ccars

Here's a serious topical question for you: is there anyone in the city where I can find a good döner kebab? I know they're not that popular in the states at all, but I'd sure like to make them so :)

Call it excuse-making if you will, but as was repeated before above, this is a very minor problem in the grand schemes of things. Those police should be out making sure people walking home alone don't get mugged or murdered, instead of babysitting drunks. And I'm aware that none of you like people under 21, but they're doing nothing illegal by catcalling at 2 AM. And that seems to be the extent of the excuses for the paramilitary crackdowns being called for. Ludicrous.

I'll do you one better: the solution is clearly to repeal the 21st Amendment. This is much closer to the correct answer. Where there is alcohol, there is vulgarity. It is the nature of humans. If one expects otherwise, stay at home or work toward reinstating prohibition. Lines of police or blocked streets will do nothing to aid the situation or influence drunken behavior.

As for the earlier comments on the Squire Sanders merger, I don't think it's anything we should be concerned about--I would argue the opposite. It's really not well known, but downtown Cleveland is a pretty important center for legal and accounting services, including, interestingly enough, international tax. Although Jones Day and Ernst & Young have shipped their headquarters plaques to DC and NY, their de facto administrative centers remain here and show no signs of shrinking. It's simply cheaper to locate the nerve center here, and in these industries, one doesn't really have to worry about attracting top talent by leveraging a particular location.

They're dragging at a snail's pace because most of the projects are driven by historical restoration grants, county and state loans, and other incentives. Getting the paperwork done for these loans takes YEARS. If you want anyone to blame, look no further than government bureaucracy. The 668 Euclid people actually had to BRIBE the building inspector to move the project forward.

Honestly most farms are not within reach of any railroads at all. It's not feasible to have most farms within a short distance of railroad spurs. "One seat rides" are not as valued in freight transport. It's generally more efficient to funnel freight into main trunk railroad lines and use trucks only to distribute to the endpoints.

Particularly infuriating to me when the new system went in was that unvalidated passes expire after 2 hours. I see no good reason for this, especially since the machine seems to implicitly encourage a user to buy multiple passes at once. It took me about 4 trips to remember this.

^^ One could probably label anyone per se reckless who has about a 50% debt-to-income ratio, depending on income level, and fails to accumulate any savings. Since the saving rate hit a low of about 1% in 2005 and has risen to 6% by today, one can assume that the average rate consists of a great deal of heavy savers and heavy overconsumers. Without this data, we cannot pass judgment, but it is clear that now that debt is not easily available, saving is a necessity.

That's a really bad date to pull that data for comparison. Since then, housing prices have declined significantly and we've seen at least two market crashes. I'm sure households are in much worse shape now.

That's why banks are not lending--there are no interested buyers who are creditworthy. Those who abused credit by buying houses they couldn't afford (and obligatorily, the mortgage brokers who sold them the loans) are now in deep trouble. But this entire global crisis is just a result of what's been happening on an individual level--we abuse debt. Now our credit card is maxed out and we just ran out of gas. Unfortunately, this is going to be only the beginning of our problems, because certainly the government is going to try to step in and muscle a return to the wasteful days by spending more money we don't have.

Little-known fact: Miami was also a real hotbed of bubble-esque construction up to 1929. It has a long history as a cesspool of speculators and hype machines. These are my thoughts exactly. Ohio has essentially been in a recession since 2001. We have been dealing with this foreclosure crisis since then, and most of the population that had something to lose in a cyclical recession has already lost it. The employment centers have already moved away, the international capital dried up years ago, and we've been written off for dead. The benefit here is that we've proven to the rest of the country that we are stable even if in a recession, which I believe will become far more valuable than any other indicators like growth or construction. If you look at Case-Schiller for Cleveland, the housing market stayed the flattest out of all the top 20 MSAs in the nation. Nothing happened here. The malinvestment wave simply skipped over us. I think this is going to prove to be a very important asset moving forward.

^^ I think there are two big crash leaders on the very close horizon: a bursting of the commercial real estate bubble and the Canadian residential real estate bubble. Both of these markets are behaving very similarly to what happened in housing in 2007--a very sharp rise in prices combined with a sharp decline in sales volume. Miami will probably see it first as a few new office towers came online in the last few months less than 40% occupied. One company strategically defaulted on over a million square feet of office space in L.A. This is going to bring us some pain job-wise, but not as much as the housing bubble did to the construction market. If we hold tight and don't meddle in the market, the foreclosures can be processed quickly, put into hands of investors who will charge reasonable rents, and private-sector employment will rise as overhead falls. But of course, Congress will do something stupid and perpetuate the crisis for years by paying the owners to avoid foreclosure.

ugh. this is the crowning glory of the commercial real estate bubble. office vacancy in SF is 18% and rising, and depending on which research you consult, it's worse than Cleveland's office market. I think this boondoggle is going to go the way of the chicago spire.

