Brutus_buckeye

I remember touring it a number of years back and finding the building to be a great property if someone can figure out how to handle the challenges. I do think I remember the old Duke Call center being converted to parking. I forgot about that part.

You can choose to believe what you want. That does not change the fact that in 2009-10, it was the case that the Dems did not want to negotiate with the Republicans on redistricting because they were counting on growing their majority to gerrymander things to their advantage. There were a number of articles written on but they were very old. I actually posted a link to one on this site many years back but it is no longer active or it appears to have been scrubbed during a clean out a number of years back. Jason Williams had written on the matter back when he wrote on politics. I completely understand that the articles may have been scrubbed, but there are articles out there. I am not going to waste 30-40 minutes to try and find them to prove a trivial point in the matter but if it is important to you, you are welcome to search for them.

There are articles that exist, they likely have been archived or something. If you care to spend the time to find them again you are welcome to do so.

That is a tough corner with the density and availability of parking in the area and being late to the game for a hotel/apartment conversion (not to say it wont work but it seems they may be late to the game for something like that. Dixie Terminal really offers no excess parking there and Scripps does not have much either I would imagine (could work for hotel but I would think apartments need more). The Renaissance caddy corner already has their spaces locked up and the Mecantile conversion as well as Kimpton likely have secured their spaces. There is just not much else available on 3rd and 4th for parking that could limit the potential of that building to residential (a high end resident is going to want a car) even if they rarely use it. Hotel works better IMO if there is the demand to do it but it is going to be a tough conversion at this point.

Looks like the hotel developer has backed out.

That is not true. Dems may have an advantage in voter registration over Republicans in Ohio (but Independents have broken toward the GOP lately). However, it is patently false to say that Democratic candidates receive more statewide votes. If that were the case you would have: Senators Sherrod Brown & Tim Ryan, Governor Nan Whaley, SOS as a Dem, Treasurer as a Dem, Atty Gen as a Dem, Auditor as a Dem, you would have Jennifer Brunner as Chief Justice and a Dem majority on the Supreme Court. If Dems received more statewide votes in Ohio, they may actually have won at least one statewide election in the last 3-4 cycles (Yes, I know SHerrod has won and they won a couple SC races but in general they are not performing well on statewide races)

You can find it yourself, They are there. I am not going to waste 30 minutes trying to prove it to you. If you want to read the history going back to 2009-2016 range (when the initial amendment to change how redistricting works was passed) there is a lot of history on it.

There were a lot of articles out between 2010-2015 talking about this issue. I have not seen anything lately and I am not going to scour the archives to try and pull it up, but there were a lot of articles written on this topic. Many had pretty much acknowledged that the Dems were to blame for the mess that was created and that it could have been easily avoided if, when they held power, agreed to a reasonable plan.

I agree with your point. I do think it needs fixed now as the Dems have suffered enough. But back in 2010, I do believe the Republicans were justified in their efforts to stack the deck the way they did since 1) The Dems turned down a reasonable offer when they had a chance to consolidate power and lost and 2) the greedy deserve to be punished for that. Now it has been over 10 years since that occurred. Reasonable minds should meet and make things fair.

The other thing that is often overlooked by many of the partisans on this board is that back in 2009/2010 the Dems had the governor mansion, SOS, atty general, treasurer (pretty much every office but auditor), they also had one of the branches in the statehouse. The GOP came to them at the time to propose a fair redistricting plan so that it would offer the minority party a say in the redistricting process in 2010. The Dems at that time told the GOP to go screw themselves because they were reading the tea leaves that pointed to a Strickland re-election and gains at the statehouse. THey were betting on controlling the whole redistricting process and gerrymandering in their favor. Well, instead they got curb stomped in 2010 and the GOP was able to control the process. While normally, I would agree that the GOP should have shown mercy, in this case, the Dems got to reap what they sowed and they absolutely deserved what they got in 2010.

^ and schools are still not happy about it.

I think part of that speaks to the age of the housing stock. Cleveland and Cincinnati developed much earlier and therefore built a lot of 2/4/8/12 unit buildings in their mixed residential neighborhoods. Drive down the street in East Side Cleveland or Lakewood and you see a ton of older small apartment buildings lining the streets. The huge complexes are spread further out. Also, i saw a quote where like 75% of the apartment housing stock there was built before 1990. Whereas Columbus has a much newer housing stock. You do not have as much new housing (apartment projects) in the 90s-present that are smaller than 100+ units. Only recently has that become a trend again, when dealing with urban infill. Much of the multi-family development in Columbus of the 90s-2020 range followed the trend of larger suburuban auto-centric complexes.

The flatness of Columbus makes it easier to develop and infill. Construction costs will be less in columbus than say Cincinnati which has a more challenging topographical environment. Yes, it may be easier to sprawl out but real estate is still largely about location and where you can develop just as easily closer to the city for relatively the same cost as sprawling out, it is easier/more economical to develop where there is existing infrastructure in place, even if the cost of land is marginally higher than the burbs. All things being equal, development in the city is preferred because you have sewer, electrical and other utilities to tap into to take advantage of whereas if you are developing raw land, there are considerable infrastructure costs to drive up the cost of the project to offset the lower cost of land.

