I don't like this building. Most unfortunate for people who get sick in Paris or Tokyo. Funny thing is, the illusion falls apart unless your room is on the first couple floors. But hey, the more blocks we bulldoze, the more people we can heal!
  19. Have you ever called the police after hearing gunfire in an East side neighborhood and the police don't come for hours? That's where the comment comes from. I've called them and gotten laughter in response, which suggests the problem isn't staffing.
  20. Dental school looks just like a parking deck. Maybe it's intended as an homage, like the Longaberger basket building? The clinic has only itself to blame for the state of the neighborhood around it. How much serenity does all that wreckage provide? How much additional security is needed because the neighborhood is so undesirable? CCF is hacking off its nose to spite its face, how very medical of them.
  21. At least it's mixed use, looks great to me.
  22. Great move for Akron, glad it's seeing so much success! I've read of similar successes in Pittsburgh and Philly. In my eyes this is the best bang-for-buck a city can get from any direct investment.
  23. CPD's been known to advise developments in the city not to hide the parking, especially if they will be open after dark. Making the city less walkable leads to more criminals and more crime. This is the sort of corrupt stupidity we need to wipe out. We need to design for the people we have, not hypothetical ones. We're also short on police. If the parking is visible from the street, the passing cruiser can keep a better eye on it. I'd like to have more police, we all would, but Cleveland seems to have a relatively solid amount right now. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/law-enforcement-police-department-employee-totals-for-cities.html As for hypothetical population, I would place a higher priority on that since we are supposedly in growth mode. I don't think anyone believes the population we have is sufficient, certainly not in the vicinity of midtown. The question then is what sort of development would entice more population to settle there. Hard to argue with a flagship-quality grocery store. Next question is how to build it, and I would rather account for modern trends than ignore them.
  24. CPD's been known to advise developments in the city not to hide the parking, especially if they will be open after dark. Making the city less walkable leads to more criminals and more crime. This is the sort of corrupt stupidity we need to wipe out.
  25. Plenty of cities have built densely without imposing height limits. I don't think Cleveland needs them. The only thing we need a limit on is anti-growth activism. There's no charm in telling others to go away. This city needs more people and this development will help bring them in.