jjakucyk

The requirement to build outside of Dayton was probably driven by space requirements, plain & simple. If it was huge, it's probably not even practical to be close to the city center. Warehouses don't typically employ that many people anyhow. More & more going to automated racking systems with a handful of forklift operators And that's a problem too. These facilities take up huge amounts of space, all of which need lots of access roads with wide pavement, deep bases, and generous sweeping curves to accommodate the trucks (railroad spurs are just too much trouble of course). They must have public water, sewer, gas, and high-speed internet, fire protection, police, the works. But if nobody works there, and the buildings themselves are just utilitarian shells, while most of the value is in the inventory and equipment, then there's really very to benefit from. These industrial parks demand nearly downtown-level services and infrastructure (except for sidewalks and transit of course) but generate only pennies on the dollar in tax revenues to pay for it all.

One answer would be that you *don't* develop new housing for that market. You let it filter down from the higher income housing as it ages. Unfortunately that does mean areas that were left to rot and now need significant renovation or rebuilding will be too pricey for that market, but c'est la vie. Of course, with construction prices being what they are, the next option is then to just develop (or accept) smaller units. $1,300/month at $2.50/sf/month is 520sf. That's not big, but it's a totally workable 1-bedroom for a couple. It could even be a half decent 2-bedroom for someone with one kid. Even so, you *can* get construction costs down to around $100/sf in this market. That's not easy, but even if you can only get down to say $150 or $175 that still gets you a much bigger unit.

^ But then you're just dumped from the "highway-esque" road to the neighborhood streets further in. When a highway reaches a built-up area, a neighborhood, a "place" where people live, work, and play, they SHOULD become neighborhood streets with parked cars, stop signs, sidewalks, bikers, etc. It's these "stroads" (street-road hybrids) that are the most dangerous because they take highway geometries and design criteria and overlay them onto streets with many intersections and where people cross and buildings affront, and that's what causes crashes and deaths. By continuing the highway through the neighborhood it sends the signal "keep driving fast" when the message should be "slow down and pay attention to your surroundings." It's not a rural location anymore, so rural highway design is wholly inappropriate.

I would so do that. Only thing is that Bratislava uses narrow gauge (1 meter) tracks, so do do something like that here you'd need a much wider palette.

Here's a map of what it used to be like a century ago.

The whole area south of the Baldwin Building between Gilbert, Reading, and Elsinore was a park called Deer Creek Commons, which had four baseball fields along Reading Road. Near Gilbert was also the right-of-way of the CL&N Railroad, but it was always an open park otherwise. Back in the day Eden Park stretched all the way to Reading, at least on paper, but the rough terrain, heavy industry, and railroads down there made it less than desirable for a park, so much of it was sold off. It wasn't until after many of the tanneries and steel mills started to move that the park idea came back in the early part of the 20th century, but then I-71 reamed it out.

Northbound Edwards is Cincinnati, southbound is Norwood, the border goes right down the middle. The Cincinnati side is pretty bad, but Norwood in general has many worse streets.

^ It's easy to ignore since it's a typical suburban commercial outlot kind of typology that's so common you almost don't notice it. Farther down Edwards the building that backs right up to the sidewalk is a total f-u to the street, especially because of this abomination of an entrance http://goo.gl/maps/0DFuE

I am nice, but that's exactly why I bothered to fix the links in my old posts, the write-up on interurbans explains it all.

What a great video. It breaks my heart that I never got to experience this day and age. It does show how crowded with cars and trucks the streets were getting. I bet most people can't imagine that even in very large cities before about 1905 or so the streets were virtually empty 24/7 with the exception of the core of downtown. Even there the number of actual "vehicles" was minimal compared to just people milling about, so streetcars and interurbans could pretty much just go about their business without the need for signals, crossing gates, traffic cops, or even stop signs. Once automobiles came on the scene the interurbans started to have to sound their whistles at crossings, further annoying neighbors, or install railroad-type signals at great expense. I fixed the broken image links in my posts above for anyone who's new to this discussion.

^ Do we even know how many were going from cities in Europe to cities in America, versus farm to farm, farm to city, or city to farm? Things like the Irish potato famine sent a lot of farmers over here, but did they start new farms or move to American cities? Maybe by the late 19th and early 20th centuries the immigrants were fleeing Europe more for lack of economic opportunity than any particular problem with "density" which were really not any better here if moving from a European city to an American one. Earlier on in the 19th century and for much of the 18th I think immigration was based more on farming and homesteading without the supposed encumbrances of more cooperative European farming villages (heaven forbid). That rural "value" does continue to pollute modern discourse, but these are all ancestors we're talking about here, so while there's certainly values being passed on from generation to generation, I think it's silly to attribute preferences to anything innate.

The forest moon of Endor?

Then what should it be John?

^ Zoning officials afraid to shake up the status quo for fear of incurring the wrath of busybody citizens who would raise hell for anyone who might make it easier for "those people" to move in to "their" neighborhood. It's much more fine-grained than you might think. "Those people" could be folks with "merely half a million dollars" to spend on a house compared to the entrenched owners who built something for $750K. The people in the development with $300K homes are fearful of those who can "only" spend $250K and will zealously enforce any covenants or restrictions to keep them in their own separate pod out of sight. It's pecking order. Part of this comes from the banks' slavish devotion to comps which must be stupidly close by. This is easy in homogeneous subdivisions, but in mixed neighborhoods the banks can't seem to figure it out or look more than a block or two away.

