jjakucyk

I'd say the reality is somewhere in between.

Tax credits are actually quite restricting as far as what they allow. In a case like this, opening up the 2nd floor windows would probably be permissible, but nothing more. Even converting the base of the building to parking would likely be denied. That doesn't mean there aren't means for compromise, but it's more steps and time. Of course as savadams13[/member] said, if they don't use tax credits they're free to do pretty much whatever they want.

^ Beat me to it.

I didn't know that until fairly recently either, probably because most projects I've worked on were rear additions or accessory buildings. It's not in an obvious place in the zoning code either. In hillside districts you average all the setbacks, not just the front, and I've dealt with those situations more.

One thing to keep in mind is that all residential (and office limited) zones in the city require you to average the front setbacks of properties on either side, either 3 buildings or 300 feet, whichever is greater, to determine yours. That's why the 20' front setback usually doesn't apply, but it still requires more work to figure out.

There's no way they couldn't have reinforcing in them.

When our firm was looking to relocate last year, a couple of patterns emerged. If you want a walkable urban location and need less than 2,500 square feet you can find something just about anywhere. Less than 4,000 square feet and you still have a decent number of choices. However once you start getting higher than that, downtown is just about the only option left. Try finding 8,000 square feet in any of the neighborhoods and you're almost certainly pushed outside of the NBD to locations like the Red Bank corridor, Rookwood, or Spring Grove Avenue that might just as well be out in the suburbs. Even in OTR spaces that large don't usually come up for lease. That's why those law firms and such are opening satellite offices rather than moving. In part it's to cater to more specific clients, but they probably couldn't find enough contiguous space to relocate their entire firm even if they wanted to.

The "tower" is just the right corner of the main building. So the BW3 and Supercuts and Boston Market and all that are where the parking lot used to be.

Here's an aerial showing both LeBlond and Hyde Park Lumber. I assume late 1980s.

It could be narrowed a decent bit just by reducing lane widths. Especially on the north side of the parkway there's some weird extra unused space (again in front of Salvation Army), like what appears to be a 12' to 14' parking lane. https://goo.gl/maps/nL7noSQiaKN2

^ And the barely 4 feet of sidewalk in front of Salvation Army.

This site plan is more succinct. Also, two right-in-right-out drives crossing a bike path? That's super dangerous.

Well, if you treat every brook/creek/stream as sacrosanct then you can't ever build a city. You'd clip the grid of streets so often you'd never be able to get anything more than suburban density. Manhattan has thousands of creeks in pipes, and if they were all daylighted the only street that would remain continuous is Broadway (which runs on a ridge). If you do that, then you're making the flooding/pollution problems worse by spreading the population out over a larger area that requires more paved streets and parking lots and single-story buildings while still severely harming the hydrology and overall ecology over all that supposedly lesser-impact development.

^ Yup

This is the first thing that came to my mind after seeing that.

Yep, that's the 1888 expo, and it was only in that year that the very first electric streetcars were put in service.

Glenwood is the boundary if you count North Avondale as separate. That being the case, it's still just as big in land area as Mt. Lookout, Walnut Hills, Camp Washington, Roselawn, or Pleasant Ridge. That's also more people than live in Indian Hill or Milford, and the same as Wyoming, or Ft. Mitchell. So to belittle the residents and neighborhood as a whole as "tiny" and "not a community" is really quite offensive.

You're pining for this, 1400? https://goo.gl/maps/YxNGnZqABu72 I suppose Washington Park was better before it was redone too?

Court Street has been missing from Google Maps between Vine and Main for at least a week. I've seen stupid stuff like this happen before at other locations. Not sure where the breakdown is occurring.

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The it's the 4th largest neighborhood in the city with 20,000 people.

Yawn indeed.

Where did you get that quote? It's not in the article. Yes, it is a problem that this is being brought up at the last minute. However, it looks like the criticisms of the project are that Children's basically came up with their plan, and the public engagement process (required for zoning changes, abandonment of public rights-of-way, and PUD revisions) was little more than a feel-good play with no actual intention of listening to any public input. This is a criticism of many Department of Transportation projects too, and it looks like they want to prevent Children's from flattening the entire neighborhood in the way Christ Hospital is doing, or by building a fortress completely disconnected from the neighborhood similar to the Cleveland Clinic, which was cited in the article. "Children’s needs council approval of zoning changes, modification of the hospital’s development plan and the sale of city property. The Avondale Community Council stridently has opposed the expansion, particularly its scale and how it was planned. Community members say it was clear Children’s had settled on its plan and that its talks with them were for show." Is it a bad political move? Maybe, because "hurr durr bizness friendly" but I do see where their objections are coming from. It sure sounds to me like they're trying to prevent Children's from doing many of the things were here at UO routinely criticize big institutions for doing. So I'm a bit surprised at all the knee-jerk rants.

The McMillan to I-71 northbound ramp is roughly the same as it's always been, only now the ramp has two lanes instead of one (it combines before reaching the bottom), and you can now access that ramp going west on McMillan too. There's a stop sign for westbound McMillan, and some plastic bollards in the street to try to prevent anyone going eastbound from blowing past the ramp.