Foraker

Big Al's Diner on Larchmere (12600 Larchmere Blvd) -- go check out all the new construction!

Developer has proposed wrapping the back side of the parking garage with townhouses. Very preliminary though, may or may not be part of the final design.

I've heard those voices, and I agree with this I also think looking at a row of townhouses will be much more pleasant and interesting to look at than a parking garage, and there will still be room for trees. We're also getting ahead of ourselves -- the city does not yet have a development agreement in place. This whole project could still fail to materialize. A woman spoke at Monday's city council meeting about the missing bollards to the right of your image, between the end of Cedarbrook and the parking lot, and problems with speeding drivers cutting through. Hopefully that gets corrected quickly. (Cedarbrook used to continue to Lee Rd. -- through the pocket park between Boss Dog and the theater building.) I'm very much looking forward to this development, but there are lots of places where the details will make a big difference. Glad to have local City Architecture involved.

100%. And there's that strip of green between Lee and the high school football stadium that could be improved as well. The developer's proposed park space runs from Meadowbrook to the wall that runs parallel to Meadowbrook. Compare https://www.google.com/maps/@41.4993453,-81.5648947,142a,35y,90h/data=!3m1!1e3 and

Making it easier to buy guns is making it easier to kill -- accidental deaths, deaths in fights, suicides, and murders are all easier with a gun than without.

There is probably more bark than bite here. When it comes to trademarks (and trade names and service marks), in general the legal question is whether there is a "likelihood of confusion" in the mind of the average consumer. How likely is the Cleveland Guardians roller derby consumer going to be confused over their relationship to Cleveland Guardians major league baseball and vice versa? (Similarly, you can buy "Ballpark" mustard at Progressive Field and "Ballpark" hot dogs (mustard came first) and everyone knows the difference between owners Bertman's and Sara Lee, respectively.) The roller derby's earlier use of the Guardians name, for roller derby, probably means that the baseball club cannot expand into roller derby in the future. Which seems unlikely anyway.

The city will be conducting a comprehensive traffic and parking study. Community engagement begins soon - if you're a resident, participate: https://www.clevelandheights.com/DocumentCenter/View/9557/Cedar-Lee-Meadowbrook-Framework-of-Meetings-Framework_20210803?bidId= https://www.clevelandheights.com/1154/Cedar-Lee-Meadowbrook

I recently rode Amtrak to Chicago and then the Southwest Chief to Arizona. Train into Cleveland was over an hour late (and in the middle of the night) but easy connection and we left Chicago on time. noticeably smoother ride to St. Louis than through Ohio. No dining car service for coach passengers right now, unfortunately. Just a snack bar. 🙁 That was a long trip for just snack bar food. But reportedly that will change soon with the lifting of some COVID-based restrictions. It's also a long ride while wearing a mask. (Please get vaccinated, people!) But I was able to sleep and was very productive when awake. Very nice way to travel. I highly recommend it. Flew home, and it sucked. From TSA line to delayed flights to cramped seating and fewer airport businesses open to damage to my luggage -- I spent an entire day traveling home and while faster than Amtrak it was exhausting.

If the city vacated Frankfort, does SW now have to pay taxes on that land?

Necessitated by repeated state tax cuts and reductions in spending from the state (including reduction/elimination of the state estate tax and reduced state support for public education). Running a city costs money, whether it comes from the state or the local government. And the state limits municipal income tax rates. So how do you pay for city services -- police/fire/road maintenance? Would it be better if the state would impose a 3% "municipal" tax that is just passed through to local communities? I don't know.

Agreed. I saw that someone on Nextdoor had asked when the Denison pool was going to open, and was outraged to learn that it no longer exists. I swear people are hibernating, waking up and going straight to Nextdoor to complain about they don't like how things have changed in the past decade. It's a swamp of the uninformed.

