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Granite blocks in the center turn lane would be nice, especially if there was a slight curb ramp that would discourage using the lane for passing. Plus you really don't want cars driving over rough surfaces quickly because it makes a ton of noise. The stamped brick crosswalks on MLK Blvd. in Covington are disturbingly loud when cars drive over them even at the speed limit. They don't even look that rough since they're just stamped concrete https://goo.gl/maps/QNJisFz5i712

But what else would you do to Delta to further calm it? The bike lanes, parking, and proximity of houses and sidewalks to the street are already pretty good. The lanes are all quite narrow too (it was originally a 6 lane street but I think it's only about 55' wide, so even with parked cars snugged up to the curb the right lane was always pretty scary tight). There's so many driveways I don't see much opportunity to do medians. The only other option is to add buffers to the bike lanes and eliminate the center turn lane, similar to how many streets in Chicago are striped, like Halsted or Clark, but I don't see that flying.

I never bought the idea of renters being too transient. Maybe in college areas or really rough half-way house type situations ok, one year is probably the max, but the average American moves every 5 years. Single-family homeowners stay in their house on average less than 10 years from what I can see. That's not long-term by any stretch, so it's something of a pot calling the kettle black situation.

Some interesting points from the report:

I've wondered if Indian Hills profoundly anti urban structure helps hold Cincinnati back in terms of urbanism? Going through the North Shore of Chicagoland gave me that thought as its the same intense concentration of wealth, but you can A) Actually see the mansions and B) a popular commuter line runs through those towns, many of which have attractive walkable downtowns... While the North Shore still trends Republican it's much more "purple" than Cincinnati's suburbs. Nevertheless, I don't think the walkable downtowns of those suburbs and their commuter rail access really help as much with urban "mindshare" as one would like.

$1,400/month for new construction downtown is great, even for a studio, no matter the city. I paid $1,100/month for an "efficiency" (like a studio but with some half-walls and French doors into the sleeping area) in Lincoln Park, maybe 350 square feet, in 2002 in a 1960s mid-rise. Yes there were some $800/month rentals in older buildings with no parking and a bit more off the beaten path, if you wanted to sign a 2-year lease and pay your own heat, but again this was as far from downtown Chicago as Hyde Park is from downtown Cincinnati, and 14 years ago. Even here in Cincinnati the $1/sf/month number is falling more and more into "cheap apartment" territory as opposed to the "normal apartment" range that it used to be. $1.25/sf seems to be a bit more normal nowadays. That new construction in buildings with tons of on-site amenities and a downtown address isn't commanding $2,000 per month or more from the get-go is pretty remarkable.

Saw this come up on the Facebook page, from the Cincinnati Enquirer, January 14, 1987. Seems follow-through on "plans" is not very good.

No no, fine-graied urbanism is when the buildings actually ARE separate, built by different people and different designers on small lots sold individually. Coarse-grained is when the whole block is developed by one person/company. Even if it's made to look like smaller buildings, that's just a facade which belies the true nature of the complex. It's the difference between OTR and U-Square.

I'd say that's also the dynamic in the sunbelt too. Even ignoring walkability, if you want a house or apartment with some character you have maybe a small bungalow belt around downtown that's very likely run down and surrounded by highways, and then you're suddenly in ranch-ville. If Cincinnati were Nashville, Charlotte, or Austin, you'd have downtown probably not all that much different than it is now, but OTR would be like Clifton or Corryville. Once on top of the hills all bets would be off. Price Hill, Clifton, and Walnut Hills would be Finneytown and Anderson, spreading for miles in all directions.

I know we've been over this before, but it's not all "developers are teh evulz." The economic forces in Cincinnati just aren't conducive to the same type of development as you see in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, or even booming sunbelt cities. There's so much existing urban "product" here (if not OTR or downtown-level density) that is so cheap to buy or rent that new construction simply can't compete except in extraordinary circumstance. You can buy an existing house here for a fraction of what it would cost to actually build that same house, let alone a condo or apartment. That means what new construction does happen has to be as cheap as possible, otherwise nobody will buy it. Yes that sucks, but you can't say that developers are being greedy and building cheap crap and at the same time say the new apartments are overpriced. This is a simple supply and demand reality that can't be avoided by moratoriums or regulations. Design review might help, but that's super subjective and fraught with its own problems. But if a design review board says something as simple as "this shall be made of brick rather than styrofoam" the developer comes back with "then we have no profit and won't build it." Is that a win? In stronger markets where housing prices are overall higher, then new construction costs are more closely aligned with rents and purchase prices. Thus they don't have to cut so many corners to make the economics work. They also don't need to build as many megastructures to amortize all the costs and squeeze as much out of economies of scale as possible. I tend to think that onerous off-street parking requirements are a bigger factor in ballooning the size and scale of projects. Anyway, labor and material prices are much more consistent across the country than housing prices, so being in a cheap market here actually puts us at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the country. Think about it like this, with low cost-of-living and lower incomes, it sounds like a good deal compared to high cost-of-living and higher incomes. That would seem to wash things out in the end, but it doesn't because while housing and taxes and energy costs might be lower here, you still pay the same for iPhones, TVs, BMWs, and yes, new construction, as someone in California. I'm not saying this is a good thing, it's just the reality of the situation. I'm also the first to say that settling for something bad versus nothing isn't a fair trade either. However, there needs to be some sort of consensus on what exactly to do about it, if you can do anything. The economics can't really be changed without very extensive market intervention that has all sorts of unintended consequences. Of course, a first step would be to remove the distortions of all the pro-suburban policies that have been in place for some 80 years now. That's no small task, and it's much bigger than a merely local concern, though there are still local factors involved. I'll say this though. It's less expensive to design and construct a building that isn't trying to look like a bunch of separate buildings all smashed together. Unfortunately, nobody seems capable of doing that without it looking like a suburban office block and raising the ire of neighborhood groups and review boards that push for the Potemkin Village look for lack of any other ideas. It goes back to things like parking requirements and scale economies and height limitations that all conspire to squash buildings down and expand them out, so it's more difficult to proportion them properly without making them look suburban or look like multiple buildings instead.

