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To me the lake view obscures half the buildings and isolates the ones you can see. I prefer the flats view, where you're looking up at a city on a hill. Photos don't always do justice to the topographical effect.

I would say it's both. There's a diagonal swath of wealth that runs roughly SW from Willoughby Hills into Medina County. Execs in the Summit/Medina area might be more amenable to Independence, but that doesn't represent nearly the same commute differential for downtown. Eastern Cuyahoga presents a rare combo of office density and high-end exurban housing right next to each other, so if that's the lifestyle you want, and you can afford it, downtown might be a particularly hard sell.

I kinda wanted to vote for Sittenfeld just to protest the party's disregard for the primary process. But I didn't. And I wasn't even aware of his anti-streetcar views, so now I'm really glad I didn't.

Philly and KC have a lot of nice prewar towers as well.

Finance seems a more likely sector than manufacturing, since they're office-only operations. Moves from the Beachwood-Mayfield area seem less likely due to Chagrin Valley proximity. Executives in those wealthy burbs prefer having their own "downtown" because the real one is nearly an hour commute vs 5-10 minutes.

I've heard talk of moving it to Rockside Rd. Not official talk, just legal community grapevine. I don't think anyone currently believes that will happen. Sounds like a political non-starter. But it also sounds like many lawyers would prefer to move it, for their own personal convenience. County seats are typically in the center of the county on purpose, but that was for rural areas with the population evenly spread. The same purpose would be thwarted by that arrangement in a coastal city, with people concentrated toward one edge of the county.

Retail needs to be a priority because it's an essential part of urban life, one in which Cleveland makes a very poor showing. We are competing with cities that have found a way to make it work. We will continue to lose jobs and residents from our urban core until we can too. The market is very limited for this retail-lite version of city living.

CSU is very much in the core, literally adjacent to Playhouse Square. Euclid Avenue should not transform from downtown theater district to suburban campus in the space of one block. The central city location is CSU's main selling point, so it would behoove CSU to have a campus that looks like it's downtown.

Would anyone like to buy a 7-story picnic basket? Constructed on the edge of town, the now-former Longaberger HQ has yet to cover its own public infrastructure costs. Bidding starts at $600k! http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2016/02/26/longaberger-is-moving-out.html

I would love to see Cleveland do what Cincinnati's doing-- on many levels. To the extent that we have anything like OTR, much of the leadership here can't wait to get it torn down.

Somehow, theoretical threads like this one don't get as personal. Midtown (the Euclid Corridor) really is ground zero for this issue though.

I grew up in Central Ohio, known for being especially overcast. This link was the quickest explanation I could find, and although it focuses on Lake Ontario, the graphic is helpful. Same thing happens here. http://rhpweatherblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-is-lake-shadow.html

Not sure "clear days" is the best measurement. We usually have some clouds here, just not as much overcast. Wineries are concentrated along the Erie coast to take advantage of this.

I would never suggest LA as an example of doing it right. But it has the weather and the economy to overcome bad planning. There will be demand in LA until the water runs out, no matter how difficult or costly it is to live there. Demand in cities like Cleveland is largely tied to traditional urbanity. If we're going to draw new residents, that's how we're doing it.

Cleveland is notably less overcast than the rest of the state, so there's that. Nice little bonus to weigh against the extra snow. When comparing metros, Ohio doesn't give itself a chance with its balkanized urban counties. We are paying for those in so many ways, it's just sickening. Everyone points to Columbus as a success story and the reason for that is clear. It's hard to imagine a reform more necessary or more obvious.

I think we're getting a little into Sim City territory and overemphasizing the macro at the expense of the micro. A residential neighborhood exists to serve its residents, moreso than planners or the city as a whole. Additionally, at least what I see in the Hough area resembles Bedford, not Walton Hills. But even if it did take a larger yards model, and it worked: why not? Presumably it would not exist if people with choices didn't want to live there. Do you want more of them living in your city, or driving to and from the suburbs? Because building suburb in the city makes the entire city less viable. You want to analyze urban neighborhoods in isolation but that's not how they operate. Demand for suburbs in the city is sufficiently low that these neighborhoods remain decrepit and dysfunctional. This can be observed. Adding plazas and McMansions clearly has not helped. My point is that we need to recognize how much damage they're causing and put an end to it.

Cost-benefit favors it strongly and the city's overall structural design is premised on it. Sections of the city don't exist in isolation. Density in one area strengthens surrounding areas, while lack of density makes areas around it less viable. The sum total of the city's density affects downtown's viability as a downtown, affects the viability of the city-wide transit system. There's a cascade effect in either direction. The further out you get, the less this matters, which is why I don't begrudge the suburbs their sprawl. I see it as a reasonable compromise.

Why is it "egregious" if it's in the inner city? Isn't it better than abandonment and urban prairie? No, because it's a round peg in a square hole with a very limited market. Those who prefer sprawl will seek actual sprawl. Those who prefer urban living will seek actual urban living. Plus, the entire city is worse off with low density neighborhoods this close to downtown. For example, it's harder to put walkable retail along Euclid or Chester when the walkable population is limited in this way. On a larger transit-oriented scale, the same goes for downtown.

I wish they would either 1) give Cleveland a team, or 2) make Crew games more available for viewing here, if we're supposed to be part of the Crew market.

I don't understand how this rebuild addresses the connectivity problem. The square still occupies the same space as before, so needing to walk through it still means the same thing it did before. You're going to be walking for a bit. Maybe there will be programming along the way, maybe there won't, but that's a separate issue. The one added retail amenity happens to be right in front of Tower City. Might have had more impact in the NW quadrant, in terms of filling in empty space that separates active districts. The only way this project would address connectivity would be to move the buses away, impairing connectivity on a city-wide level.

^^ There's already a very large lawn a couple blocks away. I'm not saying the square's original setup was better, I'm saying it wasn't bad enough to justify spending another fortune on another downtown lawn. Cleveland has many problems and lack of lawn is not among them. Even if it were, I'm pretty sure we've solved it at this point, so we should probably start investing in something else.

Those cities don't even have a rail hub. We do, and we would squander that advantage by having our bus system converge elsewhere. That STJ thing over by CSU was a big wasteful mistake. I'd rather not double down on it. Our rail system needs that money.

In transportation, nothing trumps speed. That's the whole point of it. Getting around isn't something we want to do, it's something we have to do, so the main goal will always be to minimize the time it consumes. Logistics matter. So I would agree that there's no sense in building a rail system that's slower than buses. Land use needs to make sense no matter how the transit system is set up. TOD is really just shorthand for fundamentally solid urban planning.

With Tower City being the rail hub, moving the bus connections away doesn't make much sense to me. Expecting some quiet pastoral contemplation zone in the middle of downtown doesn't make much sense to me either. I mean, why not hang out on the Mall if you want that, it's peaceful to a fault over there. That's why I'm not sure redesigning the square was a great use of funds in the first place. Landscape design was never really that big of a problem. But we're throwing massive piles of money at it, and claiming there's no money for anything else. Just based supporters' stated rationales, I think some folks had an unrealistic and unreasonable expectation that the bus system was going to disappear as part of this project. No.

That's not a terrible idea actually. Good road and rail networks are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of cities have both. Pittsburgh and Cincinnati both have full-blown freeways connecting their downtown and uptown areas. Meanwhile, Cleveland is seeing the most egregious sprawl-type development in areas like Hough that are nowhere near any freeway. Lack of transit support is an independent problem. Development around any road or rail line will be influenced primarily by planning and zoning. If those policies demand sprawl, that's what we'll get.