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The nightlife came first in Tremont. People started moving there for a reason. People move everywhere for a reason. Slavic Village could have gone Tremont's way if not for the stark difference in their surroundings. The fate of Slavic Village is tied to that of Central and Union-Miles. People like to be able to try things out before they commit. That's why you begin a neighborhood revival by first establishing it as a destination, then you start to pick up young renters, then you get some of them to settle down, then you get others to follow their lead.

Can't believe I'm saying this, but maybe that intersection needs a roundabout. With some sort of monument in the center. A couple of those storefronts need renovation but most of them are actually open and occupied. That's pretty good, for a neighborhood that needs so much help. It tells me that one decent draw would go a long way in this area, something like that velodrome, or even an upscale club. What did Gordon Square have just before it took off? It had an endless supply of tax prep offices, just like Broadway/55th does right now. That might suck, but it's a far cry from having all your retail boarded up, and it's a lot easier to build on. Now if we could only get hipsters to cherish old hubcaps...

Indeed, your edits make my last post look rather silly. To penalize destruction is not to penalize innovation. But if innovation creates destruction, it cannot be a pure good nor can it be treated as one. Pills can cure a great many diseases that were once considered unstoppable-- and yet, we recognize that at some point, a drug's side effects can be more damaging than the disease it's trying to cure. As the cost of educating yourself for a career continues to skyrocket, the destruction side of that scale grows. Is the value side (productivity from tech) growing enough to keep up? If so, what's the problem? There wouldn't be any. The problem is that the value side isn't growing nearly so fast. One could say that the destruction side (i.e. ed costs) is growing at a pace that would be unsustainable in any situation, a pace that tech's benefits cannot possibly match. It would seem that the most logical approach would be to reduce the costs that make this an issue in the first place. Addressing that problem does not require an up-or-down vote on technology.

Each of the examples you list [edit: in the original paragraph] are other companies suffering harm, not individuals. If Atari fails, those programmers can go to Nintendo or to another competitor. This is the sort of innovation-based change we can all get behind. The result is still people making video games and all that has changed is window dressing. At no point is anyone's lifelong investment in themselves rendered useless. If you equate that to the dissolution of a failed company... then that equivalency is really all we're talking about here.

I think people are only "anti-tech" to the extent that tech creates situations like Peak Education. As with anything, if your action imposes costs on others, you are expected to cover those costs. This is not a novel concept in law. So if you get rich by wiping out someone's field of endeavor, by replacing them with software, if is likely that your gains are coming directly from their pockets. They may have invested in that career at great cost. You are profiting directly from the ruination of their long-term investment... surely you can see where this is going, in a legal sense.

How bout let's not do this.

By the time we're through, people are going to wish we'd never messed with these roads in the first place. Every attempt to "calm" traffic will only cause it to spray wildly in all directions, just like trying to "calm" a water hose by squeezing it.

One must afford before one can avail, and the list of what will be accepted in trade for all this tech shrinks every day. And then there's that specter of obsolescence again... what if you're forced to mortgage your life on tech and you end up with betamax in a world that goes VHS? Not a big deal when we're choosing VCRs, but if all your life is to revolve around tech, that sort of issue gets more serious.

Oh you won't see it... not until it's right behind you! Perhaps you should have majored in nefarious plan perception. I hear Bowling Green has a stellar program.

Plan? There's no plan. Corporations aren't trying to plan the economy and neither are we. Peak education is not the result of any sort of planning, it's a random collection of individual failures on a scale never before seen. The fact that it transfers wealth from the many to the few is just a happy accident. Happy because at least there wasn't any economic planning going on. Thank goodness for that.

I'm not being a downer so much as I'm just being critical here. I'm actually glad that you feel that Highland Square and Akron in general are great places to be. Maybe I'm just growing impatient with the pace of change, but it seems to me that things could be better still than what they are. I fully acknowledge that Akron could be much, much worse off than what it is. But I also think it could be better as well. You're right about all of that-- I really was just trying to cheer you up though, and I find myself wanting to promote the place more and more. I moved to Akron with some trepidation, thinking it too small or not urban enough, etc. But I've come to find that it's an easy place to live, and that's worth a ton. And other than large skyscrapers, it doesn't lack much in terms of urbanity. Downtown was a pleasant surprise and so was the sheer volume of upscale residential. The old commercial streets leave much to be desired, but that's a statewide problem, and West Market is among the state's best. Not perfect but it's viable from downtown to the city line and beyond. That's immensely powerful-- it says here we have a rust belt city that took all the blows but never fell.

