LocutusOfBoard

I am dissapointed that Ohio has missed out on the airport boom. The state's biggest airport, Cleveland, is mediocre at best. Atlanta and Dallas cleverly invested in hub airports in the 1980's, foreseeing the huge boom in consumer airline travel. This is while people in Ohio probably thought that investing in steel factories was the way to go. Cities like Atlanta and Dallas benefitted not only by creating lots of airport jobs, but because they have excellent point to point service out of their city they are popular as business and especially corporate HQ destinations. That has brought a lot of jobs and wealth into both cities, which used to be cowtowns not too long ago. Cincinnati's airport (which is not in Ohio) is quite good, although most of the growth there has been recent. When P&G bought out Gillete and Macy's bought out Federated, the new companies could have easily decided to relocate to the othter city. This frequently happens (when K-Mart bought out Sears, they sold their own HQ and moved to Chicago). But Cincinnati's respectable air service (e.g. flights to 5 European cities daily) was probably a big plus in keeping them in town. One reason Cincinnati actually has so many Fortune 500 companies probably has something to do with the air service. It's still not too late to get in on the airline business. Airline travel will probably continue to grow for several decades, so it is worthwhile for cities to invest in airports. Columbus lost their America West hub, so Cleveland can also lose their Continental hub if it's not worthwhile for the airline. Pittsburgh lost their U.S. Airways hub recently as well. Continental has 3 hub airports: Houston, Newark, and Cleveland. Houston is a poor llocation for a hub, even though I don't doubt the cost of doing business there is cheap. For flying to Europe or Asia, Houston is crap. As a North American hub airport, it's just poorly situated. Cleveland has a better location, especially once you consider that most East-West flights veer to the North. In Newark, I would imagine their costs are very high. As an international hub, Newark makes sense, but it's location is crappy as a North American hub. So Cleveland getting flights to Asia or to more destinations in Europe is not entirely out of the question. In fact, it's very probable if they make the right investments. From Continental's POV, Cleveland has a better location than Houston, and a lower cost of business than Newark.

Length of runway is absolutely a factor. For long distance flights with big planes, you need a big runway. You need a minimum of 12,000 feet just to accomodate those planes today (although 14,000 feet like JFK is better). And in the future, airports will need even bigger runways to accomodate the big Airbus planes.

Maybe Cleveland would be better off building a new airport out in the flat westerns suburbs, and converting the old airport to a community like Denver did. There's not much room to grow: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Cleveland&ll=41.410291,-81.856213&spn=0.063722,0.120352&t=h&hl=en

Didn't Cleveland just open up their first 9,000 foot runway? It's good news, but it's pretty sad also. Even a moribund airport like Toledo has a 10,600 foot runway, and has had it for some time. Cleveland really needs a 12,000-14,000 foot runway so it can add more international flights and hopefully keep its Continental hub. Good website: http://www.airnav.com/airports/

There will now be 3 lifestyle malls in the SW chunk of Toledo and suburbs: the Levis Commons in Perrysburg, the Fallen Timbers Mall under construction in Maumee, and the new Southwyck open air mall. It will be the lifestyle mall capital of the world. :lol:

I think that building at the top of the page would be awesome. That would be Cleveland's best building after the Key Tower, IMO. Usage of glass in building is both practical and beautiful.

Do you guys not like anything that is not art deco?

300,000 square feet is very small. The convention center here in Columbus is 1.2 million square feet. Cleveland should aim higher.

Whoa, that was sudden. Just when interest in this story was at an all time low, and everyone was convinced the whole project was a lot of hot air, they start construction. RIP Southwyck.

Good news, very good news. NW Ohio is getting another expressway too. US 24 will be an expressway for 25 miles SW of Toledo, and a 4 lane parkway beyond that to Ft. Wayne.

Maybe parts of Cincinnati (and especially the nearby Kentucky suburbs) are losing population because there's a transition to a more business community rather than a residential one.

Well, I've never claimed to be representative of the state. I just live here. :-)

Tim Horton's expanded into Toledo in the 1990's, before they were bought out by Wendy's. But after that most of the expansion was in the Columbus area, with spillover into Dayton.

I just got back from 2 weeks in London. When people asked where I was from the U.S., I said, "Ohio". Mosst of them just had a puzzled look on their faces. Probably hadn't heard of it before. I felt compelled to say something about the state, but I really wasn't sure what I could say, due to the lack of defining characteristics. Here in America, even the most clueless rube knows somoething about Ohio, typically the large American football stadium in Columbus. But overseas, no one cares about American football, the "Shoe" or the Ohio state Buckeyes football squad and their 2002 National Championship. I was at a loss for words. :? "Well, there were some aviation pioneers from our state, but none of their famous work was actually in the state." "We're not the home of the auto industry, but we have the most plants after Michigan and Ontario." "One of the smaller Great Lakes borders some of the Northern parts of the state." "People are really into American football. They watch games at the local high school on Friday, then college games on Saturday, then professional games on Sunday. It's a way of life." (This may impress Americans, but carries little weight overseas) "There's lots of Amish people." (Tends to add to the already unfortunate impression that the state is backwards and agriculturally oriented)

Yes, I knew that. I was the one who pointed it out to you on SSF. :) In Canada, "Timbo's" is a national pride brand. Their most popular advertising revolves around Canadians going to other countries with Tim Horton's mugs and meeting other Canadians because they also carry around Tim Horton's mugs. But now they are owned by an American company.

