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If my neighborhood were the one in question, a lot of things would be different and it's hard to speculate how I'd feel. Chances are I'd be very angry, not about this project, but about the conditions I live in. Your point about maintenance is well taken but hardly project-specific. I use the same argument against most "streetscaping" proposals. You have to keep pouring money into them forever or they look like crap. To the extent this road would involve treelawns and such, same argument. I'm thinking of medium to large scale manufacturing, and the amount of cartage that typically involves. One key purpose of this road, I've always assumed, is to keep all that new truck traffic off the streets of the surrounding neighborhoods. And when it comes to freight, time absolutely positively is money. It is not possible to emphasize that concept enough.

Even the densest communities still need roads; I could list off several versions of UC in other cities that are far more dense while at the same time much better-served by freeways. In fact, I think freeway access has helped those neighborhoods achieve and maintain density because it better integrates them into their metros, as well as the rest of the US. This serves two purposes: 1) people who choose to live there don't sacrifice access to diverse economic opportunities, and 2) businesses and institutions in that area gain more access to larger markets. As to the notion that UC is easily accessible already, that's in the eye of millions of different beholders, and again, there are benchmarks. Steelyard has nothing to do with this. There's a difference between building roads and screwing up retail development. Steelyard wasn't spawned by the Jennings Freeway, it was spawned by a decision to subsidize and pursue exactly that style of new development. Far better choices could have been made with those resources, but that's about as separate as issues get.

Sorry. Still interested in your preference. I see it as a building that was created for retail (banking) and shouldn't be reduced to museum status if we can get retail back in there. When it was being considered as a museum (of itself) I had viewed that as advertising the space for retail.

I'm happy with any retail use that doesn't involve tearing it up. And I would be surprised if anyone planned on tearing it up.

A grocery at 9th and Euclid would be super duper awesome! Especially when combined with the butcher on 4th.

The ideal outcome would be for a correction to be issued by the media outlets, such as yahoo, that ran with a false story. That's not unprecedented.

I don't think cars are the enemy, and I think casting them as the enemy does us little good. I don't care what motives lie behind any particular infrastructure project, I only care what effects it will have. I believe the area in question needs drastic change at a structural level, I believe industry is the highest and best use for much of its empty land, and I believe this project could go a long way toward luring it. That said, I don't believe it makes sense not to have some sort of plan. Hell, the plan they made for the Euclid Corridor would be perfect for the OC, it was just an awful plan for where they put it.

The building that (most of?) these files are moving from is being sold for $650,000 outright, per the artcle. Couldn't they at least get a year's rent on their new digs from selling their old digs? And since when does East 40th Street, half of which goes through the projects, command any sort of premium?

I agree with Hts121, this sort of thing should be directly addressed. We can't let national media paint a negative picture based on false assumptions.

Not the first time I've seen that kind of thing in a DCA report. Someone needs to take a second look before they release their final product, make sure it makes sense.

$1,000,000 a year for a warehouse to store documents is a poop-ton of money, any way you slice it.

We're both partisan and both on the same side. I'm well aware that the last statewide figure to push for this was Ken Blackwell. Like all policies, I'm trying to judge it on its merits, and I think it has some. It has some issues too, as you and others have pointed out. I'd prefer the same monies went into rail expansion first. No doubt about it. But I would not turn away monies for this road, because I believe it will be a net positive. Yes UC is growing but it has a long way to go before it matches its parallels in other cities, and its surrounding neighborhoods are a total wreck. The current course has not been particularly successful overall.

"Through the East Side destroying homes" means two very different things though. The neighborhoods (currently) in question were built around factories that are long gone. The street grid fans out from a downtown that was filled with retail. University Circle was nothing more than Doan's Corner when that planning took place, to the extent that any planning even did take place. Planning wasn't really a thing then, which is how we got neighborhoods built around heavy industry, which is why those neighborhoods ultimately failed, which is why urban planning was developed in the first place.

In what sense? It's not a freeway, it only connects to a freeway at one end, and it doesn't extend past city limits. The importance of University Circle's eds & meds to the local economy is a relatively recent development. This is a relatively recent plan geard toward addressing that state of affairs. It has nothing to do with putting criss-crossing freeways through the Heights.

