Clevelander17

A golf course wouldn't be optimal, but it would be better than more retail and more traffic congestion. I just take exception to your snide comment about having plenty of green space around you and advocating that the rest of us put up with daily headaches so that a few times a month you can eat at some fancy new restaurants that just have to be located in an already oversaturated part of town. It's a bush league way of looking at the world. This is exactly why we need regional planning that cuts a lot of this selfishness out of the equation. Sorry, but I can't agree with this. A decade and a half ago, neither Oakwood CC, TRW, nor Acacia CC were zoned for retail. People bought homes near these places with absolutely no idea of what might happen to those clubs/businesses and what kinds of retail development might replace them. I was young, but I do vaguely remember what Cedar-Richmond was like in the 1990s when only Beachwood Place and LaPlace were there. Traffic wasn't great, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it is now. To try to spin this around on them as if they should have known is simply ridiculous. This isn't at all analogous to knowingly purchasing a home near the turnpike. There is an abundance of green space and wealth in the Chagrin Valley. If there really is a need for more upscale retail in this region (which I think is debatable, despite claims of chains we're supposedly lacking), THAT'S where it should go, nearest to those that will be frequenting it. And let Solon or Orange Village or wherever reap the hypothetical tax windfall from such a development.

I'm not certain about that, though I'm certain it's one of the busiest in Northeast Ohio. Is there a place that we can find such information?

What's this in reference to? Right a "smart" city that is looking to ignore residents' opinions and fool the general public would do such a thing. It's almost like those in charge have already decided for everyone else what this space ought to be. This is shaping up to be as unethical of a process as the Oakwood debacle. How about listening to what the citizens want? Why won't the mayor tell citizens who the developers are and what the developers' intentions would be? Why is he waiting until after Acacia club members vote on the conservancy proposal? Is there really $16 million on the table, or is he simply poisoning the well for a lower offer to simply get the land conservancy out of the way? The article makes it sound as if the mayor doesn't even have a firm offer from any developer. Perhaps this $16 million number may be imaginary. Something's not right here. The mayor needs to act more transparently. Also, I have to say this, but I'm a little disgusted by some of the NIMBY comments in the Cleveland.bomb comments section from out-of-county folks who brag about abundant green space near them but don't mind about even more traffic congestion and diminishing green space in other areas.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas, udfan12. One thing I like about the European secondary school system is that starting at about age 16, students are on a path towards college or a path towards vocational training. We used to have something similar in this country, but we've moved away from it. We need to be honest with ourselves as a society and be able to admit that college may not be for everyone. And quite frankly, there are a number of careers out there that don't require a college degree that make more than some that do. The downside of this model is that it forces some kids into making a lifelong decision perhaps before they're ready. Some kids are late bloomers and some don't know what they want to do by age 16, which is absolutely fine. Another issue that sometimes students are unfairly pushed along a path that isn't right for them because of assumptions made about the student based on background. I'd be curious to hear more about how high school kids can create jobs and take on leadership roles in their community. Maybe even some examples?

So it's pure hearsay by a your typical Cleveland.bomb commenter trying to stir up trouble. What's the other rumor? If you don't want to post it here, maybe you might be interested in shooting me a PM? :)

Oh now you're going to have to spill it! ;)

. Had all of Cuyahoga County been part of Cleveland during the 1970s, Judge Battisti would have ordered busing throughout the county (which by most accounts he dearly wanted to do but was forbidden from doing by Milliken v. Bradley). This would have impacted the county's population the way it impacted Cleveland's. We'd now have about 900,000 people in the county. In reality, this would have increased sprawl. The settlement of Medina and Geagua counties would have begun earlier. I think busing was probably a mistake and executed incorrectly, but I also think that your comment assumes that there is no geographic point, no distance from the center city, to which people will stop running from the issues of urban life. I think families moving a few miles to inner-ring and second-ring suburbs in the years following the busing decision was an easy transition for many. But if families were forced to move 20-30 miles out of the county and away from the region's main employment center (Cleveland), I'm not sure the surrounding counties would have boomed as quickly or to the extent to which you're assuming. I just think that there is a distance (and I'm not sure what it is or if it even matters nowadays) from the center city where it becomes unrealistic for people to be a part of a region in a way that allows them to conveniently commute to their daily activities (education, employment, entertainment, etc.).

Gotcha, that makes sense. It would probably take generations of committed local leadership to really put a huge dent in the way this county was developed. Under central leadership, things may have developed differently, but it likely would have been almost as bad because I doubt many would have had the foresight to buck the post-war sprawl trends, especially if that's what citizens were demanding.

