jjakucyk

I always see "monthly parking only" signs up at Parkhaus, Gateway, and Mercer on weekdays through lunchtime. Parkhaus thins out in the afternoon when courthouse visitors leave. I don't think Ziegler fills up. So for weekday daytime parking, you're going to have some trouble. Evenings and weekends are a breeze, so it's all a matter of what time you're concerned about. I'm curious what Ziegler is like at those times because of its resident component.

While the loss of the roof and floor structures is tragic, all those parapet walls look to be in pretty good shape considering. Yes they need to be braced stat, but I don't see any bulging or missing caps or blown out areas. It really looks quite solid. Besides, I'm pretty certain Mohawk was de-dedicated in front of the building, so it's all private property and not a "threat" to anyone really.

Unless a new tenant is willing to pay more. Or someone wants to buy the building and doesn't want said tenant. Or the tenant is a nuisance and causing other tenants to leave.

If the brick was painted before, it should be painted again, but it has to be a vapor-permeable paint. Cincinnati has a lot of very soft and porous brick, especially the orange common brick on the side and rear of many buildings, and it simply doesn't hold up without being painted. That brick doesn't have the "shell" found on harder face brick to prevent moisture penetration. The same goes for brick that's been sandblasted, since the hard surface has been blasted off, exposing the softer more porous interior. Now, if brick hasn't ever been painted, then there's no reason to paint it if it's not deteriorating, but it can also be very difficult to match brick color in patches and repairs. Damage could also be caused by improper mortar repairs rather than paint or a lack thereof. Mortar must always be softer than the brick, but modern Portland cement mortar is harder than most older bricks, causing them to crush from freeze/thaw cycles, leaving a honeycomb of empty cells. Old bricks need a lime mortar instead of Portland cement.

A lot of the floors were removed and reconfigured in poured concrete, especially in the western half of the building. So there's misaligned floors, some very tall and also some very short spaces, ramps, stairs, and being that it's concrete and masonry it's not trivial to demo and fix. The small windows in front and lack of any in the back also make it difficult to convert into some uses without compromising the historical integrity. Additions in the rear are newer basic warehouse spaces without much going for them, but they make egress an issue. The college studio project I did on this building (embarrassing as it might be) was a residential conversion, cutting in a couple of new windows and replacing the additions in the rear, but of course there's no accounting for financial feasibility, and most of these units are pretty large lofts/studios which should really be multi-bedroom setups. Doesn't mean it's not worth saving. For as beautiful a city as Cincinnati is, there really are very few monumental buildings on prominent street axes, and while this is no Union Terminal, Withrow High School, or St. Francis deSales Church, it's still an important building on an important site.

It does look pretty bad (not that it looked great before the fire, honestly) but only the 3rd floor and roof are wood framed if I recall correctly, the rest is masonry and concrete. So I would hope it's still salvageable. It's just unfortunate that the stabilization work and new roof from a couple years ago was basically for naught thanks to this.

Jane Jacobs used the term unslumming to talk about neighborhoods that were recovering from a period of decline and neglect. These were vibrant if rundown and poor neighborhoods with lots of people. The houses that were starting to look ragged got painted and gussied up, the stores got new lights and displays, and overall they just sort of picked back up where they were before things stalled. I think what's a bit different now is that such neighborhoods have fallen so hard for so long, that there aren't really slums in the way that there used to be. Today, such neighborhoods have lost their activity and are best described as decanted. They can't easily be reoccupied, since the buildings require total rehab, if they haven't already been demolished. New investment tends to be more "catastrophic" because what's existing has fallen too far below baseline acceptability that slapping on some paint and new finishes isn't enough. The thing is, as the tweet points out, a neighborhood in such a condition has so much empty space that the idea of displacement is borderline laughable. The people who are supposedly being displaced are the ones who would live somewhere else if they could anyway. True gentrification seems to be more along the lines of displacing of middle or even upper middle income people by those in the top brackets. That's San Francisco in a nutshell, as well as NYC and Washington DC. Yes it happens in Chicago too, such as Lincoln Park where already expensive 3-flats are being converted into single-family mansions. There's pockets of this sort of thing happening in OTR as well, but the thing is, there's so many other neighborhoods nearby, if not just a few blocks away, that are still at or near rock bottom. It's not really a problem until it becomes a city-wide or region-wide phenomenon.

$59M for 250K SF is $236/SF which doesn't sound out of line for a gut rehab, especially if there's major facade work, mechanicals, class-a finishes, etc.

My understanding is that this project uses rather thick slabs (12" or so), and when they're pouring they have someone walking around the wet slab with a story pole measuring the depth of the concrete to ensure it's level and at the right depth. There's also people underneath to make sure the forms aren't sagging, which wouldn't necessarily show above as a deep spot, since even pumped concrete doesn't self-level. Considering the thickness of the slabs, it could be as simple as a minor flaw in the form work, like a joint not being fully secured, or a temporary column being knocked out of alignment after the pre-pouring inspection. I don't think there's been any determination so far.

Has there been a surge in public transit? Seems all I've been hearing lately is the opposite, except in a few places like Seattle and maybe Denver. Chicago has been hemorrhaging riders, as have LA, Boston, DC, and Atlanta. It's really worrisome actually since gas prices have been kept so low.

That's why we need a land tax instead of traditional property taxes. It doesn't force anyone to rehab or build new per se, but it makes speculation and land banking in built up areas a financial loser. Same for parking lots in prime downtown locations.

