jjakucyk

Well you know, we need wide, smooth, high-speed streets so fire trucks can quickly get to all the car crashes caused by wide, smooth, high-speed streets.

Anyone notice the drains on the bridge that stick out about 5 feet from the curb and would easily flatten bike tires?

Is there any way to see the times without being at a station, either on the web or an app? I tried Cincy EZRide and it's a complete disaster of an interface. You try to plan a trip, and zooming keeps shifting the start and end points, so you have to enter them manually, but it also tries to autocomplete addresses from all over the country. I tried to get it to find me a route from Main and Central Parkway to Findlay Market, and it didn't even acknowledge the streetcar as an option. It went from a couple bus routes to walking the entire way. I just want to know about when the next streetcar is coming so I can leave the office in time to catch it, rather than walk to the stop to find that I just missed one, and that the next one is 20 minutes away.

Well they substituted the admission fee for the parking fee, so it kind of washes out. At least you have options now, either taking the bus, or parking on the former streetcar right-of-way along Art Museum Drive, though it is a bit of a hike to the main entrance from there. You can actually park on Eden Park Drive near the Park Board's building and walk up the steps to the Art Museum, though I don't recall ever seeing anyone parked there before.

What's driving all the hotel demand? Not just downtown, but everywhere it seems.

^ No but it is in an urban design district. There's only about 10 of them in the city, covering mainly non-historical but still traditional/walkable neighborhood business districts like Short Vine, Hyde Park Square, Oakley Square, Mt. Lookout Square, the Pleasant Ridge business district etc. That said, someone who's good at negotiating with insurance companies can, with some effort, get them to cover an actual restoration with appropriate materials and workmanship. Say you have an old house that was damaged by fire but not destroyed. Insurance will certainly pay to have repairs done, but it's up to you to say that drywall is not an appropriate substitution for plaster, that painted poplar trim does not replace stained oak, and $5/square foot ceramic tile from Home Depot cannot replace handmade Rookwood. I'm not sure what they might have been able to do in this case to cover the remaining balconies that were still intact but obviously dangerous. Even if they couldn't get insurance to pay for those, it still should have covered the one-time setup cost of the curved brick and other specialty pieces used throughout the project, and there was no doubt an economy of scale to doing them all at once.

^ Well, practically it means that there's not enough people nearby to do low-paying jobs that are necessary for the general functioning of the community. Without meaningful transit or affordable housing nearby, janitors, baristas, housekeepers, waiters and waitresses, bar tenders, cashiers, dry cleaners, security guards, and the like can't get to the jobs in those high-income neighborhoods without a car and/or a long commute. It becomes a situation where the job is a means only to fund the car needed to get to the job, a rather vicious circle for someone of modest means. Wages in the area have to go up to counteract that, but it only makes the neighborhood even more exclusive as the coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and other stores get more expensive to cover the higher wages, and it risks stalling business growth and all sorts of other factors. Point being, when neighborhoods are segregated/concentrated by income, economic efficiency declines because of all the additional travel that's necessary.

Yeah they basically reconstructed the entire facade, but with windows on the 2nd floor, insulation, waterproofing, and concrete block backup. I assume there were probably issues with water intrusion and perhaps damaged lintels or who knows what else, on top of the difficulty of cutting in new windows on the 2nd floor where there were none before.

Low density areas aren't necessarily more expensive or financially insolvent. Farms can get by just fine with narrow streets, unpaved preferably, ditches instead of curbs and sewers, wells and septic tanks, and you're not going to have a 5-minute response time from the police or fire department. In most rural farming locations, that's pretty much what you've got, and it works fine. It's when you start layering on those city services, which you see with leapfrog subdivision development, that it becomes a problem.

Indian Hill is an interesting beast because while it is very spread-out (1, 3, and 5 acre lots), it's also pretty low-service from an infrastructure standpoint. The streets are mostly narrow, no curb and gutter, no stoplights, no sidewalks, virtually no streetlights, most but not all of the city has no sewers, and since it's all pretty high-value property, that allows taxes to be lower and funneled mostly to the school system. Wealthy suburbs seem to be relatively resilient financially, as long as they remain wealthy. It's the middling suburbs that also have city-level services (wide streets, sidewalks, lighting, full sewer and water systems) plus all the extra school bussing, police, and fire coverage while not having the value and thus the tax base to pay for it all in the long term that are in the biggest trouble. There's also things that aren't governmental like gas, electricity, telecom, and even things like mail and package delivery that are more expensive to provide in the suburbs, but which don't cost any more to the user despite all the extra piping, poles, and wires they require.

strongtowns.org is the place to start for all of that stuff. But here's a good graphic that makes the rounds from time to time. I think the numbers are a bit conservative, in that the differences are likely even bigger in practice, but muddled due to other factors. Plus there's no real definition of urban vs. suburban, so it could be comparing "streetcar suburb" urban and "early post-war suburban" which is much closer than say "inner-city rowhouse" urban and "exurban 1-acre lot" suburb.

Maybe, but it also reminds me of discrimination laws that were finally struck down in the 60s, or even the very recent gay marriage issue, which again saw the federal government telling the states "no, you can't keep oppressing your citizens." As a general rule in modern politics, cities tend to be more liberal, states tend to be more conservative, and the federal government is somewhere in between. State governments in many cases are openly hostile towards their cities, seeing them as resources to be strip-mined for redistribution to "proper folk" in the country. The federal government is the only entity therefore that can put a stop to such shenanigans. State governments are like the bratty kid who throws a tantrum because their parents spanked them for kicking the dog.