Without a doubt. Pittsburgh found this out the hard way. I certainly kept people from going downtown, and the casino had really suffered.... And has been operation at Severe undercapacity, or well below the inflated expectations. By all accounts I've heard that the Pittsburgh casino is awful. Dirty, overpriced, and located in a desolate part of the city that is cut off from the rest of downtown by a highway. It's as if we decided to build the Cleveland casino on the lakefront at the mouth of the river, but worse. I think Forest City has plans to develop that whole North Shore area in Pittsburgh but they might be rethinking this due to the poor performance of the casino, I don't know. At any rate, our casino plan seems to be much better thought out. I only hope they offer a poker room and table games right off the bat--this, I think, is one of the mistakes the the Pittsburgh casinos made. A casino isn't a casino without baccarat!

I think that's a bad reason to nix the idea. If the workforce is overwhelmed, that means they'll be collecting more user fees, which in turn allows them to hire paid employees. There's also no reason why they couldn't acquire more rolling stock and create a separate entity that provides the vanilla "coach" commuter service and then run the "scenic" trains at different times. Under one operations umbrella, they could provide far more efficient service. CVSR already has the rolling stock, the knowledge, and the right-of-way. It's already there, and it's a good backbone for demonstrating that service can be provided efficiently and cheaply. I'd think bringing a government entity in to push it around would muck up their service more than it is now.

I think it has something to do with the railroad industry's off-color and at times contentious relationship with the federal government that has existed for over 100 years. The FRA and other entities just hate railroads.

Drat. It really irks me how glacially slow these engineering and feasibility studies move. :/ A hundred years ago, we used to build entire rail lines in 6 months! Well, I guess it's back to the letter-writing campaign. If they're going to kill rail, they had better kill the highway funding too. Hypocrisy.

I don't propose we build a new building, but instead sink some money into rehabilitating old neighborhoods. Given the fact that those apartment buildings almost certainly have substantial market value, and the foreclosed homes do not, this potential project could be a wash or even a boon costwise. Pipe dream, though, at least until I can accumulate some capital and some clout.

I still wonder if anything can't be done from a policy standpoint. A single-bedroom HVCP voucher is worth about $50,000 in home improvements. I'd surmise that this is enough to rehab a single foreclosed house. Jesus, a lot of those homes have 3 or more bedrooms, and then your guaranteed rent goes up to $900/mo. We're left with the chicken and the egg problem. If we close the towers first, where do the people go? If we rehab the foreclosures first, who will rent the house? I'd surmise that CHMA itself could get a bank loan with a solid business plan if it planned to populate the homes with tenants they already have. Of course, that would mean more work for those with a pretty narrow mandate that is already being satisfied adequately.

This. Nobody said that the housing projects were race-restricted. There are poor folks of all races. They all have an equal propensity to commit crimes, especially when you concentrate them all in one area. This is what I don't understand. What perpetuates these housing projects? Is CMHA some kind of organization that is above the law? Do they have no accountability to the people? How is it that we can have massive housing projects right next to emerging neighborhoods? is this seen as a desirable policy position?

Any chances that this project will be off the ground by inauguration time? I don't see a new governor nixing a project that's already had more than a couple million sunk toward development.

What sold me was the ability to get drunk at the bar *while* running errands! I save so much time!

I might put it a little differently. Some properties are snatched up pretty quickly, while similar ones in the same neighborhood can take a really long time to sell. My impression could be wrong, but I see it more as a really spotty market in terms of resale. With the exception of North Collinwood (and only south of the Boulevard and away from E. 185th), Slavic Village, and Glenville, the neighborhoods suggested in this thread have fairly active real estate markets for livable properties. If you're watching Tremont right now, especially, that real estate market is actually heating up again as we speak. The foreclosures are another story, but even those are starting to see some stirring activity in Collinwood with people rehabbing them. Barring any catastrophic (and unexpected) meltdown, chances are, real estate prices aren't going anywhere, especially in the solid neighborhoods that were suggested here. By the way, this neighborhood map might be useful for getting your bearings about what neighborhoods people are talking about: http://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/general-u-s/34198d1232027660-map-neighborhoods-your-city-cleveland-neighborhoods.gif

^ This is the libertarian influence coming through to try to curb runaway spending. That they had to pick on this favorite project of ours is unfortunate and seems unjustifiable in light of the truckload of money we're about to dump into the worthless and wasteful interstate highway system. Unfortunately, the highway lobby is one of the most powerful in the country, and by contrast, the national rail system has relatively few powerful supporters.

^ That chart is shocking. I propose we lay rail on interstate highway right-of-ways. Heck, when we run out of oil, nobody going to use them anyway.