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I'm thinking it should go to a different area entirely. Lorain, Fairport, E 55th, somewhere that it might stand out more as an attraction.

I don't understand why the boat can't move. It's a boat. There might be other sections of the lakefront less amenable to development and more amenable to hosting it.

This measure being opposed by neighborhood small businesses, the people Cleveland's government should be bending over backward to help. So yes I really do think City Council would be better off adjusting its focus. It's a bad look.

I like the cow-catcher on the front. Ramma jamma!

I'm a serious Browns fan but that's just wrong... especially when the expense isn't shared by the suburbs.

A TIF is a voluntary diversion of general funds. A city can bind itself to such an agreement, but no one can force a city do so. I do not understand why it is so important to some here to absolve local officials of accountability in their spending decisions. All of these technicalities are just different ways a city can exercise discretion over its revenues. Ultimately the city is still making choices and the technicalities do not change that. Regardless, there's other public money involved here beyond the TIF funds. You can read more about it at a link within the one Strap posted. Until we have the entire project budget laid out before us, we aren't going to know all the specifics. And then the budget will change, because the project is not yet fully funded. We're appealing to the state for financial help on this. That suggests an emergency. I think we need state help for a lot of things, maybe including this, but not principally including this.

That article states the funds are redirected from the Public Square TIF area, not casino proceeds. If I understand it correctly, the funds are from expected real estate tax revenues from the casino for capital improvements to the property. All buildings around public square are in this district to encourage upkeep of the structures. If I understand it correctly. You're right. But what happens to those revenues otherwise? Any restrictions or diversions of money related to a TIF are self-imposed. It's an agreement, not a law. At some point the city gets to decide whether or not to establish that policy in the first place. Drill down one level and everything's in special buckets, everyone's hands are tied and nobody has any discretion. But drill down some more, and you find that local revenues are spent however local officials see fit. There's really no good alternative to that.

I happen to think the public money going into PS is money well spent, but I agree with you that it's a perfectly valid criticism. I may start a new thread all about spending priorities, because the issue keeps coming up in various project-specific discussions. Our county in particuler has been awash in discretionary money over the past 10 years or so. But... there's no such thing as discretionary! Kidding. I posted an article yesterday with details about how this project has been funded so far. It still isn't fully funded and I hope that works out.

That's not relevant here. First of all the city determines its own budget in the first place. Aside from certain specific grants, nobody is telling it what to do with its general funds. After the budget is set, yes it's set. But we're talking about major long term planning decisions, not rearranging budgetary items on the fly. As to this project, much of the funding comes from casino revenues and non-profit money. None of that has anything to do with the budget distinctions you keep bringing up. If the people who decided to spend these funds on this project had decided to do something else instead, they could have.

Agreed regarding the overall context of Public Square. Its immediate surroundings are private 9-5 offices, so most of its foot traffic is always going to be pass through or bus related. Apart from events, Public Square will still be the same thing it was before in functional terms. The renovation will make it nicer for events, which might total 4 in a good month. The recently renovated Mall is a large open event space, and how much has been happening there? Not nothing but not a whole lot. The org charged with making it a happening place decided to immediately tear up another park instead. Improved event space isn't a bad thing, I just don't think it was a burning need worth $50 million. Nothing was stopping us from closing the street more often and holding more events there before. I'd rather see that $50 million spent on actual events!

Some details about project funding can be found at the link below, which also makes clear that I'm not the first to question these policy choices. If the city wanted to use casino proceeds to improve public safety or invest in neighborhoods, it most certainly could have. Same goes for the foundations, they can donate however they so choose. No sense getting hung up on how everyone's hands are tied-- they aren't. http://www.cleveland.com/cityhall/index.ssf/2014/09/cleveland_city_council_approve_7.html

It's both, and they dovetail. Historic preservation is rarely the cheapest or most profitable path for individual developers. But there are other interests in play here. Maintaining this area's walkability and unique sense of place affects the value of every property nearby and the quality of life for every resident-- not just the developers' own tenants. I mean, Lakewood recently made Walgreens include a false second story! And it looks 9x better than a typical Walgreens.

That seems like quite a stretch for an ad hominem. Leaving aside whether this is the best possible capital investment, could you explain more about mandatory capital spending? Are cities really forced to build parks if, for example, they wanted to hire police instead? Cities can't decide how to structure their budgets, or how to spend their own general funds? That's the impression I get from your post, but it's not how I understand the budgeting process to work. Certain specific grants may come with strings attached, but money is generally fungible-- are you citing any particular code to the contrary? I didn't find Public Square to be especially ugly, unusable, or underutilized before. Ideal? No, but not awful. Not in dire need of $50 million.