I don't care unless they have some ulterior plan to sell it for retail development a decade from now. I think I know what you're getting at, I read about it in the comments section of the article, and it doesn't concern me one bit. What matters to me is that green space>retail, particularly in that part of the county.

Even if a majority of residents oppose this, what role, if any, do citizens have in the decision-making process? I mean if everything can move forward quickly before the next mayoral/council elections, do the residents have any say through any kind of a referendum? It's not entirely clear to me what that area is zoned, but it appears to be residential like most of the rest of the city. Also, somewhere I was reading something about the historic "Mayfield Country Estates" that were torn down to make way for Legacy Village? Can anyone explain to me what these were and how big of a loss that was? I don't have much of a memory of what that area looked like while TRW was still occupying the land.

And the plot thickens with the City of Lyndhurst offering to buy the land to sell to developers: http://www.cleveland.com/lyndhurst-south-euclid/index.ssf/2012/08/city_of_lyndhurst_makes_purcha.html

Couldn't a more centralized government do a better job of controlling land use through zoning? For instance, if Cleveland and Cuyahoga County were merged in 1950 and a decision was made to keep the undeveloped outer-ring suburbs, well, undeveloped, couldn't that have prevented some of the sprawl?

Yeah but is this really regionalism? I still think there are too many school districts and too many really tiny ones especially in what is a fairly dense urban area. I was actually playing around with the map the other day also redrawing school districts. I think the current number of districts in Cuyahoga County could easily be cut in half by combining a number of similar neighboring districts.

Not sure what source you were looking at, but according to the ODE report card pages, North has a higher percentage of students with disabilities AND a higher percentage of students from disadvantaged backgrounds than South does. These differences are not insignificant and alone could account for the big difference in the science scores. Or they could have no affect at all, but who really knows, because the state makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to adjust for those types of demographics beyond adding them on the report card page as some sort of a silent addendum. Personally, I think that the fact that your subjective analysis of the teachers in certain subject areas North and the pseudo-objective measurement results seem to line up as compared to one other school, is pure coincidence. In fact with the current measurement system, I think such instances are, more often than not, going to be coincidence...yes it's really that bad. There are undoubtedly outstanding teachers in urban schools whose students score lower on tests than, say, more affluent students with legitimately bad teachers in other districts. And the measurement system is pretty much blind to this type of thing. So you're right, I suppose I was a little harsh in saying that the state ratings system tells us "nothing about the schools themselves." I should have said that they tell us "mostly nothing." Until the tests themselves become less biased and until demographic data is able to be adjusted enough to the point of really measuring what a district/school/teacher is adding to the child's learning process, I think that the measurement system will remain too inaccurate to be as useful as most politicians and citizens assume it is, especially in comparing districts. It shouldn't take a background in education, statistics, or experimental design to see how much improvement the measurement system needs if these are the things we're going to be using it for.

And an argument against centralization of regional power: http://georgiapolicy.org/sandy-springs-a-case-study-on-centralization-of-local-government/

I believe that townships don't have taxing power (at least income taxes), so in that regard they're pretty much legally obliged to rely on the county for a number of services and to force citizens to pay individually for privatized services. Getting long-established municipalities to switch to using county services could be challenging.

I was reading a bit about "The Lakewood (California) Plan" and the way it has historically outsourced/shared services while retaining control through a local government. I think that that relates nicely to the following article from a few months ago about Ed FitzGerald and his expansion of county services to increase sharing with the suburbs: http://www.clevelandmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=586CA122EB394032BD4AA3B686FF03D9&nm=Editorial&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=1578600D80804596A222593669321019&tier=4&id=B1E902F597024628B7967BE30E9D6019 Just another possible, perhaps more realistic, for regionalism in NEO.

Just to be clear, University Heights does not have its own high school. It's part of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District, and all public school students in that district attend Cleveland Heights High School. The state ratings are no reflection of the level of service the schools provide. The Shaker Heights schools have tons of programs and services that would make many outer-ring suburbs jealous. The schools have high teachers salaries and as such tends to have its pick of the litter in staffing. So let's not let this by clouded by the fact that the population it serves--very diverse ranging from extremely wealthy to poor, with decent concentrations of both and everything in the middle--may not score as well overall on standardized tests as some other area districts with perhaps less affluence but also less diversity and poverty. This belies the reality that the range of educational opportunities in the classroom and extracurricular offerings for SH students is quite likely among the best in the state. The point I'm making is that the schools themselves are top-notch. A decent chunk of the families in the district indeed enroll their kids in the schools but aren't actually taking full advantage...for whatever reason. A similar story plays itself out across the border in Cleveland Heights, though not quite to the same degree in regards to what is offered to the students and to a worse degree in what is taken for granted.

