jim uber

I might agree with you if this were a smaller property. But it has a disproportionate impact on that block any way you measure it. It's street frontage alone is about 1/3 of the entire west side of Walnut. More generally (and not responding to your comment) - this block in the center of our downtown should be solid gold in an economically healthy Cincinnati, and with this conversion it almost will be that. Every city needs a safety zone for venti-caramel-soy-frappacino drinkin' foo-foo people and their big checkbooks, and ours ain't done, yet. It was bad policy to convert Metropole to its current use, and I'm happy it's going to go back to what it was originally designed for. If that makes me sound like a bigot so be it, but I'll also say that, living in Gateway, I'm happy to welcome those people from the Metropole who aren't criminals to our neighborhood, cause I think that's what OTR should be - re-developing with a healthy mix of races and incomes. But 6th and Walnut? No way.

OK, I'm not smart enough to know what "elite teams" do (seems to me they probably do a wide variety of things, but the main one is winning), and I'm not certain arguing about Nippert's urbanness or cool factor is that interesting. But, I have to admit that when I have visitors come to UC's campus, they almost invariably comment about how nifty it is that we have a stadium nestled in a hole in the middle of campus. The most recent example were two graduate students from U. Michigan, of all places, who couldn't stop from saying how amazed they were that the stadium "was, like, right there, in the middle of everything." I guess that that is pretty unusual.

Yes, nothing is built yet, but that's reason to speed up not slow down. Cincinnati has had a bad habit of striking while the iron is cold, and that needs to stop.

"Not only am I warming to the idea of a streetcar, I'm kinda gettin' hot. I'm kinda gettin' hot and bothered by the thought of a streetcar downtown. With the casino and all of this other stuff. It's almost like all of these things are coming together for us." -- Scott Sloan, 700WLW, yesterday in the interview with John Schneider. Can someone please remind me where I am living?

I didn't understand it either. I figured COAST would have been in favor of privatizing services as well. The waterworks issue was essentially a tax on suburbs, and that's why COAST opposed it. Again, if it's good for the city, look for COAST to oppose the measure. Creating a water district and selling the proceeds to it creates an income stream for the city, where there was none before (cincinnati water works can not generate a profit). So, where does this money come from? It comes from the new water district of course, which means it comes from increased water rates on its customers. But, part of the deal was to retain a lower rate for city of cincinnati residents. Thus, the bulk of the added cost is assigned to folks outside of the city limits - essentially a nifty tax on the suburbs with the city getting the proceeds. Now, I personally think that such a tax can be justified in many ways. However it provides exactly the sort of reasons for COAST to oppose it.

COAST was pretty specific about being happy no matter which way it went, because the people got the vote and that was all they were after. Could be BS, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. No. The vote they wanted the people to have was the vote on any expenditure on any rail project in Cincinnati. Not the vote that happened yesterday, which is what you implied. I mean, that's just nonsensical - if they just wanted the vote they got yesterday, the result would have never mattered, and they would have succeeded just by gathering 6000 signatures. No, COAST lost yesterday. They care, and yes, anything else is BS, and not deserving of any benefit, from doubts or otherwise.

I think that they do have more pressing issues. I would appreciate NAACP getting involved in the redevelopment of OTR in a positive way. I don't know of anyone who lives here who wouldn't hope for a truly integrated community. The emotional key to Smitherman's push on NAACP to go anti streetcar is in his statement that it's a "toy for white yuppies" (can't remember the exact quote, but that was the essence). Everything else - the "boondoggle", the "excessive" costs, etc. is window dressing to play to a wider audience. So, the healthy racial integration of OTR as it redevelops is the keystone to defusing the entire streetcar issue. Of course this is difficult to accomplish, but without dialog nothing even has a chance. And I think there must be many "honest brokers" out there who could serve this city well by helping us to turn the corner. In my opinion the CFP and related groups should now turn their attention to finding those honest brokers, and asking how they can help to bring NAACP to the redevelopment table along with the city, 3CDC, and other groups. I'd like to suggest that this topic is not necessarily off limits for the recently announced City task force that will consider obstacles to OTR rehabilitation. The emperor has been naked for a long time. It's time to be really honest and get down to what the real issues that are holding us back.

