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Regardless of height, I agree that there's not nearly enough residential in the plan. How perplexing that it takes study upon study to "prove" what's already crystal clear to anyone who lives here. There aren't enough apartments in Cleveland, there aren't enough downtown, and there aren't enough on the lake. Need. More. Any lakefront plan that ignores something so basic is a bad plan.

How are those your only 3 choices? High density, lots of apartments and walkable retail. Outside those 3 areas, Cleveland's neighborhoods today aren't all that different from what you'd find in your typical midwestern county seat. Maybe a few more duplexes. But the housing is overwhelmingly detached and the retail is overwhelmingly located in plazas, to the extent that there's retail at all. And that's the pre-war neighborhoods... what's left of them. Cleveland's post-war areas weren't even really designed to resemble big-city living.

I believe downtown and Lakewood/CH draw largely from the same market. Urban living is urban living, and if that's what you want, those are your 3 choices in Greater Cleveland. The only distinction for downtown is that its prices are so much higher, so it gets the higher end of that market while Lakewood and CH serve everybody else.

I don't understand the logic in examining Cleveland and its neighborhoods as if they exist in a vacuum. Potential residents and investors will most certainly perform the sort of comparative analysis that Keith M. suggests. Refusing to acknowledge the "best practices" of the competition is, IMO, a huge and tragic mistake for Cleveland or any city.

http://www.cleveland.com/rockhall/index.ssf/2012/03/2012_rock_and_roll_hall_of_fam.html Quoting Happy Dog owner: "Clubs play a vital role in supporting a music scene, but also in bringing new life to a neighborhood trying to turn a corner," says Watterson. "The problem is, we're doing it with one hand tied behind our backs." Watterson is referring to an 8 percent admission tax levied on the small music clubs by the city of Cleveland. "We're competing for bands against cities, like Chicago, which don't have a tax," says Watterson. "The Cleveland Cavaliers only pay 5 percent. We also pay a sin tax on alcohol that goes toward the maintenance of Cleveland Browns Stadium." A proposal introduced in Cleveland City Council at the request of Mayor Frank Jackson's administration would apply the tax to only 25 percent of ticket money collected by clubs holding up to 250 concert-goers and 50 percent of the money collected by clubs holding 250 to 500 people."

You can shed pounds but you can't shed hips or shoulders. Them's bones.

At Ontario. The state office building is 615 W Superior, but it's east of the river, south side of the street. Quick off continuance off topic, but this is such a crime. If any UO's hear of ways to stay active in calling the city off these small clubs I'm all ears. That's not off topic at all and the solution is political. Speak out against the people who are doing it. Get them out of office so they can't do any more damage. Be sarcastic about it, as in "Great idea Frank, spray the city with youth repellent. Act like the bad guy in Footloose. What this town needs is a social clampdown from some bygone age. Yeah. That'll draw the software companies." We'd be a lot further along right now if Cleveland's top leaders weren't so devastatingly horrible. It's not like we don't have new people with modern sensibilities ready to go, but they keep getting spanked in elections. I've gone door to door for young candidates on many summer nights. I've given speeches supporting them at precinct committee meetings. The regulars at these meetings all look like they'd vote against dancing if it came to a referendum. But there aren't that many of them. Time to take over.

We need places like DU whose market is essentially lucky people. You're well off, you're thin, that's wonderful... and Cleveland has something for you. Come on down. It isn't surprising that our first new downtown retail in years is of the high-margin variety. There are, however, a lot more locals who fit into other market segments, segments that depend more on volume than margin. Hopefully there will one day be a place for those shoppers as well.

Uptown is a generic term that almost always refers to a city's secondary CBD. Secondary CBD's are almost always uphill from the primary CBD, which is almost always near a waterway. So the term really should include all of University Circle (which itself is a whopper of a term, spoken or typed) rather than just one development. I mean, if a development on W6th called itself "Downtown," it's not like we'd stop calling downtown downtown.

Did you read the article? Yes...? My interpretation of it leads me to believe demo is the only real option left. I'm thinking these "renovation plans" are somewhere between remote and completely bogus.

However we got to this point, we're not left with any real options beyond demo. And this was probably true 10 years ago but nobody cared then.

Lacking sufficient turnarounds does not release RTA's obligation to serve all their stations equally in a situation like this. Deadheading is inefficient, but it's a fact of life in transportation planning because it's rarely OK for the planner to skip jobs entirely for the sake of convenience. In the case of a public agency, it's definitively NOT OK for 3 trains in a row to serve Puritas but skip W98th. If deadheading is required to equalize the situation, then it just is. Serving inner city areas should never ever ever be considered optional.

I think it has more to do with lower volume and lower buying power on the store's end. Smaller stores are by definition less efficient, hence WalMart. Now if some system were to come along giving corner stores the same prices WalMart gets...