The whole "small government, states rights" group seems to be just "stop the feds from telling us we can't keep screwing over our cities."

Agreed it's at a weird distance from Downtown, but I would hope it's enticing to people who work at WCPO, Laser Spine Institute, or that building at Reading and Elsinore.

It takes a long time to rough-in mechanical systems, especially in a large project like that, after framing is up. Electrical, plumbing, HVAC, audio/visual, fire alarms, security, is all quite time consuming and difficult to coordinate, so it does look like construction has stalled when in fact it really hasn't.

Is Baldwin 200 the 1980s office tower on Eden Park Drive nearer I-71, and Grand Baldwin the old building with the clock tower at Eden Park Drive and Gilbert? Is that one still going residential?

Back in the day, the early streetcars didn't even have an enclosed cab for the motorman. It's not that they didn't have heat, they didn't even have windshields, or a seat, and they worked something like 12 hour shifts. I think there were some stories of a poor motorman's hand getting frozen to the controls in icy conditions. I'm not sure what's worse though, being exposed to the elements like that, or having to stand the whole time.

There's definitely something smelly here. Below are my excepts from one of the previous review packets. This specific item, citing previous legal precedents, seems pretty hard to argue against: "It is unclear from the record if the applicant had any intention of reusing the building and therefore leads staff to conclude that the purpose of buying the property was for demolition. As stated above in the excerpt from “Assessing Economic Hardship Claims under Historic Preservation Ordinances” buying a building subject to a historic preservation ordinance and demolition review and expecting to be able to demolish it as well as redevelop it is not a reasonable investment backed expectation."

Location, location, location. Even without I-75, Elmwood Place is still Elmwood Place. O'Bryonville on the other hand is its own neat little neighborhood to people in the know, and to most others, it's Hyde Park (in fact that little spit of Torrence lane IS Hyde Park). The difficulty we face here in Cincinnati which is for the most part not supply constrained (with some exceptions) is that the low value of existing buildings makes people think they should be able to get new construction for a similar price. It just doesn't work that way. The same new car doesn't cost appreciably less here than in San Francisco, despite the huge income and cost of living differences. Building construction is similar. While labor may be marginally cheaper here, materials aren't, and they're both still way higher than a building that's had decades to depreciate. I do think $220K is a bit much, especially since it backs up to Torrence Parkway, but it's a super easy walk to the O'Bryonville business district, and it would be an outstanding house for a single teacher at Summit Country Day School. There's some 1920s bungalows next to my apartment building just two blocks away that range in value anywhere from $30K to $180K depending on whether they've been remodeled or not. They're a bit bigger with separate living and dining rooms, and I believe two bedrooms upstairs. On the other hand the brand new "courtyard houses" built at the end of the street were sold for $750K and up, with similar models by the same developer in Northside selling for half that much. So it seems like pretty much anything goes here, and again, location, location, location.

That's why you hire architects :)

You can't just knock out the ceiling of a house without beefing up the structure, because the ceiling joists are preventing the roof from pushing the walls apart. There may also be diagonal members in the attic to keep the roof rafters from sagging, which in houses like this are probably only 2x4s. You could do it, but you need to install a large ridge beam, which will require one or two posts in the middle of the house, plus adding columns in the gable end walls which would mess up those attic windows (which were probably vents originally, if there was anything at all) and requires a lot of labor and some new footings in the basement. On top of all that, once you remove the ceiling, and you only have 2x4 or 2x6 rafters, you can't get the required roof insulation without going to very expensive closed-cell spray foam or a combination of spray foam inside and rigid foam on top of the old roof, which requires new roof sheathing and rebuilding all the eaves and soffits. You also can't do recessed cans in that shallow of a ceiling, especially sloped (down lights for sloped ceilings are bigger than standard remodel cans, usually requiring at least a 2x10 rafter) and each one punches a hole in your thermal envelope.

Funny how somewhat lower weekday ridership but robust weekend and event ridership after just three months of operations and thus not much time for people to move jobs/homes/etc. constitutes a "massive failure."

My guess is whatever redevelopment happens would be something like this on Short Vine: https://goo.gl/maps/ySaDMZ3qxi32 It's a large block; you could fill in all the street walls on McMillan, Kemper, and Gilbert with pretty deep buildings and still have a lot of room in the middle for parking.

The exterior proportions of the Towne Properties house look pretty good, and the cornice design is nice. The brickwork looks pretty bad though. I'm seeing this more and more, even in pretty high-end residential work. It's like the mortar joints are growing and the brick is shrinking, plus they're not cleaning it properly afterwards. At least tint it some. Red mortar with red brick is really quite beautiful, and it would hide these thick sloppy joints. https://goo.gl/maps/4yY258bEH6x I do wonder what's up with the lintel over the front door. It's not the same as the others and it looks like it was pulled out and replaced.

^ This is going to be a very neat project. The newer storefronts on the first and second floor are awful and do the building a huge disservice. Fortunately I can say that there's a lot of evidence left of the old storefront (both remaining in-place and in old photographs), so we have plenty to work with. :)