Nice summary. I used to be a planner for some of the larger outfits, years ago. An owner operator once told me that every time I sent him up the east coast, he was paying us 2 cents a mile. Fuel was their cost, but the company fronted it and took it out of their settlements.

Maybe living in the Highland Square area makes me biased, but I think Akron is great. It has a lot going for it. Redevelopment may be slow but it seems steady, and the new stuff seems well designed and well thought out. I don't think it's necessarily too small. That can be an advantage over larger cities in that you can get around so easily. Cleveland has neighborhoods like Highland Square but none that are so close to major retail. And while there are blight issues, they're less serious than what I've seen in other nearby cities, smaller and larger. The 3C's, Dayton, Youngstown, Toledo... they all have worse blight than Akron. So cheer up! It ain't half bad here.

^^ There's been plenty of supply increase on the college side. It's not like there isn't enough college to go around. There are more than ever before and they're just dying for students. Most of the cost increase is attributable to competitive pressures. Instead of controlling tuition, colleges spend big to attract a larger share of students, even though most of them are non-profit and have no such mandate. This is a choice but it's not the only choice. Different choices could be made by the people currently in charge, or by different people. ^ Yes, but continuing ed doesn't pull you out of productive activity for months or years at a time, nor does it cost your annual salary, nor does it reduce your skill level to novice like switching fields does. These are the costs of human obsolescence.

When an economy is a collection of individuals, it does no good to say the economy's over here and the individuals are over there, for purposes of assigning costs. A cost to any individual is a cost to the economy as a whole and to all the other individuals therein. There's a lot of distance between an economy that resembles ice and one that resembles a waterfall. What I'm advocating is a balanced approach where we recognize the need for change as well as the cost of it. The purpose of an economy is to efficiently utilize people and resources-- but primarily people, because inanimate resources do not engage in economic policy. So an economic plan that has people spend their lives running in circles paying for multiple educations is a fundamental failure. Each iteration of that cycle removes them from trade and denies the rest of the world their contributions, while they're fumbling around seeking yet another way to be of any use to anyone. When you're driving, you're trying to get somewhere. But that doesn't mean you drive as fast as your car possibly can go. Getting there expediently is a value, but there are other mitigating values that cannot be ignored.

Expecting people to constantly re-educate themselves is the opposite of efficiency. When someone is forced to switch careers, much of their accumulated education and experience becomes a waste. That cost must be counted against whatever is gained in exchange for it. Shunting that cost to individuals doesn't work, because the sum total of those individuals is your economy. Every day that we force them to spend on retraining is lost productivity, and every dollar is one less (plus interest) for them to invest or trade with. It's a destructive spiral.

I agree the drug testing is out of hand, but it really is difficult to sell the long-distance trucking lifestyle these days. Deregulation slashed the pay for drivers of all kinds 30 years ago. If we want to solve this shortage, we need to pay them like professionals again.

Maybe (though I think some educated guesses are at least possible), but more importantly, you never know what entire new industries technology will create. The IT field was tiny 30 years ago and all but nonexistent 50 years ago. If technology's rate of job replacement equalled or exceeded its rate of job destruction, we'd all be talking about how great the economy is. We have spent at least two generations seeking ways to use tech to eliminate people from the economy. Mission accomplished. Time for a new mission. That mission doesn't have to be anti-tech, but it absolutely cannot be anti-people.

I think Akron is doing a good job, and this East End project is exciting. Seems like there's a lot of potential in that area. BRT should be out of the question.

why make it easy because people are to lazy to learn the differences? You play. To win. The game. 6th street is good too, but I prefer 5th street because it clearly conveys "adjacent to east 4th" and "distinct from east 6th." This whole story is a big pile of positive, in my view.

I think rebranding is a solid response to those issues.

I love the name change. Helps distinguish this complex from the other one. And I really love the direct support of downtown retail, which is a major step forward.

I've worked with a lot of these TX people and they rather openly do not like Ohio. Neither their trucks nor their boots are ever supposed to encounter actual mud. They enjoy pointing out how much more poor we are here, and how poor we look. Pittsburgh is the biggest city that's actually within the play. Much of the investment for this has been and will be in that area. These folks are not urbanists and tend to prefer suburban campuses anyway. Chesapeake has proposed one in Louisville.

But will we get that? Getting the GFS to front W117th would... have value. I wouldn't call it a victory, but at least it would show some understanding of the ideals involved here.

Riddle me this... Under B, does a State ID count? Is C required if A or B is filled in? How does B relate to the third item under C? The statement following "NOTE," does it apply to A thru C, or just C? What is a form 10-T and where are they obtained? What if you have multiple forms of ID? Can you complete multiple steps, or check multiple boxes under C?