WestBLVD

Here are pictures of some completed loft conversions that took place a few years ago on the square in Downtown Wooster. Exposed brick galore! I don't think many would expect to see these kinds of apartments there.

This area is unfortunately a huge cut through at rush hour. Because the innerbelt backs up daily, many commuters take I-90 to 2 and then go up West Blvd and reconnect to 90 West and vice versa for the opposite commute. You've got a turn lane for West Blvd (that regularly is so long that it takes up the second lane), and then another turn lane for Berea Road, then two through lanes that immediately go to one at the Chicle building. Sadly Cleveland just recently EXPANDED West Blvd northbound to 2 lanes a few weeks ago north of Detroit. They did this by removing street parking, shrinking a turn lane, and repainting stripes. The increased cut through traffic the past 2 years has been unreal. But there's always been problem for pedestrians trying to cross at both West Blvd/Detroit intersections to get to the rapid stop. Anytime you've got a pedestrian walkway crossing a multi-lane turn you're going to get safety issues. Currently, you can only cross Detroit on the west side of West Blvd from the rapid stop, but many people will still try to cross on the east side where there are no markings. The terrace rowhouse rehabs look really great, but I wonder how long the facades will be kept up. I'm hoping some attractive landscaping in the spring time will help. This neighborhood anywhere else would be insanely different. You have direct rail access to downtown Cleveland (11 mins) Direct access to Hopkins Airport (15 mins) direct access to Lake Erie and Edgewater Park, yes that's just 5 blocks to the north without any impediments! You have a ton of medium to high density apartments (half vacant) surrounding a rapid stop. You have a historic commercial strip. You have gorgeous tree lined streets with beautiful homes. Any 5 story or taller apartment building would have Lake Erie views here as it sits just on the secondary lake edge bluff. Theoretically this should be one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Cleveland and if this were any other large city it would be. Yet it blows my mind how this is arguably the worst section of Detroit Avenue, and the neighborhood is not on Cleveland's long list of up an coming areas. However, I would say that if we were to have a sudden energy crisis, that could be a huge game changer for the neighborhood. It has all the elements needed that make a neighborhood successful, it's just severely lacking investment. A sudden jolt in the price of oil and rest assured, this will be one of the first areas in Cleveland to see development, rehabs, and an influx of new residents as a sound infrastructure is already in place.

The Merchant's Block development is really taking shape as you can see from the before and after pictures. Downtown Wooster is doing incredibly well for the cards it has been dealt the past decade. There's hardly an empty storefront downtown, and quite an assortment of high end dining options. A recent Saturday night excursion found long waits at all downtown restaurants. The number of boutiques and coffee shops has also jumped in recent years as well as the number of loft apartments. So many Ohio towns would kill to have the success Wooster has had recently in its downtown transformation.

Anyone else notice that ODOT installed exit number signage for the West Shoreway yesterday? Kind of funny for a road that may become a boulevard there are now numbered exits! I think West 45th was exit 194. Not sure how they got the numbering scheme. And with regards to RTA and the 55, it's such a shame what's happened to that route with such service cut backs. I made the mistake of hopping on the 55 at Clifton only to find it exiting the shoreway at West 45th and crawling up Detroit. Consequently I was 20 minutes late for work and will avoid the 55 in the future. The bus seemed emptier than usual. I'm curious how much ridership the 55 has lost now that it can't "express" into downtown?

I was referring to buildings such as this one, which I believe recently went vacant and buildings such as these that sit half empty all over town: http://g.co/maps/978nu There's no denying that there is a market for more downtown apartments. The conversions are warranted, but do have effects elsewhere. Even if the moves downtown are from the suburbs, someone is moving into their old residence, where did they move from, and who moved into that person's residence and so forth, until you get to the location where the extra vacant unit just got added to the list. Because the net loss in Cuyahoga County is roughly 11,000 people a year, there's always going to be a huge increase in vacant units each year, even if you get modest reductions in household size. So any new housing projects, without subsequent demolition, exacerbate vacancies, lower home values, lower rents, and lower incentives to revitalize a neighborhood. Obviously it's great if downtown can steal away from potential new tract housing in North Ridgeville :) , but sometimes it's good to look at the bigger picture. The reality is that some homes/buildings/neighborhoods are just going to decline further in Cleveland at the expense of downtown's growth or some other town/neighborhood's growth in a region with a declining population. That's why I always look at huge conversion projects with a bittersweet mentality. Great for that spot, bad for somewhere else.