Indianapolis took off pretty similarly to Columbus. I did not mean to make it sound like I was knocking Columbus but certainly topography played a role in some of their density development, a lot like Indianapolis. You can also draw a distinction between Columbus and cities like Wichita or Kansas City, St. Louis, Cleveland, etc. is that Columbus (and Indy to a certain extent) are capital cities and have a large research University (IU in Indy counts). Also look at Minneapolis (capital city and large R-1). All that contributes to the growth in Columbus (being a government center helps). Kansas City is pretty much the same peer as Cincinnati as neither are capital cities but both are growing and developing despite not having a state government in their cities.

Columbus is compact because it is a flat canvas. Up until the 70s much of the surrounding city was a flat cornfield and then it took off and the cornfields filled in. Cleveland and Cincinnati (especially Cincinnati have a lot of hills and some topography issues that make it difficult to develop in certain areas of town that force them to spread out in more neighborhood pockets. Cleveland not so much as it is relatively flat, but If you look at Cincinnati, there are some extremely dense areas sitting next to empty space due to hillsides getting in the way. I will agree with you that part of Cleveland's issues was from depopulation that they are struggling with today but the topography also plays a key role here.

^ you have to figure that given they control a lot of the area around the stadium, they can expand the offerings with pop up concessions to help spread out the lines. Similar to what the Reds do at the entrance before the game. However, most stadiums have long lines for concessions during the games so I do not know if that is something that will be changing signifcantly any time soon.

With straight ticket voting you are right, but the odds and ability of that truly happening for city council (which is technically a non-partisan election) is almost nil (although the Dems have done about as good of a job as they could to consolidate over the last few years by making cross party endorsements from the likes of the Charter committee non-starters for the Dem endorsement). When you have 20 candidates running, I think you will always have a Republican. If you minimize the candidates the Dems could sweep. The proposal out a few years back to stagger council terms that failed (thank God) would have likely accomplished that.

I don't think they would be able to capture her seat. The way the election is set up, it pretty much allows for at least 1 member of the minority party to be on council. There are enough Republicans city wide to at least capture 1 seat if they all vote for her (or vote at all). She would never get to the top 3 but will always stay in the 7-9 range.

^ This was always going to be an uphill battle. Even if the numbers make sense, getting it past the legislature (no matter who is in charge) and then having to take it to the voters was always an extremely heavy lift. Part of the reason why the city still owns the railroad is because they have been unable to get voter approval in the past to sell it. So this is nothing new right now.

I think Reaching Northside would be a great goal to have but is the streetcar the best method? Northside is a bit far (and slow moving) would it be better to have more of a dedicated rail ROW on certain parts of that route?

I think some people just like to live in trailer parks. Give them a choice between a 2-3 bed apartment community or a double wide where they have a yard and some people will choose the trailer. Plus, with the trailer park, they can at least have equity ownership in their trailer that they could never achieve in an apartment community. There are a lot of reasons why people would choose trailer park living. It is not something I would ever choose (although depending on the park and home, it may not be all that bad), but they are perfectly rational choices for living there.

Also, what was the key goal of the Streetcar? Was it intended as a means of transportation or to spur development? You could certainly argue both ways. It does move people from one part of downtown to another, but in reality, is it that much more inconvenient for people to just walk to the destination? Given its limited scope and amount of people living in the footprint, I do not think of it as much of a transportation means but more as development. When the streetcar is there, you have a fixed means to move people to and from certain places (whether efficiently or inefficiently), that fixed means is permanent and cant be easily moved, so it will encourage developers to invest in that area. In areas with low investment, I think it is interesting how the Streetcar acts as a way to spur that development. While I am sure that the political means will never allow this to happen, but just spitballing here, it may be more efficient and effective in certain neighborhoods to spend money that would otherwise go to tax rebates or rollbacks on the streetcar expansion (such as the Mohawk neighborhood. You could theoretically get the same investement of dollars for the same price as tax rebates but now you have a fixed piece of infrastructure that will continue to serve the neighborhood and encourage even more future investment. I know that would be a heavy lift and impossible under the current structure of things but just thought it was worth noting.

I think the key thing is that at minimum populations need to sustain themselves. Small growth in the birth rate is a good thing, but at a minimum there should be enough births for people to replace themselves. How to get there is anyone's guess

Plus @Ineffable_Matt, @X further stated that we should work to increase the quality of life for those who are already here, so by process of elimination he is talking about not having babies.

The overpopulation argument is such an old argument that has been disproven over and over and over again it is become a tired old trope by this point. At one time it was the nativists and xenophobes that rallied around that line in an effort to prevent overpopulation but today it is the Green Zealots who embrace this brand of faulty science. Go back over the last 100 years and you hear a loud faction of "Chicken Littles" who decry that the world cannot support a population if it reaches.... 1 billion,.... 2 billion.... 3 Billion... and so on. There would be no food, no land, people would be too crowded, etc etc. Each time the world crossed over a population threshold, these people were proven embarrassingly wrong. Even more severely, you have countries like China who enacted one child policies with disasterous results. Such policies resulted in the deaths of millions of babies over the last 50 years, and now China is looking at a shrinking population that will not be able to support and provide for the needs of their rapidly aging population. Are these really the policies that the Green Zealots care to espouse, because as history has proven, they are a recipe for utter failure.