About a year ago I wiped out on my scooter coming down the hill on vine street around the old curve cafe. I fractured my scaphoid bone in my wrist, got some other cuts and bruises, and generally was shaken up. Immediately 4 of the exact folks you'd probably guess wouldn't have cared ran over to help get my scooter on the sidewalk, call 911, and make sure I was OK. One of them sat with me till the medics arrived. The people that I meet on the sidewalk on vine street when I am WALKING on the sidewalk are almost always cordial, if not downright polite and friendly. "Good evening", "How you doin'", and "Hello, Gentleman" are phrases that I hear. The people at the Kroger on vine street, both the workers and the guys hanging out, are some of the most friendly people I've ever met that weren't my friends. It astonishes me the number of people I know who are literally freaked out that I go in the place. Please, don't argue needlessly with brain dead common sense like more people makes an area feel, and be, safer, because people that are up to no good generally like to be up to no good in relative seclusion. If that's not obvious to you, then go to both types of areas, get out of your car in each, and ask yourself how you feel. Then ask yourself how you'd feel if you were trying to unload some crack or mug someone on the street. If the obvious answer doesn't come immediately to mind then, ask yourself what your true motives are. Get out of your car or off of your bike and walk, if you want to see into someones eyes. Try saying "hello" and see what happens.

Given the likelihood of passage of issue 3, do you think anyone is considering approaching the developers to help fund the streetcar line or an extension of it? It could reduce their need for adjacent parking. And I thought that John Schneider had a proposal for an alternative to vine street that would go very near, if not right next to, broadway commons.

As I mentioned on the Enquirer site, I think that 3CDC might consider a free Saturday shuttle loop between Findlay market and Gateway, with stops only at Gateway and the market (just until the streetcar is operating!). Findlay needs more parking, Gateway has some of that. Park and shop at Gateway, take the convenient shuttle to Findlay and back (or vice versa). Gateway can really benefit from the large audience Findlay has, and people who haven't been to OTR lately won't find Gateway threatening, and will find the new development along the route a fascinating dinner subject with others who remain blind to what is happening. So I think Findlay, Gateway, and 3CDC/developers all win, and could be asked to help fund it.

I just bought a door mat made of recycled truck tires from OUTSIDE today. It is a good store, and I don't find it a strange concept at all for an urban area. I've also bought a very small charcoal grill from there, and a nice small metal table and two chairs (the exact same nice ones that are on fountain square) from him, and they are designed to fit nicely on my small city balcony. He's not exactly stocking porch swings, you know.

Money. This is something I've spoken to people at Metro about and it is something they have been wanting to do...it would also present the opportunity to greatly simplify the UC*Metro partnership. That's true, but it is also true that they need to find the money for this, as well as other quality of service related improvements, else ridership will not improve and that portion of their budget will not grow. I'm not sure of the funding restrictions, but I would have put a priority on making the broad implementation of an RFID farecard system sound as much as possible like a capital expense fundable by stimulus funds, and go sell it. I would have wanted that done before using those funds to purchase new buses. New buses are a necessity, but in the short run nobody will notice, whereas a modern farecard/fob system would instantly change the face of METRO to every rider, and make it seem like they are part of the 21st century, and actively wanting to make the experience of riding METRO as convenient as possible for their customers. This has been reinforced for me this summer, since I'm spending it in Seoul, which has extensive public mass transit in terms of subways, buses (of various types), and high speed rail connections. I REALLY hope that the streetcar can do better than the fare system put into place in Portland, which I found unnecessarily clumsy. Here, as in many other areas served by great transit systems, I purchase a small fob (or use an activated credit card), which I swipe at the front door of the bus or the subway turnstile on entry, and again at the back door of the bus or the subway turnstile on exit. Each time I'm told how much money it charged and how much I have left (in the case of a fob -- the credit card method doesn't need that). Each time the reader beeps to tell me it worked (and to tell the driver that I paid), plus it says something in Korean like "welcome" or "transferring". Women routinely just pass their purse by the reader, which is conveniently at waist height, and get on board nearly as quickly as just walking on. I get what amounts to a 10 cent discount for using it compared to using cash. Unlimited transfers between buses going the same way are free within 30 minutes of your exit swipe. Transfers between subway lines are also free, and between buses and subway it costs about 10 cents, again if within 30 minutes. I can recharge these things ALMOST ANYWHERE, cause undoubtedly there is a percentage taken by whomever is doing it. Personally I go to a 50 square foot cigarette shop, hand over a 50,000 won note (about $50), and get enough rides on my fob for about a month. I can also use the money on my fob for lots of other things, notably taxis. It really ends up being more of a general alternative to cash, and I'm sure that some organization is making money on each transaction (or at least paying for the system). It's hard to overstate the benefits of implementing this type of fare system, in my opinion, in terms of making riding any form of transit and transferring between them almost effortless. I hope that we won't be satisfied with less. Having experienced this, I can't understand the logic of spending the funds to install the rugged weatherproof ticket machines on the street like Portland has done. The little grimy device that is used to recharge mine at the cigarette store is the size of a credit card reader and I don't know why it would be any more expensive. I guess the main problem with this sort of system is that people have to pay, and that implies needing to have a way for people to purchase the fobs or cards or whatever the various forms they take. But I'd rather that every UDF or grocery or small storefront be enlisted to sell transit cards (for a small profit they would keep) and make them so routine that people normally will have 5 of them in their junk drawers. You could pay for a very small number of more expensive outdoor places where the cards could be purchased (like at Fountain square), but I'd keep those to a minimum and mainly for out of towners. I got mine for free (loaded with $10) from the Lotte department store, as a purchase incentive. I'd imagine that convention goers would normally be given a transit fob in their welcome package, emblazoned with the conference logo and those of all of its sponsors, and loaded with an initial $5 of transit money, enough for maybe two round trips to uptown and back.