There's a fear of new things in Ohio. A fear of tall buildings. It's a miracle any of them got built. All people seem to do is romanticize about the days of the Waltons, and Beaver Cleaver, and the lifestyle of the Amish people. A new condo tower will be denied in Columbus under the premise of preserving some shit building in a crap neighborhood no one cares about, except some long winded public officials who call it "history". People here are upset about sprawl, but the developers go where they can build. In Ohio cities, there is almost always vehement, foaming-at-the-mouth opposition from historical societies, environmentalists, and NIMBYs anytime someone wants to build something, especially if it happens to be a tall building. :drunk: Some of these historical societies are not content to preserve a building or two. They want to preserve entire cities, and in doing so they turn vast neighborhoods into ghost lands, because the buildings are old and rotting, and no one wants to live there, but at the same time the land can't be reused for other purposes because the historical societies deny tearing down the old buildings on historical grounds. At some point people will have to decide: do you want to live in a city, or do want to live in a 80 square mile museum of rotting buildings from the 1900s?

Cleveland is doing a pretty good job attracting investment.

That's exactly the assumption that was made on a recent thread. Someone was posting about how in a particular suburb of (I believe) Cleveland, most of the houses are expensive, and the average African American can't afford to buy a home there. Many folks here were howling "racism". But now the shoe is on the other foot. With gentrification, there will be good sized parts of cities (comparable to the above suburb being discussed in size), which will be off limits to the average black person because of its price. Is that not racism? Here in Columbus, most of the new residential units downtown start at $150,000 and go upwards from there. There's very little being built in the $50,000-$100,000 range, because even though a single yuppie might buy a unit at that price, so might a poor family. They try to avoid that range to keep out the poor, which in this case is mostly African Americans. Is that not racism? I think many urban dwellers out there pretend to be black-friendly, but personally would be quite happy if most of the urban blacks were priced out by gentrification and moved out to old, "main line" suburbs or left the metro entirely, which is what happened in San Fransisco. That's why they support gentrification in their own city, but if a suburb what's to restrict its own growth to high value developments, they shout "racism".

Where's the outrage over affordable housing being replaced by that which the average family can't afford? Where will the poor people go? Not everyone is a millionaire. If Cincinnati's comeback means the displacement of poor African American families with white yuppies, there could be racism afoot. I'm not sure if that's the kind of urban Ohio we should be building: one that strives to drive black people out of the cities with housing they can't afford. It seems like racism to me.

That new lifestyle center is awesome. Dayton will be lucky to have it.

Sounds like good news. Markets that have more than one airport have lower air fares due to competition.

Where's the proof that the people of Cleveland don't like it? Cleveland's poor need a place to shop don't they? Maybe you're rich and you live in one of the yuppie condos downtown. It's easy for you to shop at some costly boutique shop, and then tell the poor folks that they have no soul if they buy stuff from a big box. But keep in mind thata 80% of Americans shop at Walmart, and in the lower income sections of society, it's probably more like 95-99%. I bet a lot of people don't care much if some yuppies who don't even live in the immediate area don't think it's attractive.

Where does it say that cities can't have big box retail stores? Even NYC has some big box retail.

I'd rather have a big box store than an abandoned ghetto. Cleveland has lost hundreds of thousands of people. And no one is being evicted. The developer has purchased all those properties. I bet those who were selling were happy to get what they could for their properties. It's their choice anyway, not yours. The job of those who run the city of Cleveland is to do what's best for the city. It's not to build what you consider to be pretty (i.e. "mixed use developments"). Maybe they like that too, who knows? But they can only give permission for projects that people actually want to build. Any city, and especially a poor one like Cleveland, is very happy to get development money. The point is that we don't live in a communist society where one person plans what gets built where, which seems to be perception of a lot of folks here. I like big box stores. Especially Walmarts and Best Buys. That's more practical to me than a "mixed use development" that has no where to park, and has some small time merchants who rips you off badly.

Are you joking? Once they legalize gambling in some form, every major gambling concern in the country will be working on a plan to break into the Ohio market. Gambling is extremely profitable. The Indian tribes are moving now, before the others because they are not subject to the same laws that an MGM Grand is, which has to wait for the state to legalize gambling in some form before they can make a move. I think an Indian tribe can buy any plot of land, have it declared a "reservation" and build a casino there.