jjakucyk

Were the windows even open on the back side to begin with? I know a few were, but it seems like a lot of them were just false windows from the start.

"Just" leasing it means they have property rights. Maybe so, but do they have ALL the same rights as if they owned it outright?

Oil may be a finite resource, but combustible liquid fuels are not. As P. J. O'Rourke once observed, when we ran out of whale oil, no one really noticed. Yes but in all those cases we were substituting a fossil fuel for a bio fuel of some sort (oil for whales, coal for wood, even natural gas for beeswax candles). The problem is we don't have any substitute for fossil fuels that have any hope of "allowing us to run things the way we run them now." Wal-Mart, commercial airliners, and sprawlburgs only work with CHEAP oil, and we've already exhausted most of it. Sure there's still some new discoveries, but we're at diminishing returns as it gets more and more difficult and costly to extract and refine, and the alternatives are also costly to grow and refine, especially when they displace food production. The incentives to come up with a substitute are so huge that we're not going to find something sitting in a puddle and slap our foreheads over how obvious a solution it is, because someone would have found it by now.

^ Except that in this case SORTA owns the Oasis right-of-way, and I&O/G&W is just leasing it.

Isn't that basically the standard response from all railroads though?

^ It just shows that the oil market is highly volatile, which makes it all the more absurd that nearly our entire economy and way of life is based on it. That's the very antithesis of stability and reliability. Besides, there's no denying that oil is a finite resource, so the current crash in prices is only temporary.

The big difference between Cincinnati (and other older cities) and these sunbelt boomtowns is how quickly the sunbelt cities devolve into low-density single-family residential neighborhoods. Instead of several miles of older neighborhoods that went through at least one or two eras of redevelopment and densification like OTR, Uptown, Northside, Price Hill, Walnut Hills, and of course Covington, Newport, and Bellevue, you instead go immediately from downtown to the equivalent of Evanston or Bond Hill, with another quick transition again to ranch-dominated inner suburbs, all of which can be quite depressed by now. Cincinnati even has some rather dense manufacturing suburbs more like what you'd find in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania such as Lockland and Reading, which are that much more rare in the south. So because the southern core city was originally fairly small and sprawl runs rampant with very restrictive zoning even quite close to downtown, there's enormous pressure to maximize development in the allowable downtown areas, so it's a bit more peaky than you get here.

This is exactly what I was talking about... http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/2/15/lower-speed-limits-wont-solve-this

^ But that's exactly what makes the intersection SAFER. It's so tight that everyone has to be extra slow and careful when driving through there. Yes, big vehicles turning onto Auburn from McMillan is a problem, but widening the lanes, broadening the curves, improving sight lines, etc. only makes people drive faster, endangering everyone even more. That's when you end up with an intersection like Clifton and MLK, which we all know is an unmitigated safety disaster, precisely because it was engineered only for automobile safety and easy turns.

The important thing is that the market is there for these kinds of units in this particular place. If you want to argue that they're overpaying, fine whatever, but there's simple supply/demand forces at work here. What would be nice is to see some of this kind of development happening at a smaller more granular scale, but unfortunately zoning is too restrictive to allow that to happen and only big players can get in the game. That's a more important topic, because Cincinnati is in a good position to prevent the kind of housing shortages and explosive prices seen in places like NYC, SF, and more and more in Chicago, but it's going to get harder and harder to fix the underlying problems of artificial scarcity created by the zoning laws as time goes on, and make no mistake, nowhere in the city or developed suburbs is the zoning set up to allow for new growth other than vacant lot infill. So I'm happy to see projects like this take some of the pressure off market demand, but these one-off projects won't be enough in the long term.

This is where Uptown Rentals plans to build a 50,000 sq foot medical office building: http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/print-edition/2014/11/14/mount-auburn-a-lost-neighborhood-gets-new-love.html?page=all OMG a new building that actually responds to the corner! Funny how the other examples are also in Uptown (Stetson Square, etc.)

This is the key part from the article: 3 bed 2 bath is damn big, and those prices per square foot are not bad at all for a brand new rental. $1/sf/month is typical for a decent older apartment. Plus, even if someone did find an equivalent house nearby, they'd still have to save up that extra money to fix all the crappy stuff while having to live with it in the meantime, then they have to deal with all the construction hassles, and even when all is said and done it's still an old house, and you *STILL* have to put away a good chunk of money for all those maintenance items to come back again down the road. I know very wealthy folks living in $million plus homes who still have no wall insulation, clanky steam radiators, ungrounded electric, and drafty windows because even though they can afford to fix them it would just be too disruptive to actually do it. Compare these apartments to an equivalent sized house in the same neighborhood that's been completely remodeled and includes lawn care service, on-call maintenance staff, and no property taxes, then it's more apples to apples.