Indeed, I think even Jake has proposed this in the past. Since MLK climbs pretty steeply on both sides to reach this intersection, it would be a simple feat to leave Vine/Jefferson where it is and have MLK go underneath. You could then just connect Short Vine across Vine/Jefferson to a new entrance to the EPA with a simple 4-way intersection, or make THAT the roundabout. Then just put a jug handle somewhere in the EPA's massive useless lawn to connect Vine with MLK, or don't, and make people use Goodman/Eden/University

It's a terrible catch-22. The more parking that's built because "we aren't there yet" the farther away "yet" gets. Also keep in mind there's the market, and there's "the market." The middle man in all this is the lenders. If the builders and the buyers want less parking, but the project can't get financing without ticking all the check boxes, then that's a market failure, just not a government-imposed one. I think that's why some places swung the pendulum all the way from parking minimums to parking maximums. They predicted or saw outright that lenders were holding projects to suburban standards in conflict with new more permissive zoning.

Yes, those parking lots and Davis Furniture are a major barrier, as is Central Parkway itself, which only makes it worse. What's happening with Davis anyway? It's just been sitting there doing nothing.

From a traffic engineering by-the-book AASHTO standpoint, a roundabout actually isn't a great way to resolve complicated intersections, because tight angles preclude proper geometry without drastically increasing the radius of the circle and/or restricting right turns and truck movements. Beyond that though, my guess is that objections would be more about the slope of the land and inability of ambulances to preempt signals and blast through the intersection. Also, I think that intersection is just too high-capacity for either the city or state DOT to entertain such a solution. There seems to be a lot of push back against multi-lane roundabouts due to confusing right-of-way when exiting and a perpetual confusion among the general public about just what yield means. Instead, they seem to prefer "turbo" designs that fling exit lanes out in more of a spiral fashion than a circle (such as you see in the two new 3rd Street roundabouts in Newport), and which also pinch down to just one lane at some point. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.3137256,-84.2992925,184m/data=!3m1!1e3

But the abatement is only on the *increase* in value, so the assessed tax can't go lower than what it was. I don't know how that works with lot splits, but even if the original taxed value of the single parcel is now divided 50/50 among the two new ones, then the total receipts to the city shouldn't change. Such a lot split can only happen if the underlying zoning is more permissive than what's there, so it seems like something to be encouraged, even if it's a relatively rare situation (I know Hyde Park and Mt. Lookout folks get all bent out of shape over this but that's a different conversation). Removing the abatement only for that specific case sounds like a knee-jerk reaction that could have other unintended consequences.

I would hope someone with GIS in their name would appreciate it.

Three stories, maybe four with a basement, new construction, decently high-end, yeah that's not an unreasonable price at all. If you're already doing better than builder-grade construction, then the price premium for LEED can be negligible. $5,000-10,000 in additional design fees and certification, and maybe 5-10% more in the construction itself. The value of the property tax abatement (100% for 15 years if LEED Platinum certified) for a house like this $120,000, which is huge, and then there's the energy savings and additional durability on top of it.

Indeed. Cincinnati to Columbus via Mason, Lebanon, and Wilmington? The way to do that would be to use the former B&O Midland via Loveland, Blanchester (no need to stop there ?), and then Wilmington to Washington Court House, etc. There has never been any direct connection between Lebanon and Wilmington, which would require bridging the Little Miami River Gorge near the I-71 Jeremiah Morrow Bridge. The abandoned Pennsylvania Railroad Zanesville Branch did run between *South* Lebanon and Wilmington, crossing Todd Fork and other tributaries some 18 times. http://www.jjakucyk.com/transit/map/index.html Best stick to the more established usable routes.

Is that objection based on diluting the office market, or (more likely) attempting to protect the views of existing 3rd and 4th Street towers? Not saying either position is good, but the motivations are different.

Since the suspension bridge is owned by Kentucky, I don't see how its deteriorating condition and inability to support large buses is in any way Cincinnati's fault.

That was the main entrance when streetcars were the primary mode of transportation.

So if you buy the two-pack in the app, activating only activates one ticket. That's fine, but it shows the activated ticket as "CBC Streetcar 2-Hour $2.00" which looks like both tickets because of the $2.00. I was using a second ticket to cover someone who didn't have the app yet, and I was struggling to figure out if it had activated one or two. The only way I could really tell was by going back to my ticket queue and seeing that I had another one left that was unactivated. Then getting both to show up for verification (fortunately no cops inspecting fares that day) requires going into the settings menu and cycling through them. Can we just make it free already? I still see people missing a streetcar because they're struggling with the vending machine. With the crap frequency (thanks Cranley) it's all that much worse since that's pretty much a guaranteed extra 10 minutes minimum. The Transit app is a worse experience than Cincy EZRide, which I wouldn't consider great either. Drilling down through non-obvious menus to get to your previously-purchased tickets is rather bone-headed.

Even John Schneider subscribes to that notion, that downtown had a lack of parking that was strangling businesses. Only after that was "fixed" by building more garages was the streetcar then considered. I find that such a backwards way of thinking. It's like so many road/highway projects today that are must-builds, but no consideration is given to transit except as an ancillary/afterthought that can only be done as part of the road expansion, making it self-defeating. All these little decisions, a garage here, one less streetcar running there, removing a curb bump-out, rerouting a bus, they individually don't do much either way, but they deflect the neighborhood trajectory more towards automobile dependence, and they do add up.