urbanlife

in shanghai, pudong area, there are left turn lanes, but in an arrangement I haven't seen in the US: 2 near center median and 2 on the right curb lane, so a right turn occurs from lane C4, in front of L3 and L4. There are also variations on the right hand turns, sometimes crossing bike lanes before intersection. very crazy. L1 L2 C1 C2 C3 C4 L3 L4 B1

it seems that most of the original rail innovation in cleveland was privately driven, and is now controlled by the merged RTA function. RTA is an operator, not an innovator. Let them concentrate on providing reliable and affordable bus services. maybe it is time to split rail off from RTA and have an authority charged more with economic development and all things rail.

^ why can't one of the foundations step up with a matching grant and let's get this done.

the holdout property owners are having a meeting tomorrow to announce their own plan. apparently, there is some talk of them buying out Wolstein. This is what has to stop for Cleveland to move forward. Waterfront property sitting undeveloped, money sitting on the sidelines. If these owners had such good ideas, why didn't they build some housing of their own?

This 'plan' has been on the board for many years. All of the property owners knew that Wolstein was aquiring land, and chose not to sell. Unfortunately, instead of taking some risks and making solid investments in the area, the other property owners have sat on their land. vison? risk? rewards? 'believe in cleveland?' not for this group - it's a lot easier to just pay the taxes and wait for someone else to do the hard work.

Here is one example: http://www.craftsman-book.com/

IMO, it is somewhat market driven and there is sufficient demand to support the prices. but, there is also a 'hole' in the market for mid-priced unts that might not have high end finishes, but are still in a desirable part of downtown. I also think some of the demand is very location driven and not value driven. I don't think a lot of these units in Cleveland would resell at the same or higher price. The developers are cashing in (and they are taking risks, so i'm ok with this), but i think they have priced the product to include the tax abatements and haven't left much leftover for a pioneer homeowner downtown to realize in the short term, say 3-5 years. Two other observations: 1) Part of the problem appears to be lack of outside investment into the city. In Cleveland, there are a few bigger regional players doing almost all of the work. The biggest national developer based here, isn't doing any new residential downtown. We need and have room for some larger national developers to accelerate the pace. There is a lot of money sitting in overpriced markets today. Should get that here. 2) Barriers to entry. Almost anyone could build a house/condo on a greenfield piece of land. In order to build/rehab downtown, it takes some experience and some dollars, which both seem to be lacking. Not to mention the historic difficulty in working with the city on code/design issues. You aren't going to find a mortgages on commerial property with 10% down and 30 year term at 6%. This is where outside dollars could come in. I think there is a need for more of this cooperative type of development and there appear to be many small to midsized buildings available to do this. Get 3 or 4 friends/partners and get the ball rolling.

From today's PD, http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1141032655207320.xml&coll=2 Is petty crime too petty to report? Monday, March 13, 2006 By Rachel Dissell The Cleveland Neighborhood Development Coalition, a group of community development nonprofits working to revitalize neighborhoods, has hired former Cleveland police Cmdr. Charles McNeeley, who is now chief in Olmsted Township, to help create a series of Neighborhood Safety Action Plans. Desiree Schmitt, who owns Southside Dry Cleaners and Concierge in Tremont, is working with a group that formed a phone tree to promptly relay news of crimes to neighbors. The group is also working to set up an Internet site where people can log crimes and the police response. Currently, they post items on tremonter.com, a neighborhood Web site.

^ i agree that if class A vacany went lower, ultimately that would drive new construction. however, i think there are a few types of people looking for office space in CBD: 1) certain businesses that will generally only take class A space (ie fortune 500 types, banks), and then another segment that is more price sensitive (smaller companies, law firms). they probably won't pay $28/square foot, but might pay $20. Is that B or C or maybe some less desirable space in an A building with small floor plates that requires space to spead over 2 floors? right now it seems that most of the large companies are building or occupying new spaces in the suburbs and not absorbing in the CBD.

part of the problem is that many suburban churches want to help, but don't know where to go, so in an uncoordinated fashion, they show up at public square a few times a month and hand out food and supplies. public square could be one area to have a food drop, but the bigger problem seems to be that 3 or 4 church groups will show up one day and then there will be no food for many days, so a homeless person will eat 3 meals one day and then have no food for a few days. not very effective in getting a schedule down to have some support if a person truly wants to get back to work, find a home, etc. i would suggest that the food and supply drops should be more closely aligned with points in the city and suburbs that can provide additional services - health screenings, churches, housing agencies, other non profits. Many of the homeless in cleveland may be long term homeless due to a number of factors, but i think a more coordinated effort to address the problem makes the most sense. dropping food off at a park (no matter where the park is) doesn't seem to be a solution to the problem - it is a short term fix to hunger, but not the bigger issue of homelessness.