Very true, I could care less if vacancies started to sprout in Geauga County. But I do worry about the glut of housing here. I often wonder though that if the desirability of downtown living has more to do with the age and modernity of the unit itself, versus the actual location. Downtown by far has the most number of new modernized units and someone looking for an urban place that has granite countertops, sleek finishes, walk in closets, central air, etc, is most likely going to pick downtown because that's where the most selection is. It's much cheaper to convert 100 units into modern units in one fell swoop downtown versus doing it in numerous much smaller apartment buildings/doubles/triples in our neighborhoods. And while this merges with another thread, the East Ohio Gas conversion is likely going to take some public money to go forward. Should the city, state, county, put money into this conversion project to create more housing in this location? I guess I'd rather see those 6-15 unit "old fashioned apartment buildings" scattered throughout our neighborhoods renovated instead into 3-8 unit buildings with modern units with modern finishes. That way you modernize a building, maintain the structure, increase the desirability of that block/neighborhood but also achieve the goal of reducing the amount of units in a region that has too many to begin with.

Oh, I agree that downtown living is unique and definitely provides a certain niche market. But there are still quite a few people who live downtown that moved from other neighborhoods or chose downtown among an apartment elsewhere in the city. Perhaps I didn't convey this clearly in my original post, but I was remarking on conversions because they increase the number of available units in a city that is losing residents. An increase in 5K new converted units in downtown means that 5k units elsewhere in the city become vacant. Toss a couple more of those vacant units on select streets in our city and it's easy to see where we are going. A 6 unit apartment building that becomes vacant on a street in Cudell or Edgewater can prove to be disastrous for that entire block and set that neighborhood into decline.

I've been thinking about this a lot. Fascinating urban nerdery! :) It's kind of the opposite of our Cleveland Neighborhoods in 2016 thread ... What neighborhoods are most at threat for a backslide. My guess is that if we don't see population gains in the under-40 market in the next decade, you're right. I'd be most worried if I was a rental property owner in the Heights or Lakewood ... Or potentially edge city neighborhoods like Old Brooklyn, West Park or Edgewater/Cudell. At the same time, I'm still hearing about plenty of people moving out of the city to Lakewood. I've also seen 20-somethings moving from places like Asiatown, Tremont and Shaker Square moving to Cleveland Heights and buying a house, courtesy of the city getting hit relatively hard by the foreclosure crisis. The opening of ownership opportunities for younger people in the inner ring is one thing that may stabilize these cities, although not necessarily the rental properties. I also think that as rents rise in places like downtown, Ohio City and University Circle, we'll see people self-selecting into cheaper rental markets; the big question for me is whether those rental markets will be places like Asiatown or Slavic Village or whether they'll be places like Cedar Fairmount and the Gold Coast. Ive been doing alot of work in this area, and as I keep mentioning, pretty much all of the previously stable parts of the city or Cleveland (such as old brooklyn, west park and Edgewater/Cudell have been in decline and seen subsequent increases in crime. Same with Lakewood and Cleveland Heights as a whole, but because both of these areas still have more expensive and desirable housing, it has been somewhat confined to certain areas of those cities. It does tend to go hand in hand with the changing demographics that these areas have been seen. Also for the most part these areas have seen a big increase in rental housing, in part due to middle class or even elderly residents wanting to get out and not being able to get their investment out of the property, but also due to the foreclosure crisis, where properties may have been bought up just for rental purposes, and often section 8, just to reap some kind of return. So without a big improvement in the local economy, several quarters of job gains, and a change in the perception of these areas, any improvement in one area only seems to result in the tradeoff of a decline in another. That's why I have been so adamant about maintaining the stable areas (and at least making an effort to stabilize/prevent further flight) because under the circumstances of no/negative population growth and general cheap housing in the region, it would tak along time for those areas to come back. Same with Cleve Hts and Lkwd.. Schools and crime have to be kept in check top prevent a mass exodus. Tom Bier at Cleveland State has done alot of work in this area and has predicted most of what has already happened. His latest report predicts more of the same and not very good predictions for Cuyahoga County if massive amounts of redevelopment doesn't take place in the meantime. Other studies have noted a bright side with all the interest in downtown living, and radiating interest in surrounding areas, but its really only a drop in the bucket, and typically limited to childless people. I can't help but think that the increase in downtown living is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's really hard to shore up areas when you have a net county population loss of 100,000+ in the past ten years. There are only a certain % of people who desire to live in an urban environment, and whether they choose to move into a 6 unit apartment building in the Detroit Shoreway in 5 years or a proposed new residential tower on the lakefront, it has huge implications on the vibrancy of Cleveland neighborhoods down the line. I sometimes cringe at the progression downtown has made. We used to have the Galleria and an upscale Tower City Center roughly 2 decades ago, with a handful of department stores going a little farther back. Historically, retail in downtown Cleveland did great without many residents living there (1950s anyone?) We traded retail for residents over that time. I might get my head bit off for this, but oh well, I really wish all of the residential development that occurred in downtown over the past 10 years did not get built, but actually got scattered among all of our Cleveland neighborhoods instead. The whole "downtown" model is based upon vibrant residential neighborhoods feeding a central commercial core. When your residential neighborhoods are no longer thriving, your downtown suffers. The solution is not to inject a few apartment buildings into the central core to increase the vibrancy of downtown, but rather to make sure the city neighborhoods are still thriving so there is a need for the residents to conduct commerce in the core. That's why I cringe when I read about the potential for a 100 unit conversion to a building downtown. That 100 unit conversion would have a much better impact IMO if it were in the Detroit Shoreway, Edgewater/Cudell, University Circle, etc as it would revitalize those neighborhoods but still feed into Downtown's commerce. When you put that residential into downtown, only downtown gains but Cleveland's residential neighborhoods do not. Call me an urban purist, but I would much rather strengthen downtown's commercial value over its residential value, and focus on residential revitalization where its needed most, in the neighborhoods. But it really is a chicken/egg question and what you truly believe. Maybe some think injecting a lot of money into the downtown will feed into the neighborhoods. Some believe that injecting a lot of money into the neighborhoods feeds downtown. I, personally, just don't see how another 5-10K residents in converted office towers downtown over the next 5-10 years benefits Collinwood or West Park, but I definitely can see how another 5-10K jobs in renovated office towers would help those neighborhoods.

