mu2010

It really makes a lot more sense to have a "transformative" project such as NuCLEus on the Weston site rather than Stark's site. The Weston site connects two increasingly residential areas with a giant crater in the middle, while the Stark site connects one of those burgeoning residential areas with the stadiums. Gateway is kind of dead if there's no games going on.

Thanks for clarifying. Aren't they doing something with pedestrian connections to the stations (particularly 55th), even if the stations themselves won't be renovated?

Overlapping and fuzzy neighborhood names are common, but the idea of having a bunch of houses on side streets being one neighborhood, and then the main street being "another neighborhood" is a bit unique in my observation.

In common usage and in my mind, the Victorian Village, Italian Village, Harrison West, etc, are all subsections of the Short North "area." In official city maps and planning documents, they're separate neighborhoods. The "subsection" names all predate the term "Short North" which is a relatively recent thing, but cities evolve and change. If the "Short North" is really just High Street, we already have a name for that: High Street. To me the idea that a residential neighborhood is somehow a different neighborhood than its main, adjacent business street is a strange concept, and it doesn't really exist in any other city I've been to. So I wouldn't have drawn the maps like that. I certainly would not want the old neighborhood names to be lost - but I don't think that's happening at all.

Exactly. Even though some view it as a wider MLK style blvd, which itself during rush hours becomes UC's defacto driveway, the fact that this will open up all this property that has basically been abandoned for decades to development is HUGE. Unlike MLK blvd, the property adjacent to this road and in the neighborhoods off of it can be redeveloped and provide jobs to people who live there now and to those who will in the future. My employer is looking at several opportunities along this route. It's the definition of a good political compromise IMO. ODOT and their people want a freeway, and the city said, well here's what we want. They got lots of money they never would have got otherwise for land cleanup, site assembly, improvements to the transit stations which we know would never have been paid for by ODOT otherwise, etc. To say it's just another highway like when they put in the interstates is way off base. So much more concessions, negotiations, attempts at external benefits to the area, that never happened back then. Follow through on all that will still be crucial, of course.

I'm getting older I guess, but my late 20s friends play it all the time.

The Arena District in Cbus had a theater that struggled and closed. http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2017/01/04/studio-movie-grill-closes-in-arena-district.html Thing with movie theaters these days is that Netflix is doing to them what Amazon is doing to retail. Not that I'm against a new theater or a renovated Tower City Cinemas, but it could be a tough sell. The area might have too many theaters already.

Banks aren't though!

I would assume more demand for residential...? Retail, especially bars and restaurants, is always volatile.

I used to like to go shopping during Buckeye games when I lived in Columbus.

Classic example of someone telling everyone else how they should live. He's actually bemoaning people in the UK using 40% more living space per person than they did in the 80s, most would call that an improvement in living conditions. It's because, according to this author's argument, society as a whole suffers from it. It's the exact same problem as littering. One person throwing a bottle on the ground suffers no personal consequences, and the net negative impact of that one bottle might not mean much, but when everybody does it it hurts the whole city's vitality, which nobody wants. The societal/philosophical justification to "tell somebody how to live" is the same justification as telling them not to litter. The merits of the argument, whether or not skyscrapers are bad, is a separate thing, but if they are bad, it's perfectly within the public interest to zone or regulate them out.

True it's a sunk cost, but it's going to cause him to wait, possibly long, and try to build the biggest project he can, rather than build whatever is feasible today. (At the same time, the longer he waits the less relevant the land cost becomes.)

I think it's ego for a lot of these guys, a nice, successful, profitable project that contributes to the city isn't enough, they want to be THE new center of Cleveland. He wants to compete with Wolstein's Flats.

He could probably get a TIF for a parking garage easily, too. He's holding out for this catalytic tax credit thing at the moment but hopefully he'll take your approach if that doesn't pan out.

;D

The existing property unfortunately is probably in a sweet spot. It's old enough to be paid off, new enough to still be in decent shape to attract corporate tenants like KeyBank, S-W, Pizza Hut, Spectrum, etc, and is in a neighborhood that today is far more active and thriving than when the property itself was built. To boot, they probably even got grant money when they built it. That all means that owning the property today is easy money, and it's probably hard for new construction to compete with. As the building ages, current tenants could start to look elsewhere, and hopefully apartment demand and rents will still be solid, and eventually, something will happen.

I am pro-scaling back, actually. I'd rather see ten small projects than one big one. (Personal preference, I'm more enamored with streetscapes than skylines) The big issue with scaling back, however, is cost of the land. Stark already paid $xxxxx for the land ($4 million?) and so he needs to build a project of a certain scale in order to justify the cost of the land.

Have construction cost less, have rents be higher, or have more public subsidy. That's really what it boils down to. Certain uses are easier to make work than others - at the moment, apartment construction is more viable than office construction here in Cleveland, partially because it's cheaper and partially because more grants/tax credits/HUD loans/etc exist for multifamily development.

KJP[/member] - The pdf file has today's date on it, so I guess brand new. I have heard Freddy Collier, the planning director, speak before about form-based codes as an aspiration for the city, but he cited the political difficulty. This is good news.

Victorian Village and Italian Village are both part of the Short North and have been considered so as long as I've known. Even the signs entering the neighborhood say "Short North" on them. It couldn't just be High Street because one side is literally in Victorian Village and the other is literally in Italian Village. It's all the Short North to me. For formal/planning/governmental purposes, Short North refers just to the High Street business district, but for most people, everything between the Olentangy River, the train tracks to the east, 670, and maybe 5th Avenue is the Short North.

Which parking lot is she referring to as the site of phase iii? the main lot across from punch bowl social?

The way we calculate population density is wrong. Here’s what we should do instead. DW Rowlands | November 27, 2017 "To calculate median population density, one finds the populations and population densities of neighborhood-sized chunks–Census block groups work well for this purpose–of an area, order them by population density, and find the density at which fifty percent of the population lives at a higher density and fifty percent lives at a lower density." https://ggwash.org/view/65370/median-versus-average-population-density There's a Better Way to Measure Population Density Alasdair Rae | February 8, 2018 "Consider a country such as Russia, where urban density is high, but there are vast swathes of empty land. The figures will tell you density is very low (eight people per square kilometer); but this it not what most people in Russia experience in their daily lives. The same is true of Australia, Canada and other large, highly urbanised nations." https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/02/theres-a-better-way-to-measure-population-density/552815/

Thing is a lot of Columbus' suburbany areas are relatively dense for modern America. Small lots. Apartment buildings. Look at Polaris area, it's a pedestrian's nightmare but I bet with all the apartment buildings the average density isn't too shabby.

tastybunns[/member] my mom teaches there, she has to live in constant drama of pending strikes, school closures, levy failures, angry parents, layoffs, budget deficits...

Historic preservation tax credit - there's a rule where if you use that money to renovate a building it can't be a condo for at least 7 years.