Anyone know what this means? https://www.cleveland.com/open/2021/06/final-ohio-budget-deal-would-fund-broadband-boost-school-funding-in-major-overhaul.html Thank you Cleveland Plain Dealer editors.

Generally agree that park-and-rides are inefficient. But I think you would get some additional riders who are dropped off and won't take up a parking space -- say one spouse working downtown and another working in Oberlin. And if they put a covered waiting area at the front of the park-and-ride site with parking behind, it COULD be made more pedestrian-friendly. My preference would be to offer up the park-and-ride lot to the local community to maintain and subsidize the route. Most probably wouldn't, which just shows how unimportant and useless mass transit is when you live in car-dependent sprawl.

A whole host of reasons, and I'm probably not aware of all of them. As I understand it, the city originally sold the property (obtained via land bank?) and loaned the money for the purchase to the Giles brothers, who used to own the nearby Honda and Toyota dealerships that they sold in recent years. I think it was connected to a promise for job creation, but maybe someone knows more about that initial transaction. The Giles have sold off their dealerships in recent years, but as I understand it they still owe the city a boat of money for loan on the Medusa property. A developer (I don't remember who it was) came forward with a plan to redevelop the property (townhomes and condos) and rehab the Medusa building, and the city council seemed to like the idea. The developer had an agreement with the Giles, but they wanted the city to forgive the remainder of the loan. As I understand it (third-hand?), the city wouldn't forgive the loan and the Giles's didn't want to proceed with the developer without being made whole on that loan (and likely some additional amount as profit/gain before transferring the property to the developer). The developer was trying to round up additional sources of funding, and then had a tragic death in the family and this project fell off his list of priorities, understandably. I think the Medusa building had qualified for historic renovation credits but that those have expired. Back to square one. Maybe this project can be revived when CH has a popularly-elected mayor.

Maybe, but not necessarily. That hasn't been the case in Cleveland Heights. If the City Manager is looking to Council for approval and permission on every matter, I can see how the city manager can be afraid to lead, to be out in front on matters -- perhaps that is what is leading to some of the problems they have in Cleveland Heights. I suspect that with the right personalities in the city manager and on council they can lead together, but that apparently isn't happening. But we've also seen (Cleveland) how a mayor and ward-elected council can fail to lead as well. Cleveland Heights might be disappointed in what they get.

Here's the problem with the current Cleveland Heights government (six at-large council members, they elect one of themselves to be "mayor," and there is a city manager who reports to council) -- the buck doesn't stop with any one person. The city manager is not responsive to citizens, because she is responsible to city council. Other than running council meetings, the "mayor" has no more say than any other council person. So if you have a problem you have to go to every council member and get at least a majority of them on your side AND willing to act quickly, which rarely happens. There's a lot of "OK, but you need to get Council on board" and then "well, you make a good point but I'm only one councilperson . . . ." Still, this system worked well enough to last 75 years. Would Cleveland fare any better due to council members representing defined Wards? Maybe. Maybe not -- who is accountable for looking out for the good of the collective whole?

Obviously, once SW builds there won't be enough parking.

Or even standard design criteria! Gotta start somewhere.

This -- When your job centers are spread out, transit cannot efficiently move people to where they want to go, so people must drive, and more cars on the road means more traffic impeding the buses, leading to this Suburban sprawl is not horrible because urban dwellers don't understand the appeal of a different lifestyle, it's horrible because of its wasteful mis-use of energy and resources. It will be unsustainable in the long run.