You're joking, right? It's the heart of the city where you're paying for an ultimate urban vibe. This is something anyone in a big city would not nor should not blink about nor feel its devaluing their home! I was being tongue in cheek regarding the difference between a center and garage. I admit it's something different, but I have to stare at this garage all day, the colors are too obnoxious for my taste. I feel they could have picked something just as dramatic/eye catching but with more aesthetic appeal.

Interesting to note how the addition of an orange advertising wrap now elevates this from a parking "garage" to a parking "center". I can't help but wonder if this is a new PR and marketing trend to combat the negative connotations that parking garages have been getting as of late.

There were at least 100 people in the park today at lunch. There's a ton of seating and tables scattered about, but still not enough to keep up with the lunch time demand on a gorgeous spring day. :) I think part of this has to do with the fact that all of the wonderful green space and seating is gone from the malls for the convention center construction. Perk Park really is a great place to eat your lunch, read a book, or relax for 15 minutes. A much welcome change from the horrible concrete park that was there before. Luckily from this spot the KIA PARKING CENTER isn't too noticeable until you go up to Superior.

I snapped this today. Picture speaks for itself. How this "sells" the Avenue District is beyond me. As I said before I hope this isn't a new trend in the city. I'd be mortified if one of the parking garages on Euclid or Prospect got the same treatment with a bright lime green shrink wrap announcing the Pepsi-Cola Parking Center or something just as tacky.

We really need 2 or 3 decent restaurants down there in the next year or two to really jumpstart this area. Right now, it is just mainly a disconnected tourist spot. What local (outside of taking a walk on their lunch hour) ventures down there? No one just says, "hey let's go down to the Rock Hall", that area is strictly something people in the region do once in their life and then reserve for when they have friends/family visiting from out of town. So a small handful of attractions added in the next year or two, such as 2 or 3 restaurants and perhaps a summer concert series could do numbers in making this a destination for locals, and subsequently spurring off shoot development as the plan lays out.

Um yeah ... This started going up today. I'll refrain from taking a picture until it's completely done. If they actually wrap the entire garage in that, it's going to be ... just wow. So much for having parking garages hidden from obscurity and blending into the surrounding environment. Bright orange stripes 8 stories tall. yikes. I can't believe the city allowed this. I'm terribly afraid of the precedent/trend this might start with the plethora of parking garages in this city.

