Clevelander17

I don't know if it will matter at this point, but they need to make a trade deadline splash.

I was thinking about that possibility, too. I'm sure if the area merchants/residents/landlords wanted to have something like that, the city would likely work with them to legally arrange for it.

Occasionally I'll see the random police officer walking around the Square and sometimes I'll see them hanging out in/around the Yours Truly. I know that Dave's Supermarket also has security keeping on eye near their entrance, but as far as I can tell they're just as concerned about who's parking in their lot and not coming to the grocery store as they are about anything else. I hate to say it, but I have wondered in the past if Shaker Square (and Larchmere) would get more of a police presence if they were both fully a part of Shaker Heights and under the jurisdiction of their police department. It almost seems like the CPD is stretched too thin to worry much about an area that is relatively low-crime. Even though I realize that they know that if they want to keep attracting folks from the suburbs that they need to keep the neighborhood safe, I don't know that they have the resources to do so as well as the SHPD might. Just a thought.

As was pointed out in the historical article posted in this post: "Columbus controlled most of the water and sewer lines in Franklin County. It defined service areas for suburbs and required that landowners outside those areas annex to the city to obtain the services needed for development." I knew about that situation with the water, too, so maybe it was a dumb question.

Yeah I ran into that yesterday. They should just go ahead and widen Warrensville Center there while they're at it. Traffic on that stretch and bleeding north of Mayfield in Cleveland Heights and south of Cedar into University Heights is going to be a mess when that shopping center opens. Thanks Welo!

Should the janitor(s) be punished at all for not doing anything?

A lot of the older cities in the Northeast and Midwest were landlocked by their suburbs in the early 20th century or even earlier. The booming, generally younger cities of the Sun Belt didn't have that issue and as such annexation of new developments has been much easier especially in the second half of the 20th century and with all of the car-generated sprawl. I'm having a hard time picturing where Cleveland's 3.5% in growth came from. Perhaps some land that was Brook Park out near/around the Hopkins Airport? I was going to guess Miles Heights, but that full merger happened in the 1930s I believe. Indianapolis, Nashville, Louisville, and Kansas City (?) all had recent city-county mergers which I believe accounts for a lot of their respective growth. It seems like there has been (and still is) a lot of unincorporated territory in Franklin County that has been up for grabs for annexation for Columbus and probably some of the suburbs as well. I'd be curious if the annexation has been unique to Columbus, or if some of its bigger suburbs have gotten in on the action, too.

This front office has a track record of reaching on second and third round picks, why not?!

I honestly don't think that. I used the term earlier in a bit of a rush because I couldn't think of anything better to call those people and most of them appear to me to be WASPs even if that's not really entirely the case.

I think we're agreeing here that schools are more a reflection of the students that attend than vice versa. I would love to have such a discussion here but I'm not sure how it would fit into the larger goal of this message board. I seek out and watch such educational videos with a bit of an obsession and there are definitely some incredibly innovative ideas floating around. While I agree that technology could be a game-changer, I still don't think that the concept of the physical classroom will cease to exist on any kind of a grand scale. There are still a lot of limitations to many of these ideas and there will still be a role for the school building--as an educational home base of sorts and for the social aspects of learning--to play.

Part of it is misconception, part of it is real concern about things like school safety and classroom disruption. For the most part, well-supported and motivated students can succeed in almost any school. However if a school environment (almost always created by high concentrations of students from troubled families) is extremely destructive, I do think it can hinder even the most well-prepared student. This generally seems to be what suburban parents are afraid of and are trying to avoid in your typical inner-city/urban school districts. The new CMSD plan talks a big game about "high-quality" schools and teachers as if these things are currently the biggest problem or if they're even being accurately measured. However the plan does nothing to address the school issues caused by extreme poverty and a general, widespread lack of parental accountability. This is why the plan is unlikely to succeed.

The new 99.1? Yeah I've never been able to pick that up clearly on the eastside.

This is a pretty accurate post. You can shuffle kids around from public schools to charter schools to Catholic schools (funded by vouchers), but if you get enough of those kids coming from families that don't value education together, these new schools are going to start to look a lot like the "bad" public schools you were trying to get them away from. It's not the schools...it's the families. And on a related note, the WASPy/exurbanist types will never voluntarily put their children in schools with larger percentages of the above types of kids, meaning they won't be moving back into the inner core until they have better (i.e. separated) educational options. I don't think the mass influx of unproven charter schools is going to cut it, but that's just a gut feeling. The current neo-segregation of the American public school system is working too well for them at the moment to risk change.

In regards to 87.7, my radio scanner just recently picked up and I thought it was hilarious that it kept playing the same four songs over and over. Glad to hear that there's actually some good reasoning behind that. C'mon Wilson, gotta make it happen! Now to the annoying...as I've probably mentioned several times on this thread, I love listening to WJCU 88.7 which has always come in very clearly for me throughout the eastern suburbs and even well into the city limits of Cleveland. Unfortunately over the past few weeks I've noticed that the station is receiving a lot of interference from another station. A few days back I was finally able to hear identification from the other station and it appears to be 89X (which is really also 88.7), an alternative station out of Windsor, Ontario. Anyone else noticed this recently too? WJCU plays a great selection of tunes, but more and more the only place where I can pick up a consistently clear signal is in University Heights where the station is located. This stinks!

Right, but that goes back to the overall point...fan interest in small market teams is only going to exist when they've got superstars. And in today's NBA, the superstars are avoiding the small markets at all costs, even giving up money to go elsewhere. It may even only be a matter of time before big-time players coming out of college start trying to dictate where they will and won't play/sign contracts if they're drafted.