^ People who don't want a 100 year old house that's drafty, covered in aluminum (or asbestos siding), with sagging floors, tiny kitchens, and 20 layers of lead paint on everything. I've been in a handful of Oakley houses, and a lot of them are really crappy. I know we've been over this before, but those supposed "alternatives" are cheap for a reason Jake.

:-D

Here's two great explorations of the role of preservation and the issues of compatibility versus differentiation, historic versus modern, etc. Can Preservationists Let Love Rule? http://www.placemakers.com/2015/02/02/preservationists-let-love-rule/ Differentiated and Compatible Design http://www.oldhouseauthority.com/archive/DifferentiatedandCompatibleDesign

This is a very important conversation we needed to have as a city yesterday. I don't think visions of reaching French Quarter status are all that romantic, personally. The tour company I work for gave over 30,000 tours of Over-the-Rhine in 2014. About a tenth of those were international tourists to boot. The word is out on Over-the-Rhine as a National Historic District and people are clamoring for somewhere new to take their family vacations. Add an open container district, allow uninhibited growth of Bockfest, and start discussing the German, African, Appalachian creole that makes the culture of Cincinnati so unique and BAM...watch the high-end hotel chains fight for property. The thing is that we have a bunch of neighborhoods that can become dense, walkable, fully functioning urban districts. West End, Camp Washington, Whatever the heck we're calling the area between Eggleston and Broadway these days, Northside, Corryville (I wouldn't have included it a few years ago but UC cut the jugular on any chance of that neighborhood remaining single family detached), Walnut Hills, etc. We only have one neighborhood that has the potential for that degree of tourism. (Actually it's the only neighborhood in the entire Midwest with that potential) It would be a damn shame to lose all that because we're aiming for the Pearl District instead. The resistance to densification in surrounding neighborhoods and suburbs is another big factor in the housing issues in SF and even to some extent in Portland as well on the east side of the Willamette River. New York City is hemmed in by a lot of Queens, South Brooklyn, and...New Jersey, while Chicago is also tightly constrained by not only its bungalow belt but the denser neighborhoods a bit closer in where "3-4 stories is plenty." Sound familiar? So the conversation on allowing bigger buildings and more density in OTR is definitely one that needs to be had, but it can't happen in isolation without also discussing density in surrounding neighborhoods and suburbs. We're already seeing the results of hyper-strict zoning and even down-zoning in Hyde Park, which being a desirable neighborhood with no ability to grow "up" has nowhere to go but more upmarket. Hence tearing down a handful of apartment buildings to build a super high-end condo building, with no appreciable net increase (or possibly a net loss) in population. But since the single-family residential districts are sacrosanct, there's nowhere else for the market to go. Also consider that unless you do go super high-end, then in order to make redevelopment of a particular property financially tenable, you usually have to quadruple the number of units. So a single-family house goes to a 4-plex, or four single-family houses become a small courtyard apartment, etc. That's why you see weird things like pop-ups in Washington DC that are 2-3x as tall as the surrounding row houses and why capping heights at 4 stories in a neighborhood that's already 3-4 stories to begin with just leads to further stasis or moving farther and farther upmarket. The numbers just don't work otherwise.

A windowless large-plate space sounds like just the thing for a downtown Kroger if they aren't willing to build a real urban store elsewhere.

And if there's any building type where a courtyard is the appropriate disposition of outdoor space, it's a library. They don't have to worry about security, and the building itself shields the courtyard from the noise of the city. The drivel of leftover outdoor spaces we see in the aerial view above don't add much to the public realm, and they're not useful for patrons either.

I've never heard anyone cite the wires as the important part in expressing the permanence of transit, it's the tracks that are important.

^ But that's the kind of logic that leads to statements like "if OTR is too full, then go to Walnut Hills or South Fairmount instead." That ignores the first principle of real estate: location, location, location, and could very well stall or limit redevelopment overall because of factors that make those other neighborhoods less desirable.

^ I don't know if there is one. I'm sure Jake will say "Mt. Auburn tunnel" but all these tunnel proposals are just so expensive and impractical. From a surface running perspective, I think it would have to be something like Reading-Elsinore-Gilbert-McMillan-Woodburn-Xavier.

And all of it is kind of moot since with the old bridge remaining this new bridge will only really be viewable from downstream on KY-8 (there's not really a good vantage point on the Ohio side of the river).

^ That's called NIMBYism, and while they may try, pressuring the city for down-zoning or whatever, nobody has a god-given right to a particular view just because they were there first.

But that doesn't make it OK, it's just an excuse.

^ I think the even more critical thing is that there were joints on both sides. From the photos of the wreck, it looks like they had removed all of the concrete from the steel beams to the left of the support columns on the left shoulder. The trouble is, the beams are cantilevered over the shoulders, and removing the weight from the left side of those columns also removes the counterbalancing. It's like being on a stationary seesaw, but then the other person gets off while your feet are up. In this case, the backhoe was parked right over that joint, adding more weight to the "wrong" side of the pivot.