What about the $30 million that was raised with private funds? I agree that investing in neighborhoods is important and has been overlooked in this town, but Public Square has been an awful public space at the center of our city for decades. I think this project will be transformative in so many positive ways for decades to come. Plus it's going to a space that can be used by everyone in the city and has the best public transit access of any place in the region-- as opposed to shelling out millions to build a facility that will be managed by a private organization who gets to reap the profits of said facility and charge premium prices to the city residents who wish to access it. Most of those positives were true before though. People used to gripe about the square being too crowded, rather than underutilized, which was the impetus behind wanting to move the bus stops elsewhere. I just feel like this is a lot of money to spend for yet another rebuilt park. Thankfully, we are beginning to run short of downtown parks that haven't been torn apart and rebuilt in the last decade. I'm sorry, "slightly different parks." You're joking right? In what way at all is this even remotely like the previous version of Public Square? Parks are very much the backbone of neighborhoods. World class parks go a long way towards improving outsiders' image of a city as well which is incredibly beneficial to Cleveland. Did the comments section from Cleveland.com leak into Urbanohio? I'm not saying parks are unimportant, I just don't think they deserve the level of funding priority that we've recently seen. I personally view homes and businesses as the backbones of neighborhoods. To me those are significantly more important in locals' daily lives, as well as more influential on outsiders' opinions. And I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Cleveland.com.

There are certainly better uses for $50 million in this town, and police staffing is prominent among them. I tend to think that after so much was spent on the adjacent convention center and malls, that maybe a series of neighborhood investments would have been the more appropriate follow-up. It's staggering how much money has been spent tearing up parks to replace them with slightly different parks.

I don't think a form-based code would oppose high rise apartments in the middle of downtown. However, our current pro-sprawl code will most likely require variances for excess height and lack of setback.

Maybe the plan all along was to dare Kasich to let this giant mess go on TV next summer.

Connecting additional people to the rail system with a Red Line extension would help the entire city, especially downtown. Extending rail to the edge of the county (or beyond) will also increase city residents' access to modern job centers. The issue isn't how much economic impact we see around a certain radius of a track or a station. The issue is how well the rail network functions as a whole. Terminating the Red Line in the middle of East Cleveland and leaving the whole lakeshore corridor unserved is a lot of wasted potential. Park and ride may not be the ideal use of transit, but it's a popular one, and it helps to multiply the rail system's effectiveness. I think a downtown loop would be fun and cool, but it seems like less of a need and less of a positive impact. It doesn't take that long to traverse downtown on foot, and the majority of the attractions are along Euclid, which already has several layers of transit service. Just seems like less ROI there than for a Red Line extension.

This is actually very contemporary. Contemporary is not defined by a look. There are tons of different styles going on right now across the world. I would say that contemporary has more to do with building materials and use even than aesthetic at times. If this is contemporary, then I guess I like contemporary. I like the brick, the copious windows, the balconies, the stylistic flourishes, the overall resemblance to prewar apartment stock. I'm happy there's nothing on it that looks like corrugated aluminum, vinyl siding, or construction paper.

I like it because it isn't very contemporary, because it has so many classic elements.

There was also the notion, however spurious, of making our cities less susceptible to nuclear weapons. Turns out you can't really do that.

I'm in the middle on this. I'm glad redevelopment is happening at the center of Parma, but I'm disappointed the format of that development isn't a little more modern. This is Parma's downtown. Couldn't they make it just a little more pedestrian-oriented?

There are those people, and then there are people who oppose these policies without any prompting or conspiracy angle. What gets me is that there are so many non-urban places for them to live, so why do they have to oppose efforts to make actual cities urban? You don't want to live there anyway! So just don't! Sprawl is everywhere, it's been expanding for decades, so go enjoy it peacefully. What's the point of opposing urban policies for urban areas?

It sounds like the key distinction is whether or not neighborhoods include commerce. Single-use residential areas are not walkable or "desirably urban" simply because there is nowhere for anyone to walk to, and no hope of performing common errands without driving-- regardless of density and regardless of road width. Functional urban neighborhoods need to include walkable street-level commerce. This may be the single most crucial issue in urban planning. Other factors can vary without notable effect, but take away storefronts and the difference is like night vs day.

You're probably right. So fire him now, let the OC finish out this season as interim coach?