dastler

You can actually see all three in this photo! You can see the two car garage with roof deck from house number two in the rear, and the third house is off to t he left just peeking into frame.

It's Ohio City, across the street from me. Buildings are nearing completion, I'm surprised they call them townhouses though? They're all free-standing single families on a large oddly shaped lot that's been split into 3 new lots. Perhaps it's a "townhouse" since they share a common driveway amongst the three houses.

Let's use real world examples... I finally found some data on how much of my property tax goes to the city of Cleveland. Per this 2022 report, 15.16% of residential property taxes go to the city. My 1,738sf lot would have a yearly property tax bill of $2,968.70 if it didn't have an abatement. The city would get ~$450 of that using the 15.16% figure. In my current tax bill, the land is 7.73% of the total value. At 7.73%, the land portion of the bill is ~$230, $34.79 of which goes to the city. Using the equal distribution method that I figured before, at 2c/sf would only need to give $34.76 (wow this is shockingly close to the current system) to the city and my total tax bill would only be ~$230, a more than 10x reduction. That doesn't take into account the land area that is publicly owned (and thus shouldn't be included in the equal distribution), but I can say with certainty that public land is not 90% of the total. You'd need more than 90% to be non-taxable in order to boost the theoretical tax bill up anywhere close to my current one. If we assume 50/50 public/private ownership (which is extremely conservative), that doubles my estimates to 4c/sf and $460/yr, I'm pretty comfortable that that's a worst case scenario. We can now ratio old to new tax situations as $230:$460 = 1:2 for empty lots. In this theoretical world, you're right that Joe Plumber's $20k lot would have twice as much in property tax. However, using Cleveland's tax rates he'd only be going from $527.90 to $1,055.80, it's a couple hundred difference not thousands like you seem to be implying. On top of this strawman though, this hugely benefits everyone that owns and lives in the city! I'm very confident that the proposed system would benefit vastly more people than it harms.

The challenges you point out I think are features, not bugs! It discourages people from sitting on land as a store of value.

In a land value tax system purchase prices aren't considered when valuing the land, it's determined by the size of the lot and what kind of uses it can have (single family, multifamily, business, etc.) I don't have the time to dig into case studies and examples at the moment, but the claim is that property taxes for smaller lots (family sized) will actually go down because the underutilized lots will start paying their fair share. Theoretically, if a city were to implement a land value tax they could work backwards and start with the amount of money the city needs. They'd then determine appropriate $/sf rates for different zoning code to ensure that the final property taxes for the year are equal to the dollar amount needed plus some buffer. Looking at the 2022 budget for Cleveland, the property tax revenue is projected at $41,665,779. Distributed evenly across the 77.7 mi^2 of Cleveland's land area would equal $536,239/mi^2= ~2c/ft^2. Does anyone know what percentage of the total property tax bill goes to the city?

Can you expand on this? I checked the EPA website and I'm not following how CERCLA keeps properties vacant: https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-cercla-overview Are you saying the implication is that since responsibility of cleanup of the sites falls on the owner before they can sell people are incentivized to sit on dirty sites?

I started a new thread to discuss property taxes to keep things on topic here:

Pulling in some discussion from a different thread to keep things on topic. For those that wonder why there seem to be so many vacant properties, especially in prime locations, I suggest reading some of the articles in Strong Town's series on Land Value taxes. They propose a system where the value of land is the sole determination of value when determining property taxes. This is as opposed to the current system that taxes both land and improvements. This article in the series specifically talks about parking lots in prime locations: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/5/whats-with-that-empty-lot-in-the-heart-of-the-city To generate some discussion here, I do believe that there are a lot of good arguments for implementing a land value tax. How would we as citizens go about championing for this type of change?

Peak demand is projected to plateau up around 30,000MW by 2039 (Data source PUCO, Table 3.2), so you would need 10,000 acres to handle peak load demands with just this style of battery. Having energy generation closer to where it's used will definitely help with distribution losses, but you need to be careful in where you look in the chart you posted. The T&D (transportation and distribution) loss is only 0.77 quadrillion Btu of a total 37.35. It's a lot of loss in aggregate, but only 2.1% of the total and 4.7% of the usable energy. The bigger issue is the conversion losses which accounts for 60.5%!!! of the total. That seemed shockingly high, but I think it's mostly because coal power plants average 33% efficiency in the US (average plant has 66% loss, with a bunch being worse). Natural gas is a lot better at 45-57% efficient. Solar is actually super inefficient at 16.5-20% efficient, but the sun is beating down on us all the time so we're not really "wasting" the energy we can't turn into electricity :)