That clearly works for you, but while it is true that parking is free to the worker in most suburban areas, I don't think the "less commuting" is necessarily true. Thanks to our highway system we have workers in our downtown office from Avon Lake to Mentor to Solon to Chagrin Falls to north Akron to Cleveland Heights to Lakewood to downtown -- all over northeast Ohio. Yet almost everyone commutes 20-40 minutes. The exceptions live downtown and walk about 15 minutes. We certainly have pockets of heavy traffic that can increase commute times at certain times of day -- on 271 near Progressive, near the innerbelt downtown, Rockside, Royalton Rd. exit off 71 -- but we don't really have that much traffic compared to other major US cities. As a result, I don't think there is that much of a travel advantage to the suburbs unless it happens to be a job in the same suburb where you live. We could all move to shorten our commutes, but I think people generally are reluctant to do so. I would guess that most people commute about the same time on average, with the landlocked-from-highways Shaker Heights residents traveling slower than the Avon resident speeding to work on 90, but both are probably still working within a 45 minute-or-less commute. I'd be interested in hearing the results of a survey of your fellow suburban office workers. Just ask "what time do you leave for work?" and what time they would be ready for a morning meeting. I'd bet that from the time they walk out the door at home to the time they clock in probably averages the same 20-40 minutes.

Ok, let's put the brakes on this a bit. Stealing tech. While there is a lot of copying of our tech in China, there are also a lot of non-Chinese companies successfully enforcing their tech rights (and still a lot of tech companies not even applying for patents in China). We've been protecting inventions since 1789 (after a much longer history of private property for inventions in Western culture) and China's first patent law was written in 1985 -- it's going to take another generation or two to get China out of the communist mindset that improvements in tech are part of the commons, free for anyone to use. Bio lab in China. A friend of mine is a pathologist and has done research on ebola. He says that the objections to the lab in China were that they did not do a good job of consistently following all of the protocols for a Level 2 lab (not quite up to ISO 9000 standards, so to speak), but that new U.S. labs often struggle to develop and maintain those protocols as well. In his view, it wasn't an egregiously sloppy lab, it was just some isolated failures that were called out with the expectation that they could and would fix it, and this is routine for all sophisticated bio labs. Creating viruses. He also said that while the Chinese might not have been fully open about what is going on, he knows several of the top researchers in that lab and regularly reads the papers that they publish, and they are way too busy doing meaningful research to be intentionally developing a weapon. In his view, that's just American paranoia. Additionally, the virus has now been sequenced and that data has been shared worldwide -- and this virus looks natural to the experts. It's just one person's opinion, but he suggested that it was something else that hasn't been suggested here. He says that bat guano is valuable as fertilizer, so farmers will go into caves with lots of bats to "harvest" the fertilizer, and it's pretty easy to breathe in a lot of dusty sh*t and catch whatever viruses the bats are excreting. All the Chinese provinces are in competition, and he suspects that the origin province suppressed news of the outbreak. Wuhan is a big transportation hub, and once it arrived there it spread even more widely and that's just where it was recognized as a pandemic. I think another option also needs to be on the table. This isn't the first bat virus to jump to humans (SARS), and the Chinese were rushing to research and catalog bat viruses to be ready for the next one to do so. (The US and other countries were helping with this, that is part of the funding sent to the Wuhan lab.) Scientists were visiting bat caves to take samples and while they probably took more precautions than a farmer would, mistakes happen. You take off your mask and accidentally wipe your sweaty forehead with a dirty glove. Oops. So while it's too early to rule anything out, the possibilities are not so heavily weighted to a human-created virus/bioweapon.

ROFL. I would be very surprised if that's how the vote turns out.

Traffic races up Stokes at high speed and accidents around the curve are not uncommon. Conversion to two-way traffic and reducing the number of lanes would be ideal. MLK on the other side of the park lost a lane due to the sewer tunnel construction project and it hasn't been much of a problem at all, which suggests that a change to two-way traffic after that project is complete would not be the disaster that some will predict.

For emphasis -- nailed it. If DARPA or some other national research outfit wants to invest in studying hyperloop feasibility, by all means, go for it. But at this point it's still a research project and is a completely unnecessary distraction for NOACA to be giving it any more thought.

More parking craters to fill between there and Playhouse Square. Would really like to see the Greyhound station rehabbed for a new use along with the acres of surrounding parking. That would really give this area a neighborhood feel.