Like, as a great example, the old Barrel House brew pub on 12th street. Good music and good bar food, great beer, and you can pick up a growler for tomorrow night.

A week or so ago Kaid Benfield, Smart Growth Director at NRDC, visited the University of Cincinnati Center for Sustainable Urban Environments and toured Over The Rhine, which he didn't know much about at the time. Kaid became interested in OTR as an example of sustainable, center city, redevelopment. He's, blogging on the subject (http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/revitalizing_overtherhine_part.html) and I thought that many here would be interested in reading and contributing.

^ Um, what are you guys talking about anyway?

The biggest change I have seen in city development policies since 1990 (when I came to live here) is a turnaround from hiding OTR under the rug, to saying that the redevelopment and repopulation of OTR is a keystone to Cincinnati success and growth. The explicit acknowledgment that 1 sq. mile of squalor (hey, I live there, and love it) adjacent to the CBD is unsustainable took remarkably long for this city to process and get installed as policy. Yea, DanB, we all know that OTR has boarded up buildings. Ho Hum. Fortunately there are people who are laser-focused on NOT having that be part of our future. Please, tell us something interesting. Moderator edit: Please refrain from ad-homiem characterizations. Thanks.

Hey DanB, a friendly suggestion for another Mencken quote for your sig line, just for context: “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” - Henry Louis Mencken People can disagree with an economic analysis on the grounds that it does not benefit them personally in the same way. We are assuming a lot when we assume that maximizing society-wide net economic benefits is an objective that everyone has bought in to. My main problem with the detractors is that they can't be honest, and simply say that they don't like the streetcar proposal because they personally like their car and want to continue riding on quality asphalt, and think that benefits for society are pointless to discuss, cause society doesn't deserve them as much as they do.

NKY increase apparently accounts for only 35 additional students, which is a huge percentage increase in that cohort, but it doesn't explain the 750 additional students (15% of roughly 5000). The only consistent factor in my mind behind the big gains in both of the last two years is the physical campus. Spring 3 years ago was when all of the construction was finally starting to finish up (that's when students who were thinking about applying to UC in the fall of 2006 for admission Fall of 2007 would have started to schedule campus visits), and construction was completed everywhere two springs ago. Last week we had a visitor to campus for a seminar (I've been a faculty member at UC for 19 years) and during his seminar mentioned that UCs campus was one of the most beautiful he's seen. There's going to be a lot of disagreement about that, but... the fact is that it is now common and expected to have visitors praise the look of the campus. As a faculty member I don't really enjoy admitting that freshmen undergraduate admission (as opposed to graduate programs) are driven more by the physical plant than faculty quality, but I'm afraid it's true. They don't really know us till they get here, but they all know the feel of campus. I think what it really says is pretty conventional - we naturally associate high quality and safety with well designed and maintained grounds. Maybe the orange bowl got them to campus initially, but campus itself sold many of them.