Not necessary. All they had to do was turn around wherever they normally do, but not start picking up until the first station where nobody could get on the last train. Some trains would go past W98th full... but others would go past Puritas empty, so they could pick up at W98th. That way all stations are serviced equally.

Agreed, especially about running some trains empty to the numbered streets. That's some really basic planning logic right there. I was trying to get on at W98th and had absolutely no chance. EVERY train was allowed to fill up in West Park while ZERO capacity was assigned to the inner city stations. Orders from the top, is what RTA staff told me. Sheer incompetence is the most charitable way I can describe that... other suggestions could be made but I won't. I gave up trying to get downtown after 2 buses and 3 trains couldn't fit me. Running a Saturday schedule, with no 55, on the heaviest day of the year? That is simply breathtaking. I am ashamed at how poorly my city's transit system is run and I would like to know what steps are being taken to improve RTA's planning capabilities.

Because there are very few oil/gas companies and oil service companies based in Ohio, and the ones that are based in Ohio tend to be very small. Texas and Oklahoma (with a secondary nod to California) are where all the big oil and gas companies are based, so naturally they're the ones who are going to exploit the fields found in other states. North Dakota doesn't have any oil/gas companies based in their state, yet that fact has hardly hurt their economy. You can see from the articles already posted here that many of these Texas and Oklahoma companies are *already* setting up branch offices in Ohio, so once they get started up and some more native Ohioans will become trained in the industry, it will be as much run by Ohioans as by Texans. I work for a Texas company that has hired dozens of locals thus far, and these are all high-end professional jobs. They throw money around in a way this area hasn't seen for a long while. There are also a bunch of Texas guys who came up, but trust me, those guys all want to go home as soon as they can. They say our women have too many tattoos.

This will be my first St Patty's day downtown, even though I've lived here for 10 years.

The patterned concrete is a nice touch. May fit better with its surroundings than earlier renderings made it seem.

University Circle is where Cleveland had its biggest deficit of supply vs demand. For years there's been a huge untapped market for modern high-end units there. Kind of a unique situation. As to Hts121's points, neither extreme is sensible... you can't open stores for no people, but you also can't aggregate people with no stores nearby. Case in point: most of Cleveland. All these aspects need to develop together. Cleveland seems to have focused too much on the residential end, meaning that in order to restore the balance needed for meaningful growth, the focus should reverse for a bit. Besides, it's not like the city hasn't aggressively pursued retail, e.g. Steelyard Commons and Church Square. Cleveland has actively sought the development of retail-free residential areas served by suburban-style retail plazas. IMO step one for growing our neighborhoods, any of them, is to step decisively away from that approach.

Agree. Just as I want congress to let Obama govern, Kasich should be allowed to govern here. Otherwise our system has no validity.

When looking at individual neighborhoods, as we are here, I don't believe large retailers are all that important. Most never had one to begin with and couldn't really accommodate one today. If we're comparing to M/SP, the smaller units along its commercial strips are mostly full, and this is throughout the metro rather than just downtown near the major stuff. Point is, getting those shops open along our main streets will pay residential dividends down every side street. It's the most direct way for any Cleveland neighborhood to take a quantum leap forward. What I'm getting at is that if some neighborhood with a reasonably intact commercial district (like Slavic Village) were to focus its funding on retail offerings, rather than curbs and planters and the like, rather than acres of retail-free housing developments... it would likely see residential and office demand start growing on their own. You could call it a multiplier effect. When your obvious gaping deficit is retail, so much so that the neighborhood has ceased to function as designed, improvements in retail will produce the most growth/dollar.

Strongly agree with Keith M. on this. Cleveland needs to focus on getting retail into its commercial strips. Retail is what makes an urban neighborhood liveable. Without that it's effectively just another suburb... with more crime, smaller yards, and a longer drive to the mall.

Ohio has too many colleges scattered about for any one (besides OSU) to really stick out. If everyone's within 1/2 hour of one, which was the goal at one point, that's a whole bunch of them. Many are in out of the way places, which meshes with Ohio's traditionally rural focus. And CSU did Cleveland no favors by following a Tri-C development model for its first 4 decades. At no point did our central city ever need two commuter campuses. Who else has that? Nobody. I'd like to see CSU continue to upgrade itself, but that will mean taking a second look at some of its architectural decisions, as well as continuing to work toward a name change so it doesn't sound like Columbus State and Cincinnati State. Not easy to draw statewide when your name lets people reasonably assume that you're a community college, or when your new construction looks so much cheaper than what any of your competitors are building. Some aspects of this problem really are "only in Cleveland" issues and we seriously need to get those fixed.

In the oil biz, there are a lot of Texas people living in Northeast Ohio hotels right now so they can work.

I've never been to either of these places, and I may never go once they're here, but I'm happy any time we're presented with more options.