Down_with_Ctown

You're too modest, sir. You've spent the last year or so running circles around the local press. For us here on Urban Ohio, SW's announcement is almost anti-climactic. But hopefully the rest of the city wakes up to this tremendous news and starts thinking positively about Cleveland and its future!

They were knocking down the old police headquarters at Chester and 107th two weekends ago. I took some pics and posted them in the University Circle--General Developments section. Haven't been by the intersection since but they were about 90 percent done knocking everything down ten days ago.

Thanks for the great news, KJP. Cleveland has built an impressive medical industrial complex in the last several decades, but very little of it has happened in the heart of downtown. The developments have all been in University Circle and just recently, on West 25th in Metro's neighborhood. It would be great if downtown could get even a share of the growth in buildings and infrastructure those two areas have seen in this century alone. Not only is CSU strategically located near (in?) downtown, it also has the institutional chops to make a truly "eds and meds" contribution to the nearby central business district.

The old Cleveland Fire Department station at Chester and 107th is about 80 percent demolished. Just happened to be in the neighborhood; had no idea this demo was going on. Maybe a good sign UC3 is on track? (This site is directly north of the existing CPL library branch.

This kinda reminds me of the Little Italy apartment development on Cornell Road that got nixed by the city around last May or so. In his year-end review of Cleveland architectural news for Sunday's PD, Steven Litt* was still pretty salty over that one. Total aside--while I enjoy Litt's work and appreciate that he consistently promotes density, I can't help but think that his many years at the PD have resulted in too much of the Feagler/Larkin doom and gloom mindset rubbing off on him. In nearly every article, he has to mention how Cleveland is a "shrinking, post-industrial city." I don't need him to be a cheerleader, but he could at least take a look at some of the (many) positive trends that have been lining up for the past decade here in Cleveland.

It will be interesting to see exactly how much retail makes it into this very residential--but still mixed use--project. Retail in the eastern suburbs has slowly moving south and east for years, and has started to consolidate more and more around Beachwood/Legacy and Eton/Pinecrest as the two main poles. (Cedar Center North and South plus Oakwood Commons have done relatively well catering to Cleveland Hts., University Hts., and South Euclid, just on a less pricier scale. Also, Eastgate, Golden Gate and the nearby Mayfield Road corridor have thrived further east). Obviously, there's no room for the old Euclid Square Mall and Richmond Town Square in this reconfigured retail landscape. However, there is at least theoretically some room for new shops, stores and restaurants in this development, especially when you're adding over 700 new Class A, 1-2 BR apartment units to the neighborhood. There's also a lot of room in the nearby strip mall Hilltop Plaza (on Wilson Mills, across the street from Regal Cinemas and the old JCPenney building). Let's see (i) how much retail s.f. winds up being built for this property and (ii) what the tenant mix will be.

Wow, between SW yesterday at City Club today, the Roaring Twenties are off to a great start for Cleveland. As significant as the SW news is (it's a Fortune 500 company recommitting to Cleveland!), I hope this doesn't get lost in the shuffle. After almost a decade of office-to-residential conversions, we finally saw new builds in the Beacon and Lumen the last few years. The latter are interesting because it costs far more to build residential from scratch than it does to renovate an existing structure. Does this mean Cleveland rents per square foot are finally getting to the point where new residential towers can be financed on a semi-regular basis? If so, that's incredible news.

Great news for Cleveland all around, but I have to admit to being *slightly* disappointed that the tallest building in the project will "only" be 30 stories. But if the 1.45M s.f. HQ is going to be spread out over P.S. and the Weston lot, that has to mean there will be several other buildings in the same range. As many have said, our skyline is skewed towards the east and needs balancing. It sounds like this project will do that. Hopefully, everything meshes well and the TT, Key Tower, and 200 PS are augmented by the nearby density.

Hopefully this gets picked up by cleveland.com in one of those "Cleveland blogger reports..." type deals. They've done it before. Then, it can start filtering its way through the media ecosystem and get Cleveland some early, positive pub around the country. What a way to start the decade!

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2019/12/bail-reform-central-booking-and-the-justice-center-are-2020-priorities-for-cuyahoga-countys-new-top-judge.html On January 1, Judge Brendan Sheehan replaced John Russo as the Cuyahoga Common Pleas Court's Administrative Judge. Ex officio, he also takes Russo's place on the steering committee responsible for determining the future of the Justice Center. He had some interesting comments in the article, and appears to be leaning towards a new building in downtown. The article quotes him as "acknowledging" that renovation of the existing building would be expensive. The article further quotes him as saying that if the public believes renovating the current JC is too expensive, "obviously we've got to move."

Wow--this building dominates the Detroit Road/West 25-29th neighborhood as is. To think four more floors are coming will be truly transformative for this stretch of road. And with Market Square coming on Lorain, I think it's safe to say we're entering a new era of height and density in Ohio City. Exciting times.