^ There is some momemtum on trying to better coordinate homeless outreach in cleveland. It is sad that some simple things still haven't been done: Aritcle in PD: http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1141205978140360.xml&coll=2 Cleveland Grapevine: http://homelessgrapevine.blogspot.com Cleveland Homeless: http://clevelandhomeless.blogspot.com/

this has to be driven from the top and from the bottom: companies like Quicken Loans could certainly get together to fill a new office building downtown. it doesn't have to be their headquarters to have naming rights or a significant presence in a building. Progressive, Quicken, American Greetings - any of these companies and other comanies that are currently in the suburbs, but use Cleveand as their mailing address, could put a presence downtown - or better yet, consolidate their interactive/online divisions downtown somewhere. But for this to also work, there needs to be more work by developers/entrepreneurs to finish converting class b and c office spaces to residential, thereby reducing office space capacity. i don't think you'll see new tower construction until vacancy rates get near 10%.

there are some pictures from this week on this flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/69363536@N00/page2/

here is an image from the PD:

^ was by there yesterday. concrete pad is still covered. BUT, the wind components that were in the back on the grass have been removed. I didn't see them anywhere on the property, so i don't know what to think about it - maybe they are assembling them? maybe they were the wrong parts? who knows.

^ it will be open by then, probably the Tuesday before for a few days of working out the kinks. it was a bar before, so i was a little shocked that they spent 4 months completely redoing the interior. Also, now that the management and leasing offices are together in the new space, the grocery store is going to begin expansion toward E13th. good things all around here now.

The area around E.12 and Euclid is interesting. Although it is not 'bad' and generally anything around the theater district is ok, there are some rougher areas/times of day and maybe are the disturbances you reference. 1) For starters, never park your car on E.12 between Chester and Euclid. Although highly active during the day, it seems that there are 3 or 4 break ins a week, this sometimes works its way onto euclid as well, but usually not. this stretch of E12 is dead at night and after 11:30p or so, there is a steady stream of people that seem to walk back toward E13, homeless shelter/who knows where. there is also some minor drug activity that goes on in the alley behind the statler. 2) E13 surface parking lot b/w Chester and Euclid. This area is a hotbed for drug activity, especially back in the rear corner by the Chesterfield tennis court. by day, an innocent surface lot. by night, a whole other story. pull in some night in your car and point your headlights towards the back where the emergency diesel generator and hvac unit is located and you'll likely see people scatter like roaches. 3) corner of E12 and Chester. I have run into some agressive people here - not panhandlers, not homeless, but agressive in seeking money and not afraid to yell or follow you if you're not interested in participating. have you experienced anything else in particular?

^ I think their dream is for Cleveland to die completely. This area was never a hotbed of residential due to industrial uses and pollution, and it is not as if these are historic properties on acres of land.

and apparently we should expect to see windows in the first floor on the sincere building this spring, regardless of a tenant. there was some talk of making parking for the condos upstairs, with more limited street retail/office, but that didn't get very far. these murals are starting to wear a little, so some nice windows here should make a nice difference. I wish they would hurry up and get something better looking for the Corner Alley outside. They did do a nice job cleaning the buildings though. They are actually white now.

they unloaded a bunch of structural steel this week and removed the facade from the front of the one building (now boarded up). The entire first floor is now connected, with some small demo to be done on a western interior wall. there is also a hole cut in the ceiling of the 1st floor.

does anyone know the response times of other large cities? 8 minutes for a priority one call on average seems like a long time. is there much of a deterrant when you can commit your crime and be long gone by either 8, 16 or 51 minutes?

These are all considered Class A space in Cleveland: - Key Tower - BP Tower - Eaton Center - Skylight Office Tower - Chase Financial Tower - One Cleveland Center - Penton Media Building - And 5th 3d, Northpoint and National City should be as well. either way, certainly more than 2.

