Foraker

The west side has a nice loop. Need a loop to the southwest and south, connect the blue-green lines to complete a loop, but man look at that big empty zone on the east through Cleveland Heights!

Unless and until East Cleveland asks for help or asks for a merger, we can forget about it. There are still people who can imagine East Cleveland digging itself out of its hole and are not convinced that they need anyone to come in and take over their city.

I'm right there with you. I'm not opposed to the occasional tower, or a downtown with lots of tall buildings, but there is plenty of room for vibrant neighborhoods with dense neighborhood "centers" with midrise buildings as the tallest buildings, with decreasing density as the distance from that localized center increases. No single-family homes within a 15-minute walk of the community center could make these non-downtown neighborhoods a lot more lively than they are now, whether we're talking about Walnut Hills in Cincinnati, Clintonville in Columbus, or Buckeye in Cleveland -- there should be a localized "town center" with increased density in that community, and it shouldn't be the highrises of a downtown.

ROFL!! That's great, and sadly so true...

Or re-use an existing structure -- the Medical Mart.

Google's waiting for Nucleus to be completed. 😅

Would be nice if National City put in a ground floor restaurant with outdoor seating on that plaza.....

An online community, where you instantly connect with everyone, is probably the easiest to appear in and disappear from. I don't see the same circumstances in a low-density sprawl, which I always thought had a much looser connection to any sort of "community" than a small town. YMMV

Someone remind Anthony Mattox!

Sorry, but that's not true -- I've seen it in Germany, Hong Kong, UK, and Japan (yes, ever-so-polite Japan!). Haven't been to any of those other countries. Could RTA do better, particularly with having more transit police around to control bad behavior? -- yes. But to say that it doesn't happen anywhere but the US suggests a lack of personal experience in those other countries.

Someone talk to K&D

Looks like a new development called Noble Station. Low-income housing complex. And the NIMBYs -- including the infamous Diane Hallum-- are already screaming. https://www.cleveland.com/community/2023/08/residents-present-tale-of-two-cities-opposition-to-noble-station-project-in-cleveland-heights.html Definitely some good points there -- "if it isn't good enough for south-of-Mayfield, why is it good enough for north-of-Mayfield?" was my favorite. I was tangentially involved in another project in that area that fell through because of difficulty obtaining financing. Legacy of redlining and the decline of nearby East Cleveland really depress property values in that area, which gives the banks cover to Not Lend. My guess is that low-income housing is what is planned because the developer could get funding for that and couldn't convince a bank to finance a high-rent building in that location. But yes, more mixed-income and mixed-use would be welcome, and residents should absolutely attend the ABR review and push for better design. Blocking the project altogether, however, seems like a mistake. A bit of density in that area would be very good. You've got to start with something.

The energy usage for bitcoin seems to be unsustainable, even with improvements in energy usage. https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks A "low energy" cryptocurrency using 6GWh. What's the average homeowner use in the US -- something around 10000-14000 kWh? -- that means that Cardano alone (hardly a household name) consumes as much power as 6,000 average American homeowners. Hopefully further energy improvements are made in cryptocurrency. But before you think I'm only attacking crypto, research also shows that worldwide cryptocurrency consumes approximately 60-125 TWh annually, but traditional banking consumes far more energy in maintaining servers, ATMs, and physical banking locations -- around 139TWh annually. (Traditional banking transactions, however, also outnumber cryptocurrency transactions by a wide margin, for now.) https://complyadvantage.com/insights/cryptocurrency-transaction-volumes-grow-567-as-focus-turns-to-defi/

Agree. If you could print out the Ohio Constitution on a few pages so that the ordinary person could read it, I would give it a lot more respect. The fact that this creates a lower threshold for legislature-originated amendments than citizen-originated amendments says a lot and nudges me to oppose it. But upping the requirement to gather signatures from 88 counties, AND eliminates any opportunity to cure, is absurd and really firmly puts me in the No camp.

This is why we need it to connect to a downtown loop. A loop! A loop! We want a loop! 😁 Seriously, it's a spur into a rarely-visited cul-de-sac, and you have to go to Tower City to make use of it. Connect the Waterfront line to CSU and Tri-C and the potential ridership explodes.

While to some extent I agree, I'm not a fan of bright lights everywhere, but if the bright signs are concentrated in a particular area like Playhouse Square it actually makes for a brighter, higher energy place to be at night. Everything has its place -- let's not electronic-billboard the entire downtown!

Went a concert in Verona, Italy, a few years ago -- in a Roman coliseum originally built in 30AD. Check out the pictures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona_Arena

This has been proposed, but flatly rejected by Republican legislators. They seem to have zero interest in really changing our immigration laws (other than building a wall to "keep 'em out"). What would change conservative minds?

So "today . . . road projects are not designed with race in mind," people of all races freely choose where to live in areas that require a commute, anyone has an option to move to a better neighborhood, and they needn't worry because housing advocates will lobby for them to get a better deal than they could 60 years ago. Everything is roses! In other words, the mostly-poor, mostly-black residents in Cleveland's Forgotten Triangle just "chose" not to move and to not live near jobs, and the "Opportunity Corridor" wasn't built there because the residents are *black* but because it was a poor, polluted neighborhood (ignoring how it got that way) -- and the neighborhood should be thankful that they now benefit from having better highway access and the displaced residents got more than they would have in 1950 (and they should be thankful for that)! Nope, racism in highway planning is dead.