As another thought. Perhaps RTA could have boarded the trains kind of like an amusement park. For example, people in line A sit in car A, and so forth. Except in this situation RTA would only let on so many people at each station, ensuring that trains would arrive packed full into Tower City, but yet riders from each west side stop would have an equal chance to board. Basically spreading the unfair wait burden to all stations rather than to those who were trying to board at closer stations. RTA could have also just not opened the doors on one of the cars. Therefore not allowing all three trains to have filled up by the time they hit West Park. Then once the train got to W 117th or another closer stop, the doors would open allowing passengers here a chance to board and fill an empty train. Then again, trying to put order into a crowd that was probably already drunk wouldn't be an easy feat. The demand was so great that you just weren't going to please everybody. It really puts into perspective the chaos that would ensue if there was a sudden extreme surge in the price of oil and folks started to look to public transit as an alternative option. If the rapid carried 100,000 passengers that day, that's approximately 5% of the Cleveland MSA going to downtown Cleveland, or 2.5% if those were passenger trips and each person made a round trip. I'm not sure how many people commute to work downtown everyday, but just imagine if all of a sudden you had 100,000 or 50,000 people wanting to get to work in downtown Cleveland everyday by public transit that didn't, lets say, 3 months prior because of a huge shift in the economics of oil. Very scary thought to process, not just here locally, but in almost every city in the US. How quickly could a public transit infrastructure be expanded if the demand were to instantly explode?

I think the old beach cliff there would make it quite difficult to have an on grade intersection. It would also be one heck of a huge intersection and wouldn't be pedestrian friendly at all. Right now, it's rather easy to walk down there. You just have to cross a 2 lane section (which is one way), then the overpass, then another 2 lane (one way) section. Otherwise it would be an 8 lane mess to cross with a multitude of turning lanes. The current set-up really breaks up the traffic flow and makes it convenient for pedestrians.

I like everything about this plan except for the far east stuff. That office park seems a bit out of place, do we really need an office park in that location? The Parkway concept seems a bit out of place as well. Would that be new residential apartment buildings on the current muni lot? Wouldn't be my first choice as a place to add residential downtown. With a busy freight rail line behind that, a highway in front of that, and a proposed office park beyond, those buildings would feel like no man's land compared to the rest of downtown. I would have liked to have seen this plan somehow extend the avenue district northward into the muni lot (pedestrian bridge or what have you) and mesh into North Coast Harbor instead. There's a huge opportunity to build this district up that the city is missing here.

That crowd was much larger earlier. As I posted in the St. Paddy's Day Thread ... I think RTA handled the situation pretty good. But I think there was a lot of room for improvement. Basically, if you were trying to board at any station that was not Brookpark or the Airport you were SOL. Multiple trains would pass by (this was at 11 am) and you couldn't board. An RTA employee suggested that people board the mostly empty westbound trains and ride to the airport, the train would then turn around and go back downtown, hence guaranteeing a seat and arriving downtown in roughly an hour's time. So what was happening is that the trains were arriving at the airport roughly 80% full. The train would turn back around, fill up at Brookpark and then not be able to accommodate any more passengers at any west side rapid stops. So essentially every station was just bottlenecking. The people who were most screwed were those at W 117th, West Blvd, and W 65th. There was no way you were going downtown on an eastbound train. You had to go to the airport first, which was absurd and most people balked at the idea. I'm not sure if RTA came with empty busses to relieve some of the congestion, but it was just insane. I saw a 26 go by completely full as well at the West Blvd station, also unable to pick up any more passengers. I felt bad for the people who were obviously not going to any parade but were just using public transit as part of their normal life ... they were unable to go anywhere on public transit. My one suggestion for RTA is that they should not have put so much emphasis on their rail system. It obviously could not handle the kind of volume on Saturday, even running 3 car trains every 10 minutes or so. In my opinion, it would have needed 4 or 5 car trains (probably impossible) every 3 minutes (probably also impossible) to even attempt to handle the demand in a reasonable amount of time. In the future, I will never take the red line for any high demand event downtown and instead try to find a less congested bus route or carpool. Unfortunately there was such a high demand for public transit on a Saturday, which is a low bus service day for RTA. I feel as if a lot of congestion on the west side could have been alleviated by running a modified weekday schedule ... particularly for the 55/55F and 26. These busses should have been running every 10-15 minutes down Clifton like they do during the rush hours and just let everyone off on Lakeside and then picked up people on Lakeside and East 9th in front of the Federal Building and then returned back on the Shoreway. The 55 and 26 are the locations where your target St. Patrick's Day customers live. This could have channeled 1000s of people waiting for hours at west side rapid stops and prevented the dangerously large crowds from forming at Tower City.