http://www.maisonneuve.org/index.php?&page_id=12&article_id=2108 THE TRUTH ABOUT JAYWALKING BESIDES BEING DANGEROUS, IS THERE A SILVER LINING TO PEDESTRIANS’ UNRULY HABITS? BY CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF FEBRUARY 22, 2006 When Montreal’s police department announced last month that it had hired 133 officers to whip the city’s unruly pedestrians, drivers and cyclists into shape, Montrealers responded with a collective roll of the eyes. We’ve seen this before—les flics hand out a few tickets here and there, wag their finger at people crossing against the light and then go home. It’s all a distant memory within a week. This time, though, the police seem serious—or at least as serious as Montreal police can be about these sorts of things. They have a mountain of a challenge ahead of them: Montreal’s drivers are notoriously aggressive and so are its pedestrians. When it comes to jaywalking, Montreal strides in solidarity with the best of the world’s jaywalking capitals. This much is obvious at the busy corner of Saint Catherine and Stanley, where I found myself on a frigid Saturday afternoon not too long ago. Stopping to observe the Montreal jaywalker in his or her natural habitat, I conducted an informal head count—one, two, three, four ... a dozen. In less than five minutes, I witnessed close to a hundred people crossing the street illegally. (See accompanying slideshow) It’s no wonder that a high-publicity crackdown on jaywalking does little to change Montrealers’ walking habits. It’s hard to fault police officers for simply upholding the law, but should jaywalking even be illegal in the first place? Maybe it’s time to rethink the entire notion of jaywalking. Maybe, just maybe, jaywalking is actually good for cities. Hear me out. Of course jaywalking can be dangerous—by dashing out into six lanes of traffic, you’re putting your life at risk. But most people don’t do that. Around 1,700 pedestrians are injured by cars each year in Montreal, a miniscule fraction of the number of the people who actually jaywalk. Traffic engineers want streets to act as traffic funnels; to them, pedestrians are mere nuisances. Regulating pedestrian crossings is a way to keep cars flowing, but the failure of lawmakers to control pedestrian behaviour shows that this approach simply does not work. Instead of trying to force pedestrians to conform to streets designed primarily for cars, why not adapt them to the behaviour of pedestrians? The first step is to accept walking as a legitimate form of transportation, one that is equal—or even superior—to vehicle transport. “What we need to do is to shift our mentality and conceive of pedestrians as part of traffic,” says Dylan Reid, member of the Toronto Pedestrian Committee, a pedestrian watchdog group created by the City of Toronto. “Being a pedestrian is the most efficient form of transport. The more people you have walking, the safer [the streets are] and the less pollution there is.” On streets that already bustle with pedestrians, Reid suggests that narrowing lanes and widening sidewalks is a good way to encourage walking and slow down traffic. “The speed of traffic is not related to efficiency,” he explains. Consistently slow traffic makes for streets that are less dangerous, less noisy and a lot more pleasant—while still moving cars along at a steady pace. Amy Pfeiffer, a program director at the New York advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, chimes in with even more ways to make streets pedestrian-friendly. Corner bulb-outs give pedestrians greater visibility at intersections; mid-block crossings, especially signalized ones, allow for more opportunities to safely cross the street and advance signal timing gives people crossing the street a head start over vehicles. Similarly, pedestrian-exclusive signals are ideal for busy corners, letting people cross the intersection in every direction at once. “It’s made a big difference in rationalizing what people do,” explains Pfeiffer. “It’s really hard to control pedestrian behaviour.” Pedestrians aren’t sheep. They will go where they want, when they want, as long as it’s safe—and in many cases, that involves taking a calculated risk by crossing the street mid-block or against the light. “If it’s safe to cross, they will,” says Pfeiffer. “It’s also about safety in numbers: you’ll get a huge platoon of people crossing [against the light] at the same time and they just assume that a car won’t run down twenty people.” It isn’t a coincidence that the cities with the most robust jaywalking culture are those in which walking rules: Montreal, Boston, New York, Philadelphia—to mention just a handful. Jaywalking is the pedestrian’s way of reclaiming the street. Drivers and their footloose counterparts might not get along in these cities, but they’re keenly aware of each others’ presence. “There should be some sort of interaction between cars and pedestrians,” says Reid. Pedestrians already know that cars are around; cars should learn to accept that pedestrians will be around.” Or, as Pfeiffer puts it quite plainly, “If you make pedestrians more visible, drivers will be aware of them.” Surely it shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that the deadliest cities for pedestrians are also the most auto-oriented. The notion that safety comes from constant interaction between different modes of transport is not a new one. In the nineteen-seventies, in fact, the Dutch pioneered a form of street that makes this concept its guiding principle; the woonerf. Woonerfs—known as “living streets” in the UK—eliminate the division between pedestrians and drivers altogether. The resulting hive of activity—complimented by trees and various kinds of street furniture—ensures that drivers intuitively slow down to near-pedestrian speeds. When I mention woonerfs, Pfeiffer is enthusiastic: “They’re awesome!” she exclaims. “Any street could be a woonerf except for really big ones.” Reid is a bit more sceptical, but he agrees that most cities have at least some areas where woonerfs could work. Toronto’s Kensington Market is a good example—its narrow streets, constant flow of pedestrians and cyclists and virtual lack of sidewalks (they’re taken up by fruit stands and cafes) already ensure a relatively harmonious existence between different modes of transport. But there are barriers. “We [North Americans] like to define our spaces. We don’t like ambiguity,” says Reid. Traffic engineers and transportation planners often see cities in profoundly different ways, so getting them to agree on pedestrian-oriented street design can be quite a feat. Improving the pedestrian environment requires the involvement of diverse government agencies, many of which are engaged in perpetual state of civil war. But there’s hope. Pfeiffer tells me that Transportation Alternatives (TA) might have found a way to bypass the bureaucracy altogether. By convincing business associations of the benefits of pedestrian-friendly streets, TA found that it can indirectly prod city governments into taking action. “Walkers are shoppers—that’s something that gets the mayor’s ear,” quips Pfeiffer. It will be a long time until city leaders realize the potential of pedestrian-oriented streets. In the meantime, make a statement by engaging in an everyday act of civil disobedience. Step into the street, look both ways and jaywalk. Christopher DeWolf wanders our streets as Maisonneuve’s urban affairs critic. His column appears every two weeks. Read more columns by Christopher DeWolf.

From today's PD, looking at specific cleveland neighborhood stats: http://www.cleveland.com/news/images/02map27.gif

Here is the accompanying graphic: http://www.cleveland.com/news/wide/deadlydozen.jpg