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Connectivity is something Cleveland needs to work on, big time. There is too much emphasis on individual nodes and not enough on how they interact. Some of this will abate as the areas between nodes are redeveloped-- Duck Island for example. That's the reason I often harp on the "health tech" plans for Euclid Avenue. Euclid should be patterned after High Street, rather than Kinnear Road.

In other states though, it seems like the commercial aspects of smaller towns are in better shape, even in towns that are struggling as a whole. And similarly, there's more storefront commercial activity in larger cities outside Ohio. Our state and local policies are either encouraging this abandonment or failing to thwart it. I would say Ohio's public transit policies and aversion to rail are among the core problems in that regard.

Just to be clear, I'm on board with that too. And my reference to High Street was meant to include South High as well as the neighborhoods along High in both directions. But I wouldn't say that Broad Street (including the neighborhoods along it) is similarly competitive in the destination sense. COSI and the conservatory are standout features though, and it's great to see mixed use development in Grandview and neighborhoods along Broad getting fixed up. Housing stock, while important and an area in which inner-city Columbus excels, isn't all that pertinent to visitors. Commercial/entertainment districts are. In Columbus those are concentrated along one street, which clearly offers advantages. In Cleveland those districts are more numerous and scattered throughout the city. Most of them are wrecked but they're all over the place, which also offers advantages.

To me that's a pretty fair assessment, and also the reason Cbus is not a mini-Cleveland. While it has the best showpiece urban street in Ohio, that's it-- the rest of the city is barely a city at all. It is designed around the principles of car-dependence through single-use development. I still travel to Cbus a few times a year socially and for OSU football. I'm originally from that area and I'll never be totally disconnected from it, regardless of what I think of its planning philosophies.

Again I think you're right, but to me that resistance is not just a fact but a problem to be overcome. Our region will always amount to less than the sum of its parts until we can get to the other side of this merger issue. And it's not like this hasn't been accomplished by similar metro areas.

Affirmative defenses are secondary issues to whether the homicide statute was violated. They are also very fact-intensive issues and more appropriately dealt with by a trial court-- on the record.

No, they're supposed to decide if there's enough evidence to take it to trial. Likelihood of conviction involves issues that can't be fully explored in a grand jury proceeding. That's what regular court is for.

Read the statute yourself. Those deeper issues you raise are matters of common law (case law), not statute. My take is that if we're going to get into those issues, it should be done in open court. If there's no evidence the accused actually killed someone... fine OK don't indict. http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2903

That's not generally how homicide laws work. The statue is quite simple, kill a person = guilty. If we're drilling down into issues of case law, it's hard to imagine why that wouldn't be dealt with in open court-- with the prosecutor actively seeking conviction, according to his duty. This isn't an issue of whether the officer was justified, this is an issue of whether that question is worth talking about in court. Cutting off inquiry at the secretive grand jury level, suggesting there's not even evidence of a homicide here, does not seem appropriate. It is hard to imagine any random Cleveland citizen shooting someone on camera and not getting indicted.

Odd distinction there though. Is that the same process they would follow if you or I had been the shooter? Or would they skip straight to an up or down vote on the crime itself, without stopping first to ask if we were "justified?"

You can't force anyone to, but plenty of people can and do overcome undesirable speech patterns. Not if they don't want to though, not if they decide that uptalk and vocal fry are values to be protected, or badges of gender pride. The latter is especially ridiculous. I once read an article on Slate defending that idea, after which I stopped reading Slate.

There are grant programs and people who help with grant applications, but I'm not talking about a legitimate thinktank. I'm talking about an LLC with a website slapping its name on reports you or I might write. Kinda like Castro having the same soldiers walk back and forth behind him, suggesting to the camera a much larger army.

The benefit from mergers, which you don't get from sharing services, is having one regime and one regulatory structure cover a large geographical area. Cannot overstate how big that is for business.

I agree that mergers are politically not feasible right now. It's a shame though, because these borders result in high tax burdens and a bad business climate.

I suppose it's only fair then that both sides have a strong PR and lobbying push! Looks like the Kochs are all squared away. One thing we could do, a page from the Koch playbook, would be to create orgs like "The Center for Wealth and Future Studies" and produce completely unbiased favorable reports.

Nobody said every structure should be mixed-use. Perusing google maps, I see roughly a dozen new multi-unit structures within Battery Park, and then there are the new ones upcoming. Do any of these include any mixed-use at all? I'm only suggesting a small number of units for neighborhood service type retail or office uses. And a grocery-- of a different market segment than the ones on Detroit-- wouldn't hurt. I don't believe areas encompassing this many blocks, with this kind of residential density, this close to downtown, should be built as entirely single-use. There has always been some degree of concentration along major corridors and in sub-downtowns throughout the city, but that always went with some degree of dispersal in the residential areas themselves. The scale of redevelopment in Battery Park is a wonderful thing to see, but given that scale, I just think a tad more mixed-use is warranted. A shade more. Something along those lines.

I'm glad retail hasn't been abandoned as a concept, but it's troubling when none is visible in renderings of a new "urban" neighborhood. It suggests an expectation of substantial car dependence now and forever. Are there plans to include a walkable grocery at some point?

But lots of people who "genuinely believe" rail is a boondoggle aren't basing their belief on personal experience, and were exposed to that idea by anti-rail advocacy. It's not about Koch money, it's about the subtle spread of Koch ideas via propaganda branded as scientific or economic research. That's where the astroturf effect comes into play. When it's successful, people just magically believe what you want them to, and they think they arrived there without influence.

Watch what they do, and do it. We can't match their spending on ads but a lot of what they're doing is astroturf, which can be duplicated cheaply. Also, get involved with your local Democratic Party. The other side is well-oiled machine at this point, and they make no effort at even appearing to be centrist. Meanwhile, our side goes out of its way to nominate moderates before the rank and file even gets to comment. As a result we're facing serious voter apathy, and we're the party who depends on turnout!

There are a lot of high rises at Mayfield/271 and quite a few clustered throughout Parma. Those may be spiking the density numbers. Plus, some people prefer high rise living and will seek it out, but in Cleveland proper they're almost all CMHA. Parma as a whole is relatively dense, inexpensive and in decent shape. Not a bad combo.

Will any of these new structures have any street level retail at all?

This is exciting. Downtown has incredible momentum right now. The last building boom like this would be the 1920s.

Awesome image! Shouldn't there be a new building at the end of E 9th St as well?

It's gonna be OK. This same roster, more or less, led the division thru half of the 2014 season. Then this past year we had a ton of concussions, led the league in that stat. Our secondary in particular was decimated. Plus, our best offensive player sat out the year. And there were indications that some players gave up on Pettine, and his staff and his schemes, a while ago. I like to believe that what we just saw was not representative of where we're going. Hue Jackson is the best head coaching hire we've had in a long time.

If we want transit to take that next step in America, bathrooms at stations are going to be a necessity. Aging populations, the ones who vote a lot, do not consider bathrooms to be an optional extravagance. And they can't stand it when elevators become de facto toilets. First time they experience that you've probably lost them for good.