There's a video of Chris Perez, getting into it with a fan this past weekend in Oakland, making the rounds on the internet today. The fan is a clown for sure, but Perez has to know better. Some of the things he says give us an insight into what he's thinking and quite frankly, it's not the type of thing I want in a player on one of my favorite teams.

First of all, the state ratings system is a mostly asinine way of judging schools/districts. They tell us nothing about the schools themselves, but a lot about the students attending (i.e. their family/background). This is a problem. Shaker Heights High School does have an extensive and seemingly successful honors program, but again this may be in large part because it has a somewhat decent influx of upper middle-class and wealthy families that do use the schools and take advantage of the program. Second of all, "University Heights high school"? WTF, mate? However Wiley Middle School in University Heights was rated "Effective." CH-UH and to a lesser extent SH both have a large percentage of residents that opt for private schools, certainly higher than most outer-ring suburbs. Some of this is tradition of private school use in those communities, some of it is avoiding the perceived "bad" school districts. Regardless neither district comes close to reflecting the demographics of the local populations. If these districts had the percentage of community enrollment that places like Solon or Avon Lake had, I guarantee you that both districts state ratings would look much, much better without anything actually changing in the way the schools themselves operate.

I was reading a post on regionalism in Cleveland from The Urbanophile from a few years back and something in the comments section made me wonder: What is the bare minimum amount of city-county consolidation we'd have to do to get the entire county's population number counted as part of the city in the census? In other words, what is the least amount of power the suburbs could cede to the county to have Cleveland legally show up on a "list of US cities by population" at #9 with 1,280,122 people?

Backyard trash pickup. Duh.

A lot. It was cited as a major motivation in the PD article. As for Shaker Heights not wanting to merge, that may be true of residents in the northern/eastern part of the city, but the southern/western part is not wealthy. It heavily middle-class black like much of UH and CH. SH is an interesting case study. I think it would be a potential great merger partner for either UH or Beachwood, and a decent merger partner for CH. I also think that SH would be one of the last ones to the regioanlism table, because it has a perception to maintain, even if that perception is built on a legacy from half a century ago that's hardly based in reality these days. I'd be okay with the state slashing the budget and cutting back aid to municipalities if, and ONLY if, this is to be follow by a state income tax cut. Taxes could then be raised and collected on a more local basis and ultimately more of that money would be staying local. Beachwood could be a possibility for Shaker Heights, but likley the only somewhat realistic one. I mean we just bought in Shaker, and we are paying dearly for the differences that those costs give us (in a still beautiful area with likely the least amount of the issues that surrounding communities are having to deal with). If we had bought in CH, heck yeah we would have wanted to merge with Shaker, but given that Shaker residents just overwhelmingly passed a payrole tax increase in a severly over taxed community tells me that they are willing to pay just about anything to grasp onto the remaining high standards and quality of life they have left (one that has largely departed the majority of the other areas and county) I think that UH might be the other realistic merger possibility for SH. Similar in a lot of ways, including taxes and government structure. UH doesn't have the areas of extreme wealth that SH has, but it does have a decent chunk of middle-class that might be attractive. Also UH has JCU, which is a big income tax generator. I think the two suburbs would get along nicely, though I am a bit biased.

In North Randall's case, I would hope that some potential future open land may be a draw. If nothing else, Warrensville Heights shares a school district with North Randall, so the bigger of a hole it becomes, the more it drags on the area as a "whole." In regards to East Cleveland, I do think it has some nice assets, both uphill and even downhill with some of Euclid Avenue being revitalized. But this is the interesting thing about the regionalism discussion, and one that you should point out to the councilwoman if you ever speak to her again. The argument she's using to poo-poo a merger with East Cleveland is the same argument that suburbanites use in refusing to cooperate and work with Cleveland.

A bit of your taxes? Sure. A full share (in some places more than your municipality of residence)? I don't think that's right. Agreed. But at the end of the day, I think a strong argument can/should be made that one's city of residence, where almost everyone spends the majority of their time, should get a larger share. Under the current system, the inner-ring suburbs are getting "screwed" the most in my opinion and for no logical reason. I'd like to see that changed.