Glad to see brand-new, market-rate apartments coming to a retailed-out area on the suburban east side. With Legacy/Beachwood to the east and Cedar Center immediately to the west, there was no chance for new retail here. Residential is the obvious solution, and should give a nice boost to UH, which consists almost exclusively of single family homes constructed well over half a century ago. A similar thing is supposedly imminent just a couple miles northeast at Richmond Town Square, with an empty mall and department stores slated to be replaced with hundreds of new Class A apartment units in the next several years. A quick question about the project, because it was hard to glean an answer from the article--are they tearing down the 20-year old parking garage, which was poorly constructed and started to give the previous owners problems fifteen years ago? From the Cedar Road view in the drawings above, that almost certainly looks to be the case. In the article, however, something was mentioned about "adding" floors (but not height) to the existing building that faces Cedar. That building is about 75 percent parking garage with empty retail (and Applebee's) wrapped around it. I have to think starting over is the best answer because I just can't picture in my mind how a "parking garage to residential" conversion even works, lol.

There hasn't been this big a reason to throw a parade in Cleveland since the Cavs winning the NBA title 3.5 years ago. I'm not expecting one now, but hopefully somewhere, the great J.R. Smith is walking around shirtless!

Boy, Deal Point Merrill sure *hearts* Richmond Heights/Hillcrest. From a $8M or so "investment" four years ago to turn the empty Macy's building into a giant self-storage box, the company's L.A. management has steadily pledged hundreds of millions of dollars of future investment. Something in the city and neighborhood must have piqued their interest. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during those discussions. Say what you will about NEO's sprawl and overbuilt retail market, but this region has had incredible luck with its dead malls. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single empty mall currently rotting away in a cavernous parking lot. Randall Park and Euclid are Amazon fulfillment centers, Westgate and Parmatown are fully-occupied outdoor lifestyle centers, and now Richmond Town Square is going mixed use. Beachwood, South Park, Great Lakes, and Great Northern are very much live malls. About the only major retail casualty is Severance, and even that property had a "second life" of about 15 years before falling on hard times (which was entirely due to South Euclid's poaching of Wal Mart). Even the current Severance, though, has Home Depot, Office Max, Marshall's, and a fully occupied strip mall. If the city could get lucky with a new owner, the nearby City Hall, medical building, Metro inpatient facility, and great location could see some exciting changes.

Two photos of the in-progress Euclid Lakefront Trail looking southeast from the Sims Park pier. Given the scope of the project, it's impossible to get a panoramic view of the entire trail from the lake (the drone pics in KJP's 10/2/19 post, above, do a much better job). But this is the trail as of Wednesday evening. The bottom pic is directly east of the pier. The erosion-killing rock line is impressive in person, especially for something so explicitly functional. The grassy berm stretching upward isn't looking its best in late-October, but if the city waters it regularly during the summer, it will look just fine. Also, you can't really make out the pedestrian trail from the lake, but trust me, it's there. It's about a 3/4-mile asphalt trail that has been completed. It's nothing special to look at, but will be fun to stroll upon when it's open (right now, it's barricaded off). The top pic shows the eastern end of the trial, with the Lakeshore Blvd. high-rise apartment buildings (between E. 250th and 260th Streets) in the background. That part is still being worked on, and looks great, even from a distance. This is an exciting project for Euclid, as the trail is located in the criminally underrated Sims Park and is directly north of "downtown" Euclid (Lakeshore Cinemas, Great Scott Tavern, etc.)

Good analysis of the facts on the ground, and an even better analysis of journalism today. I get why good reporting is hard to find, especially with traditional media companies facing so many financial headwinds. So it's no surprise that The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com don't have an "inside source" on the SHW HQ negotiations. What's not excusable, though, is cle.com and WKYC being such poor aggregators of other people's work. I'm just a lowly consumer of news with no working knowledge of how a newsroom works, but it takes me less than 5 minutes to read KJP's blog post from earlier this month and Boyd's half-baked (and regurgitated) stuff and I can already tell you which article is better sourced and more reliable. Scene magazine isn't always the most reliable or consistent news source in NEO, but give them credit on this story, at least. They're far better at linking to content than cle.com and WKYC have been.

Photos of the in-progress 11601 Euclid Avenue apartment building from yesterday.

One dark spot around that area that's always bugged me is the empty Mayfield Theater on the south side of Mayfield Road between La Collina (to the east) and Corbo's bakery and the Mia Bella restaurant (to the west). That building has been vacant as long as I remember. As an old theater, I'm sure it's a tricky redevelopment project but the land it's sitting on has got to be pretty valuable at this point.

Hate to be such a tease, but I was in the neighborhood again yesterday, and they're really making some progress on the new hospital. The elevator shafts are now about 4-5 stories in the air and the first floor steel work has expanded significantly across the construction site. One of these days, I'm going to try and find a place to park around there and snap a few pics. I'm an east sider, so it may be awhile but work occasionally takes me at or near the W. 25th/I-71 area.