Thank you for making my point more precisely and clearly. By the way, the dictionary definition of a "spree" is "an unrestrained indulgence in or outburst of an activity" -- is that the word you thought carefully to use, or was it the first one to come to mind? I can hardly believe that you are arguing that the Enquirer covers crime in OTR disproportionately because they are "down the street." You must not be serious. [sarcasm] Sherman, thank you for re-posting crime articles that appear widely in the standard news sources. [/sarcasm] You do not add anything to a discourse on crime by these actions. You do not even increase awareness perceptibly. You do not help me to understand why crime occurs nor how to intelligently assess my personal risks. In short, leave what you are doing to those who do it best, like the Enquirer and the 11:00 nightly news. They have vastly bigger audiences than this thread will ever have. And that's minus one, as of now.

As much as I dislike the Enquirer's bias, this is not one of their realms that they are biased in. Their data is derived from the City of Cincinnati that is posted online (http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/police/pages/-4258-/). Few other police departments make their statistics as detailed and available as Cincinnati's, which is the reason that you do not see detailed crime reported posted in suburban locations. Sherman - First I am a new poster but have been checking out this fine blog a few times a week for the past 6 months or so. Next, the answer is No, I won't lead up that thread, for the reasons that I stated. And no that isn't a cop-out, its a reality that doing something interesting with a crime *discussion* will involve serious journalism and data analysis. This isn't at all like "I think the west side of the new SCPA building is ugly!", where opinion is not only appropriate - it's all there is. And on the subject of the Enquirer data center not being biased. Your argument would (fortunately) be rejected in any sort of academic/scientific realm. It is not possible to say "well, that's all the data that I could find, so I analyzed those." That student gets a failing grade. The FACTS of the matter are that the FBI requires crime statistics for communities > 100,000 population; the Enquirer has convenient access to Cincinnati crime reports and no other for that very reason; and the Enquirer decides to put those data exclusively on the web, just like it decides to focus its crime reporting almost exclusively on the city of cincinnati. Yea, I'm all for freedom of information, of course, but some of you may think I prefer to hide my head in the sand. On the contrary, I simply appreciate the difference between information for information sake, and information meant to encourage reasonable understanding of the situation by the public at large. The Enquirer has the most powerful force for swaying public bias - I mean opinion - ever known to humankind in Web2.0 mapped data applications. I'm not sure they appreciate that, at all. What's the next logical step, if this information is so useful, a free twitter feed showing my distance from the nearest City of Cincinnati crime report? How fascinating and useful that would be, to make me more "aware" of my crime situation. I find it funny to read about how these sorts of single-event discussions are supposed to be valuable for my "awareness" of crime in OTR and other places in the City. I think we're well up on that curve. The latest from the Enquirer blog roll, prominent on its front page right side banner, just this morning: "Two More Shootings in Over the Rhine! HUGE Surprise! Hey Downtown! You Suck!" Yes, I am aware.

This thread has not only been lacking for some time, it should simply die of a lack of quality information, and that includes the recent postings that are in question. Crime reporting is out of whack in Cincinnati and elsewhere. What you post does not necessarily inform us of crime risk, nor does it inform us of whether what is being done to reduce those risks is working, or not. Any scientist knows that focusing on single data points in isolation is useless. I repeat - USELESS. It tells us NOTHING. However that is exactly what sells fear and newspapers and hence advertising. There is no reason to perpetuate that approach anywhere else. I am all for realistic and substantive, and even negative, reports about the city and its efforts to fight crime. However in order to do those sorts of reports one must study seriously and do the analysis. Now since nobody here (and, at the Enquirer, unfortunately) has the time to do that, then this thread should die before it infects any single additional person with its biases. By the way, on a related topic, I've always been annoyed that the Enquirer's online crime data center (http://dunes.cincinnati.com/data/crime/) includes crime stats ONLY for crimes within the city of Cincinnati. Do you think that this indicates a more general bias at that newspaper, and perpetuated here as a result, that crime really only occurs in Cincinnati city limits? What is the explanation that crime stats are available only for a portion of the metro area that is home to less than 20% of its residents? Yea, I think we can guess the answer.

Kaid Benfield is the director of the National Resources Defense Council Smart Growth program. Kaid will visit Cincinnati and O-T-R on May 22 to learn more about OTR revitalization and give a seminar as part of the UC sustainable urban environments seminar series: UC main campus, 12:10PM, 3250 Recreation center. Kaid has recently blogged about OTR: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/another_great_revitalizationin.html