Yeah. I figured it's been like this in the past, but I've personally never taken the rapid on March 17th. I've always taken a bus to work when St. Paddy's falls on a weekday and even then it was before 8 am, so I've never had to deal with the crowds. This was mind blowing. It appeared that RTA was well prepared. There were agents selling all day passes so there was no need to queue up at the self serve kiosks. There were RTA agents on the platforms explaining the waits to people (and the alternate option of going to the airport and returning back) and a boatload of traffic police and regular police and even cleaning crews at the platforms. RTA definitely envisioned a huge demand for the red line service today, but combine this holiday falling on a Saturday and falling during one of the warmest weeks on record for March and the hottest St. Patrick's Day temperature on record for Cleveland, you're going to have ridiculous crowds and ridiculous waits. I think it's reasonable to expect to maybe have to wait for a train or two for a busy event. But up to 2 hours to get from W 117th street to downtown, that's just insane!

Of course you should. Apparently RTA is aware that today is a big ridership day. (http://www.riderta.com/newsroom/releases/?listingid=1710) yet they're operating normal Saturday service? even if they operated 4-car trains, it wouldn't cost them anything in personnel--still one operator. (maybe a guy in the yard to oversee coupling). They should have been doing both---longer trains AND more frequent service. I think 3 car trains is the max for the red line, someone correct me if I'm wrong. It also appeared that they were running the trains every 10 minutes. So it appeared that RTA was running the red line at its maximum, but unfortunately the maximum couldn't keep up with the demand. I will be very curious to see any press release for ridership figures for today. They have got to be astronomical. My only critique is that RTA shouldn't have put so much emphasis onto their train system. They should have been running more west side busses to alleviate the strain.

I "attempted" to take the rapid from West Blvd to downtown at 11 am. BIG MISTAKE. Basically every train that would pass the station was already chock full of passengers and could board no more. People had already waited for 4 trains to pass when I arrived. An RTA person at the station told passengers that their best bet was to just get on a west bound train to the airport, stay on, and the train will return back downtown. So, what normally is a 12 minute ride turned into almost an hour and a half. Every station was MOBBED with passengers trying to board. The west bound trains were arriving to the airport at about 80% capacity, all of whom were just trying to get downtown, so when the train turned around, a few more would board at Brookpark and then could not accommodate any more passengers at any more west side stations. It was utterly insane. You had 1,000s of passengers trying to board completely full trains. I'm sure quite a few people just gave up and left. I have no idea how the process continued for the rest of the afternoon, especially once peak time hit. But there is just no possible way to accommodate this kind of volume. Anyone trying to board east bound at any stop other than the Airport or Brookpark was SOL. Perhaps RTA ended up getting busses out to the other stations to get people downtown? Perhaps they could have ran empty trains to particular stations to alleviate the build-ups. Basically this was Manhattan at 5:10pm on a business day type of volume on the platforms. RTA would have needed 6 car trains every 3 minutes to handle this capacity. In hindsight, I would have just drove (I wasn't drinking) over to Ohio City, parked on a side street and walked into downtown. Would have saved me a ton of time and a lot of hassle. I don't blame RTA at all. Their system is just not able to handle this kind of demand. I think falling on a Saturday hurt as well because you had increased demand for public transit on a day where RTA runs fewer busses. RTA should have been running a weekday 55/55F route. This would have alleviated a significant amount of demand away from the Red Line which just couldn't handle this kind of volume. I did happen to see a 26 at the West Blvd station that could also not accommodate any new riders. So basically if you were at the West Blvd station, you were unable to go east bound via any public transit which was not making anyone happy.

Here's another little hidden gem downtown. East 18th street north of Lakeside Avenue is still stone/cobblestone. http://g.co/maps/7s7st

Here are some examples of Cleveland streets with brick, and actually if you just browse through Cleveland on satellite view, they are a dime a dozen! http://g.co/maps/6c7hr edit, the formatting for street view doesn't embed correctly.

This is a great idea. Last summer I was all excited when they tore all of the asphalt from W 106th off Clifton and exposed all the bricks below. The street looked beautiful. They put up one of those "your tax dollar at work signs". Then came a new coating of asphalt. The street looks terrible now again. What a waste. Judging from that project in Cleveland, it's not terribly difficult to remove old asphalt and in this example was actually needed to re-asphalt it again. Perhaps the city could actually save money in the long haul for their re-asphalting projects by just getting the job half done!

Reading between the lines, it seems that economic success for young Americans is only achieved by leaving your rust belt hometown for the sunbelt or coastal oasis. Perhaps, rather, the success of those areas are achieved by draining youth from the heartland. Come on young adults, the path to a prosperous and successful life is by buying a car and driving from Columbus, Ohio for a new life as a teacher in the Phoenix suburbs! It just bothers me that the authors tried to link one's personal success as a function of if they crossed a state line for work. And the last line really irks me. Why do youth need to hit the road again? Oh wait, because hitting the road is some traditional American value that must be preserved and not die out with this generation.