I wasn't implying that the Cavs fanbase extends in any meaningful way into Pittsburgh or Buffalo or Cincy. But the lack of NBA teams in those towns means less competition for Youngstown, Erie, Columbus, etc. Fair enough. I just think there's far less regional loyalty in the NBA. I get the impression that in some of those towns (or any non-NBA market around the country), for the folks that do care about the NBA, they're rooting more for individuals like Kobe Bryant or Kevin Durant than any one particular team, be that team the Cavaliers or anyone else. I could be wrong, but it seems like that's a very typical form of NBA fandom.

In reality it's the only kind of "good" closer that most teams ever get. Guys like Rivera are once-in-a-generation. Some guys may be able to match his stat line for two or three years, but that type of consistency at the closer position is incredibly rare. It's part of the reason why I would like to see the Tribe unload Perez right now...I don't see his success lasting long enough to warrant paying him as much as he's getting or holding on to him like he's an incredible asset. Not to mention the fact that his diarrhea of the mouth is getting old.

A few thoughts: First of all, as I mentioned in my post, I think that NBA fans are less loyal to franchises than fans of any of the other major sports. So maybe Cleveland technically has a huge geography monopoly protruding out from Lake Erie, but I have a hard time believing that few folks in Pittsburgh or Buffalo care much about the Cavaliers, especially considering both a big hockey towns. I think that the market discussion in this case really does revolve around the size of the metropolitan area...though I understand the argument for keeping Houston off the list. Second of all in regards to Chicago, I do think that it's viewed by players as an attractive destination even if they've struggled in recent years in actually landing top players. I remember about five years back when Kobe was unhappy in LA and he was whining about being traded that he wanted to be a Bull and (like Howard now) that was one of the only places he would sign off on being traded to. Between the tradition of the franchise and the city itself, I still think that Chicago has a lot of allure. Finally, I think that the only way to really rectify the situation would be (or would have been) to institute a rock solid hard salary cap. The luxury tax (loophole) is really what allows all of this nonsense to happen IMO.

He's definitely a very good pitcher, but he's overrated. And you're right, there's been quite a bit of luck on his part that we haven't seen more outcomes like yesterday during the first half. Interestingly enough, on the day before the All-Star break, the two guys that really cost the Tribe the game on the defensive end of things were the two guys going to Kansas City as All-Stars.

That's cool...I've never been to the fair, but it's on my list of things to do someday!

It's a sad situation when the Cavaliers are in on a trade involving the best center in the game--a superstar--and we're supposed to be getting excited about coming away with a decent young guard and/or a first-round pick. I only want the pick if it's Orlando's or some other team that is likely to consistently be in the lottery in the next few years. I had a joke about Chris Grant and what he would do for a first round pick, but it's inappropriate for this message board.

Conspiracy or not, the big problem is that the NBA has almost overnight become a league of the half-dozen "haves" (big market teams) and the two dozen "have nots" (everyone else). It's really frustrating that Gilbert and the other smaller market owns caved in during the lockout and accepted this deal (at the behest of the big market owners) with nothing more than a verbal promise that things would change, that the direction the league started taking in the late 00s wasn't going to continue. With this new direction for the NBA and the way that many fans (perhaps a majority, even) of the league now seem to be rooting more for the name on the back instead of the name on the front, I'd almost prefer to see contraction down to about 10-12 teams. I mean what's the point of even having teams in Cleveland or Milwaukee or Salt Lake City or New Orleans or anyplace else that isn't NY/LA/Chicago/Boston/Dallas/Houston/Miami if the former group of teams can't even really compete with the latter? Right now the small market franchises are nothing but pawns--the Washington Generals, basically--for the traveling road shows that are the big market franchises. As someone who was once a big fan of the sport of basketball, the NBA, and most of all the Cavaliers, I want nothing to do with being a pawn for a league that's not going to give my team a chance at winning it all. And yes I'm fully aware of San Antonio and now Oklahoma City bucking that trend a bit, but San Antonio's great run happened before this era of big market superteams and OKC is a bit of a fluke situation with that rare superstar player who's not a prima donna...regardless he'll be up for free agency in three years and I'll be very curious to see what he does, particularly if between now and then OKC doesn't win a title.

I'm thinking Bratenahl?

Sure you could blame the failure of Issue 2...or you could you also point to the fact that some in this country simply don't prioritize investments in things like public safety and education. If you want more cops, one idea is to pay them a lower wage and hope that morale isn't affected. Another idea is to pay them what they're actually worth and put more money into the public safety pot. I like the idea of increasing foot patrols in key areas as long as we're not talking about cops who have their noses so far deep into their violation books that they're not paying attention to the surroundings. It sounds good on paper even though the efficacy of the "Broken Windows Theory" pioneered by Guiliani has been called into question.

I understand the presence theory. I even believe that it's quite possible that each member of the CHPD "Traffic Safety Bureau" (what's written on the side of some of the squad cars) writes enough tickets in a year to not only pay for their own salary but also the salary of another uniformed officer. I just think that the CHPD, as a whole, appears to some to be spending more time harassing people who are coming to the city spending money not causing problems and less time tracking down real criminals. I don't personally believe that to be the entire story, but I do understand where that idea might come from. On a similar note to KJP's anecdotes, I once heard that something like 25% (or some other significant percentage) of drivers pulled over for playing loud music in their cars were found to have drugs in the vehicle. Don't know if that's entirely true, but it is kind of interesting how a lot of times these criminals do profile themselves in such ways. He was a CHPD officer? For some reason when Jason West was shot a few years ago I thought I remembered reading in some of the articles that it was the first time a CH cop had been killed in action since the 1940s.