Nope, hate it. Same old trendy crap design, just different than the cheap CR crap.

So basically, down-zoning to prevent construction and driving more apartment rentals into the illegal underground market. Not surprising Flynn would support such things too.

People are almost certainly extra complacent about it right now because they know it's not actually in-use yet.

OMFG. It's already such a car-only corridor, but even so I can't believe he'd say something like that. What I don't understand is, why add just one lane westbound but not also eastbound? So there would be 4 lanes westbound but 3 eastbound. Then east of Reading it goes to something like 54 lanes because...reasons.

The fake tree ones are awful. In Chicagoland they put the cell receivers on all sorts of building chimneys and smoke stacks, even ones that aren't really all that tall. https://goo.gl/maps/UE2jAcBTKjR2 I suspect that here they want to get them higher than might otherwise be necessary in order for the signals to better jump over hills and penetrate down into valleys. Plus maybe there's more barriers to standalone tower construction in the Chicago area that makes leasing space from building owners more palatable even though I'm sure the phone companies don't like it because access is more difficult and they have to make do with the height and alignment that's available. Still, even where we do have some taller smokestacks (Don Pablo's, US Playing Card Company, Worthmore Chili, Christ Hospital, UC Hospital, etc.) I don't see cell receivers. Maybe the roofs of these buildings are high enough, or they just lease space from the existing radio towers? It's a good question. The tower at Main and McMicken is awful, especially because all the equipment is out in the open. Even if they can't or don't want to build an actual building, they could at least build some walls rather than a fence around it. https://goo.gl/maps/UJtAUwbzAd42

Jobs. That's the main reason anyone moves anywhere. This applies to Texas and Arizona as well. The thing is, these sunbelt cities are mostly only growing because...they're growing. Growth itself is the growth industry, which usually means sprawl-building and little else. Even in Charlotte's case, a sub-hub of the financial industry, it's about financing sprawl.

Careful ColDayMan, they may turn it into a painting party.

With the amount of as-built documentation and schematic plans necessary as a first step for even applying for tax credits, I suspect it's just working its way through the process.

^ Now if they'll just finish painting it so I can get some good final photos. :wink:

That's a pretty typical MO for a DINO like Cranley (or any modern day conservative). It's the usual "hurr durr government can't do anything right" rhetoric that they deliberately make self-fulfilling.

My architecture master’s thesis dealt with exactly this issue. When you can’t save what’s behind the facade you have to ask if it’s worth the trouble anymore. The argument is that saving the facade alone eviscerates the integrity or the soul of the building. Maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic and over-anthropomorphizing, but it’s at least worth considering. As with any approach its success or failure depends on the execution. As a general practice though, facadectomies are pretty expressly discouraged by modern historic preservation standards, even though they were somewhat common from the 1970s through 1990s. That came about as a reaction to projects where the facade was left as a freestanding sort of objet d’art such as at Penn Mutual Tower in Philadelphia, or retained as mere dressing of a blank wall with no function and blanked out windows and doors such as at Circle Centre Mall in Indianapolis. So if the problem is floor-to-floor heights and such, then saving a facade doesn't actually help that problem, and may in fact make it worse because you're trying to fit pieces together that actually don't fit, so it makes both worse for the effort.

Doesn't seem as bad as the building in the West End that the car (truck?) crashed into a year or so ago, and they did an excellent job repairing it. This building doesn't look to be in bad shape overall, same with the apartment in Clifton whose balcony collapsed last week. I have to wonder what's triggering these problems when there aren't obviously leaking gutters or other visible long-term damage.

Do our cars have electromagnetic track brakes or is that just an option?

I'm all for perspective correction, but when the building gets too tall eventually it cries uncle.

I guess you have to ask if Mt. Adams has the critical mass within itself to support the businesses. Because of its size and relative isolation it's probably natural for them to be faltering somewhat. The neighborhood is no longer a novelty in its intact urban form, so it can't draw as much in the way of "local tourists." Conversion of apartments into single-family certainly won't help nearby businesses so the question is where does it go? If some more citywide or regional draw locates there (possible but unlikely) then that can spin off to other businesses. As demand goes down rents will need to follow and maybe that can allow some more startup type businesses or small offices to go there. Because of its isolation I don't see it going all-out boutique like O'Bryonville or Hyde Park Square. It could also mean some building go (back?) to residential, as long as the remodeling of the storefront is done well, or preferably live/work.