With increasing energy in the atmosphere we're going to see more "chaos" in our weather -- more deep freezes like we had at Christmas 2022 that are REALLY cold but short-lived. What that means for plant hardiness remains to be seen. It has been noted upthread that this design greatly reduces the amount of residential/mixed-use building in this design compared to previous designs. I wonder if this is part of the Haslams' dispute with the city ("dispute" may or may not be too strong). But I also wonder whether residential buildings could be incorporated into/surrounding the stadium itself. Mixed-use buildings with their backs up against or just a few feet from the stadium structure would provide stadium revenue year-round. And a place for bars and restaurants for pre-game, in-game, and post-game revenue generation.

Speaking of farmer advocates, I read this interesting story recently about a guy I had never heard of -- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/26/earl-blumenauer-agriculture-farm-bill-congress More Ohio farmers should look into this if they haven't heard about it and talk to their representatives.

Thank you. While the new salary might be competitive with the salaries of similar positions around the country, as noted above neither the mayor of Cleveland nor the County Executive come close to that amount. No one on this site has ever extolled any "exceptional" skills or abilities of Birdsong. What is the Board seeing that is not known by the interested-public?

Certainly some aspects of society has moved beyond racism. But this is a lot bigger problem than you think. Just as one example, if you own a home in a redlined neighborhood, your home is not worth nearly as much as the same home in a non-redlined neighborhood. The only way to "move on" is to take a big loss on the sale of your home. And if you want to stay and improve the neighborhood, you're very constrained from making improvements to your home because banks still look at the neighborhood's depressed home values in valuing the house. Redlining has "ended" but its effects linger and keep some neighborhoods poorer than they otherwise would be even decades after redlining ended. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-13/why-it-s-so-hard-to-invest-in-black-neighborhoods

If it had never passed at all, education dollars would still be in one pot and money taken for vouchers would have been subtracted from the public school district that the vouchers "came from" -- even if the students had never attended the public school in the first place. And it would have continued the practice of far more state dollars for vouchers than for public school students, meaning vouchers were a real drain on public school finances. Particularly in districts with very high attendance at religious schools. That is a dramatic change. The plan also changes the calculations used to determine how much state funding goes to each school district, and does so in a way that public schools think is more favorable (it's still complex and I have not yet been able to find the full calculation). At any rate, the Fair Funding Plan does a lot that is good from the point of view of a public school supporter. The downside is that while the plan phases in over time, vouchers continue to be worth more than the per-student amount of state aid to public schools. And my understanding is that the Plan itself as voted on does not actually include the phase in. The Fair Funding Plan is kind of like an agreed-upon PLAN, but actual implementation requires continued biennial funding support. In other words, the funding for the plan comes from separate legislation. And while so far the first two steps have been funded, powerful Republican legislators continue to say things about the plan being too expensive and continue to increase both the amount offered through vouchers and the reach of who can apply for vouchers. So the long term result remains in doubt. That by itself is not controversial at all. I'd say 90% of people would agree. Those who disagree are (1) worried about the impact on society if larger percentages of the population are segregated in schools where they are not exposed to people who are very different from them (but most districts in Ohio are rural and uniformly bland, so that concern is probably overblown), (2) worried about the cost to maintain separate public and private school systems, and (3) worried about public money being used to support private schools who teach things that they don't like (whether it's a madrassa or opus dei or whatever). I'm in the camp of #2, and while I would like to be proven wrong the Republican mantra of smaller government, lower spending, that program is too expensive -- all seems to forebode future declines in funding for public schools.

Sorry, I thought it was well known. After years of debate and compromise, it is a new formula for funding public schools that was passed in 2021. One of the compromises was the phasing in of the funding. Here's an article about the passage of the bill, nonpartisan report. https://apnews.com/article/business-government-and-politics-education-ohio-5520e5cfd8048bd65e7670649caf7d62 The plan is being phased in in three steps (hopefully) and this next biennium will increase the funding, but the third step isn't guaranteed. A proposal to fully fund the plan in this bienneum was voted down by the Republican majority. https://spectrumnews1.com/oh/columbus/news/2023/02/26/legislators-push-for-full-dollars-needed-in-fair-school-funding-plan- Senate Finance Committee Chair Matt Dolan has explicitly said that the Fair Funding Plan is too expensive, but choice via vouchers is not. https://myemail.constantcontact.com/SENATE-FINANCE-COMMITTEE-CHAIR-MATT-DOLAN---WHERE-A-CHILD-GETS-EDUCATED-IS-NOT-AS-IMPORTANT-TO-US-AS-THE-CHILD-GETS-EDUCATED-.html I don't think it's at all surprising that the Republicans say that spending more money on public schools is "too expensive" -- and you probably agree with Dolan's interest in pursuing choice over increasing funding for public schools. Why can't it be fully funded but the legislature can increase voucher amounts and access this year?