I was in the neighborhood yesterday and am happy to report that are there are steel beams in the air just off W. 25th for the forthcoming "hospital in the park." So far, just one corner of one floor, but we're above ground. Couldn't take pictures because I was in a rush and traffic is an absolute disaster from W. 25th/Lorain all the way to the 71 interchange, but progress is being made. Also, this week's Scene magazine has an front page story on the effect this project will have on the nearby Clark/Fulton neighborhood. Just skimmed it so far, but should be interesting reading.

I'm trying to picture how the very hypothetical 40-story main HQ building would look like on the PS Jacobs lot. 200 Public Square (nee the BP building) is 45/46 stories and 658' tall. The Terminal Tower is 52 stories and 771'. Key Tower is 57 stories and 888' (947' at tip). Obviously, we don't know how tall each floor will be compared to the other 3 buildings, but based on KJP's article, I'd bet we're not talking a gigantic height. I suppose the main HQ tower would look fine on PS, as it would only be 5-6 stories shorter than the 200 PS, which is a decent-sized building as far as midwestern skyscrapers go. It would also "finish off" the framing of PS on all four corners, making for great postcard and publicity picks. Still, I guess I'd be just a *little* disappointed if the fourth and final skyscraper on PS is the shortest one. The filling in of the Superblock makes up for it, but damn it, I like skylines *and* density. Can't we have our cake and eat it too? ?

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2019/05/maple-heights-mayor-dreaming-of-a-starbucks-and-sit-down-restaurants-is-not-ready-to-give-up-mark-naymik.html This article technically talks about some potential developments in the city of Maple Heights (like new residential on a closed post office site), but it's mostly an interesting, optimistic look at an inner-ring suburb trying to bounce back from the foreclosure crisis and a recent state fiscal intervention. For example, the median home value is now $69,000 in a city of about 20,000. The new(ish) Mayor is looking to add dining and entertainment options to the city going forward. I'm guessing the nearby Amazon fulfillment center in North Randall has helped the suburb, as well as the economic recovery in general. Still, I wonder if this suburb can survive the next economic downturn. I've always thought inner-ring suburbs like Maple Heights are relatively low hanging fruit when it comes to regionalization. They're really too small and residential to make it on their own but also big enough that adding them to Cleveland would give the latter a meaningful population bump. They're also majority minority (MH is 70 percent so), so they wouldn't dilute Cleveland's majority African-American population. And there's also the domino theory--once Maple Heights goes, why not Garfield Hts. or Warrensville Hts? So as much as the Mayor in this article deserves credit for her enthusiasm, perhaps she can be a leader towards regionalization and growing Cleveland in the long term?

So I read the Scene article and I'm a little confused. Tell me if the following is an accurate TL;DR summary-- A key element of Nucleus's financing package is a $12M loan from the City of Cleveland to Stark. Stark will repay the city with $13.2 million in new property tax revenue generated by Nucleus, "guaranteeing" the city a 10 percent ROI. Somehow this is different from the TIF plan also in place for the project. Cleveland schools will be unaffected and receive a full protion of the property tax revenue generated by Nucleus. Opponents of the project believe that the $13.2 million in property taxes mentioned above should go to the city free and clear of any loan commitments. However (and please correct me if I'm wrong), that $13.2M exists if and only if Nucleus goes forward (the surface parking lot currently occupying the site ain't gonna raise that kind of cash). So if all goes as planned, the city collects an extra $1.2M in property taxes over a specified period and also benefits from a $350M+ mixed use project smack dab in its CBD. Plus a new stream of income and sales taxes from the increased economic activity associated with the project. Under the status quo, Cleveland collects nothing more than what they are already receiving. All things considered, it seems like part of the cost of doing business in a major urban area. My understanding is that the subsidies involved here are not direct handouts but rather splitting a larger pie that the developer helped create. Not to get too political, but kind of like the Amazon project in NYC. Except Stark isn't Jeff Bezos and the City of Cleveland could probably use the development more than New York City. Again, I may have some of the details wrong, so please feel free to let me know if there's more going on than meets the eye here.

Ironically, Richmond Road is down to one lane in each direction throughout the city of Richmond Heights for a summer-long resurfacing project. Per city officials, the underlying concrete portion of the road hasn't been replaced since the mall was built in circa 1966. Coincidentally or not, that's some serious infrastructure work accompanying DPM's development. This is one of the more creative "dead mall" solutions I've seen in years. It's not often abandoned retail gets transformed into class A residential living (granted, the developers may be doing a little bit of puffing here. Also, I'll believe the hotel when I see it). Retail in this portion of the Hillcrest area is no longer feasible. Over the last several decades, the action has spread to the east (the Wilson Mills and Mayfield Road corridors) and south (first Beachwood, then Legacy, and if you really want to stretch it, Eton and Pinecrest). You weren't going to see a Westgate or "Shoppes of Parma" outdoor power center-type conversion on this site. And Amazon is only 2.5 miles or so up the road in the old Euclid Square Mall site. I hope the project works, especially because there's an empty JCPenney store on the other side of this site that is also open to development.

Per MJ's article, demolition of the current plaza "could start in late summer or early fall." Can't wait! They're talking of a Grand Opening in early 2021--just two years time.