I just find it interesting that a mega church would go for a building like Old St. George. Seems like they usually just have their huge warehouse-church buildings and possibly some small neighborhood storefront locations. This is something very much in between. Is there precedent in other cities for taking over such a large neighborhood/regional church building like this?

Plus, if wealthier people want to live in a neighborhood, they will find a way. What does anyone actually expect to be able to do to "fight" gentrification anyway? Trying to limit tear-downs or densification just means that the houses/apartments/whatever get bid up even more and fixed up to a higher level than they might otherwise, so then there's even less chance of being able to meet demand, making the "problem" worse.

There's something to be said for starting simply and less expensive to get the ball rolling and grow with the neighborhood. That made more sense a century ago when streetcar lines were being built into what were the hinterlands of the city and streets were merely dirt. However, that also meant that rails installed in the 1890s were horribly decrepit by the 1920s. Just look at this shot of Erie and Delta from 1927. That looks rickety to the point of being dangerous. It's also part of what killed the interurban railways too. Their cheaply built tracks in dirt roads were wearing out after only 20 years, even with constant maintenance. That rough track also beat the cars up too.l When the Cincinnati Street Railway rebuilt these tracks in the 1920s through the 1940s they used extremely heavy rail set in concrete with steel cross braces, essentially making a super reinforced concrete block that remains under the streets to this day, and which are massively difficult to cut through because they're so well built. The amount of investment poured into the system and then thrown away in barely a generation is criminal. That said, building tracks in the dirt on the cheap isn't appropriate for a downtown location or developed neighborhood like OTR. That's more in line with a system like Kenosha's.

^ Don't forget what used to be at that corner! https://drc.libraries.uc.edu/handle/2374.UC/720500

I wouldn't have thought so without looking very closely, but the building does appear to have been almost doubled in size between the early 1930s and mid 1950s. While the 1932 aerial of the city is terribly scanned, it does seem to show that the building didn't go nearly to the street corner. When they built the addition they managed to get exactly the same brick, but you can see they left off some of the carved stone decorative elements on the roof, and the windows have a 3/3 muntin pattern whereas the older ones are 4/4. According to the Courier article, UC plans to demolish that addition. Granted the corner element is...weird...and that's a lot of blank wall along Lincoln Avenue, with the loading docks and such, but this is a ton of building mass that's going away, no doubt to be replaced with surface parking.

Houston has all the same floor area ratio, setbacks, parking minimums, height restrictions, buffer zone requirements, and street geometry rules that codify sprawl. The only thing that's different is the lack of specific use-type regulations. So even if you wanted to build a house in an industrial park, you'd still have to meet a sizable number of zoning criteria. Like I said before, if you wanted to move closer to work, you're physically prevented from doing so even if you can afford to buy the property. And just find another job? What world do you live in?

Uh, no. You can be forced to live miles away from work or shops or schools or whatever you want to be close to just due to zoning laws alone. If I wanted to live within walking distance of work I couldn't because it's an industrial park. No houses allowed. Then there's minimum lot sizes, setbacks, parking minimums, height restrictions, fire department access requirements, and lack of sidewalks, even though there's plenty of room to build several houses or small apartment buildings. That's the kind of non-freedom having an automobile-dominated transportation system perpetuates. It's the "cars are great servants but terrible masters" situation. What at first seemed like an enabler of freedom, "hey I can go wherever I want whenever I want" became a ball and chain, "oh now I have to drive 30 minutes just to get to anything, whether I want to or not." We're frogs being slowly boiled to death without noticing it.

My guess is that they'll just remain city-owned vacant parcels. That's already the case between Dixmyth and Clifton, and on the north side of Dixmyth as well. Either way, who would want to build anything right next to this monstrosity? That's part of the reason the apartments that were there were rather dowdy to begin with. Who wants to live on a busy street full of roaring through traffic? This is how we get buffer zones and berms and other "nature band-aids" to try to make the environment we've created a little less harsh. The problem is it just makes distances even bigger and walking and biking and transit use that much more unpleasant, so it becomes self-reinforcing. It also doesn't help that there's a creek back there, so these properties drop off precipitously towards the back, and that will only be exacerbated by the widening of MLK. If that valley was filled in from Whitfield to the edge of the Clifton Colony apartments then you'd actually have a decently flat parcel between MLK and Lowell that could have something like Stetson Square on it, but instead it'll just be empty useless woods. I have little doubt UC wants to see this whole corridor ripped stripped clean of anything that might turn off prospective students and their parents coming to visit for the first time.

This whole project just infuriates me. Of course those buildings were blighted, because they were vacated and stripped in preparation for the street widening project. This project adds a turn lane, except now there will be virtually nothing left to turn into anymore. It's like the Kennedy Connector, which has a center turn lane for its entire length despite having no developable parcels along at least half of it, and access to others on different streets. It's not going to be friendly to pedestrians because there's nothing left to walk to. This is exactly the kind of backward-thinking automobiles-above-all-else mentality that destroys cities and tax base while adding more infrastructure to pay for and maintain to boot. That's how governments go broke. If they were planning to redevelop the whole north side of the street with new buildings at a higher density than the very affordable apartments that are being lost, then maybe it wouldn't be quite so bad, but instead we get more useless greenspace that does nothing but require mowing and litter cleanup.

At some point I think you have to just say "use it or lose it." I realize that the government's taxation of railroad property based on its improved value is the crux of the problem (just as it's a problem with parking lots downtown, or any vacant or otherwise underutilized property in already built-up areas), but corridors like this are so valuable that simply letting them grow weeds is borderline criminal.