As much as I hate to see stations close, one is probably enough to service that section of E79th. Kind of ridiculous not to have a concrete plan for redevelopment presented along with the plan for this new road. Seems like that might have curtailed opposition somewhat.

Park and Ride is a very good thing. Our list of dense and walkable neighborhoods is too small for that to be a limitation. We need transit to serve as many people as possible. It has to come to them, it has to fit into their existing lives in a practical way. As transit coverage increases, our opportunities for creating more walkable neighborhoods will increase with it.

I've never heard of random punchings. I can imagine situations that might lead to it, but nobody opens with that.

Much of the City of Cleveland is car-dependent, so this can hardly be solved by hating on suburbanites. I don't believe a single thing can be solved that way. I think we'll have a lot more success if we focus on which policies are bad, rather than which people. As for the practice you speak of, that rests upon policy decisions made within the City of Cleveland. Enormous sums of public money have been spent on developments which are the polar opposite of dense and walkable. There are other options for that money and there always have been.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/26/justice/ohio-cleveland-missing-women/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1 The community here has been badly shaken recently. In the past several years, Cleveland's metropolitan area has been the center of a series of grisly discoveries of missing, murdered, kidnapped, raped and mutilated women. ... Officially, 54 women currently are missing within Cleveland's city limits, according to the city's police department. That compares with four missing women in Cincinnati, an Ohio city of similar size. Many of Cleveland's community activists who work to fight crime in their neighborhoods say the number of missing is much higher than the police website says. Cleveland police say they are doing the best they can and acknowledge their list of missing people is incomplete and difficult to keep accurate. The list does not include missing women from neighboring East Cleveland, which has a separate police department. ... The crisis has gotten so serious that civilians are now doing things that are normally left to the authorities. On Wednesday, groups of local residents went into wooded areas and several abandoned homes in East Cleveland, looking for bodies or signs of missing women who might have been kidnapped or assaulted.

I think we need something significantly larger on that Euclid lot. Like if this thing had 20 stories of residential above it. If Euclid Avenue across from the theaters doesn't merit that, I don't know what does.

Why does pro-density have to mean anti-car? The concepts aren't mutually exclusive, and if we're going to move toward density, we kinda have to work with what we have in order to get there. It's one thing to be against surface parking, but as noted above, vertical parking decks with street level retail don't seem nearly so bad. Maybe something like that should be seen as a necessary component of this project.

That idea underlies my whole pull-not-push theory of urban development. People will ultimately go where they want to go. Our best moves are to provide attractions that might stimulate congregation, like UC, and to maximize the accessibility of these attractions. I see the OC largely as a means to that end. It's wonderful that UC is highly accessible via mass transit. There you have two great things that go great together. But that doesn't come close to covering the current spectrum of accessibility. I say current because if we were to achieve Trek-style teleportation, I would want a teleporter array in UC. Whatever the state of the art might be, we need to meet it. Right now cars are the primary mode of transport for most Americans. I'm not worried that an influx of cars will somehow ruin UC, because other cities have their own versions of UC, with much better freeway access, and carmageddon simply hasn't happened.

Obviously not, but there's a clear common thread between his case and the other two. There comes a point when people might wonder about this community's attitude toward protecting women, or maybe its tolerance of depravity. Not a pretty picture being painted. I don't think this is toooo off topic in the Suburban Crime thread, but I can't help thinking about the lack of police resources in Cleveland and East Cleveland vs the abundance available to conduct speed traps and fake checkpoints in the outer ring. I really believe that regionalism could help us end this string of horrific tales.

Lovely picture of the Health Line in the background of that webpage. No indication at all which option might already be favored.

This is likely to be nothing more than "infill" for the skyline. We need that though. I would love to see something that acknowledges and addresses the Group Plan's classical styling. Huge prefab surfaces devoid of texture are a mistake anywhere, but especially so for this site. The Med Mart building at least features interesting exterior walls, even though its design is excessively horizontal. Same with the Justice Center... imagine if those banks of windows were arranged vertically instead. It would look so much less like a filing cabinet. Meanwhile, those columns on Burnahm's designs do more than hold up roofs.