Roads are expensive. Let me rephrase... they're actually VERY expensive; shockingly, disgustingly expensive. Please take a look at this report from the department of transportation: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm#hers-improvement-costs The table lists the typical cost per LANE mile in thousands of 2014 dollars. Since 2014 inflation has made things 23.6% more expensive, so multiply everything by 1.236. We're looking at a minimum of resurfacing 4 lanes of a principal arterial road in a major urbanized area, which is $5.6M/mile in 2023 dollars at the bare minimum. $33.7M for the full 6 miles, and that's just to resurface a 4 lane road and doesn't take into account that a good portion is over a bridge. This isn't just a resurface though, it's a major upgrade. Maximally, we would be reconstructing 4 lanes of road which is $29.0M/mile in 2023 dollars. For 6 miles that's $173.7M in the worst case. With an estimated best/worst case range of $33.7-173.7M, $54M doesn't really seem all that bad, especially when most of it is coming from the fed. One other tidbit I just realized, is that by reducing the number of lanes traveled by cars the city is reducing its maintenance costs.

I'm getting some significantly different numbers... I think you're confusing units, MWh=/=MW and TWh=/=TW. A MWh is a MW of power continuously delivered for an hour. 152TWh annually divided up equally throughout the year is .01735TW of power (365 days and 24 hours/day). That's equivalent to 17,350MW, which at 3MW per acre is only 5,783.3 acres of space needed, assuming their numbers can be believed and scaled linerally. They also talk about the same acre storing 100 hours worth of power, which would mean that the same 5,783.3 acres can power the entire state for 100 hours without any additional input (4 days and 4 hours). Put another way, they're saying that every acre of installation can store 300MWh, but it can only deliver that 3MW at a time. Lithium batteries can very easily handle 1C charge and discharge rates, meaning that they can deliver their entire capacity in a single hour... ie: a 300MWh lithium battery could deliver a peak output of 300MW. That means that these batteries deliver power at 1% of the rate that a lithium battery does. Hopefully someone else can check us, because both of our numbers seem pretty implausible to me (yours on the high end, and mine on the low end).

I wanted some data to back that up so went digging. According to this report from 2010 from the National Renewable Energy Lab (a lab of the DoE), there is 46.1 GW of potential wind energy on Ohio's portion of Lake Erie. Over an entire year I'm assuming that's equivalent to 4,038 TWh (24 hours/day*365 days. That's probably non-conservative since the turbines can't be operating 24/7 nonstop). The DoE put out a report in 2015 stating that Ohio's electric needs were 152.5TWh, which is only 3.7%% of the potential of lake erie 🤯 The entire US electricity demand seems to have peaked up around 4000 TWh for the last ten years, so in theory (if you ignore all of the real world problems like distribution, time of need, storage, etc.) Lake Erie could power the entire country. Pretty wild

Willey Ave is blocked off between the railroad and Columbus, there's a bunch of earthwork being done at 1994/1978 Willey. The properties are owned by DiGeronimo (DI DEVELOPMENT LLC). Do we know what's going in here?

The tweet says it's about funding though, not progress on all of the necessary plots of land. My guess is they've been allocated money from the state for the project: https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/03/cleveland-area-leaders-asking-ohio-lawmakers-for-money-for-irishtown-bend-park-walkway-connecting-downtown-to-lakefront.html They need $45million for the park (https://www.land-studio.org/projects/irishtown-bend-park), so there's still quite a bit of funding that will need to be gathered.

Adding in a red line rapid stop at Fulton is the last piece of the puzzle I think. RTA owns the land and per McCormack it's at least been brought up (not sure how seriously though). I think it'd do wonders to stabilize Clark Fulton as well, they're a bit underserved from a light rail standpoint and have plenty of working class people that don't have access to cars. The nearest metro stops are W25th and W65th. There's some pretty good bus service though, the 45, 25, and 51 lines all run through the area.

Quick photo update from 11/5/22 on the Southern end of Ohio City on Fulton. Foundations are being worked for the 12 unit apartment building designed by Horton harper at 2222 Fulton Rd. In the rear you can see another infill house that went up very quickly from Cleveland Bricks at 2217 W36th st. I'm pretty sure once both of these projects are completed (along with Bailey Bridge Townhomes from Knez) the immediate area around Fulton north of the tracks will be completely built out. Quite a difference since I moved into the neighborhood!

So that others can see, here's the progress on the Bricks site:

I actually looked at buying this church and decided against it because of the strangeness in the property. The house directly west of the church has a garage that is accessed from the "alley" that they talk about which is really just a driveway. You can see a cargo van parked in the google maps satellite view. The problem is that the garage doesn't have access from the true alley (W 42nd Place). The lot lines from myplace are below... either the church owner will need to work with the house owner to share that driveway, or some other arrangement will need to be made. If they can make it work it's definitely a better setup, and is something that I discussed liking in the Cleveland Bricks development down the street.

I honestly believe that measures like this are done to rile up the electorate in order to distract from more pressing issues like not drawing fair voting maps. In the last week we've learned that the GOP is AGAIN in contempt of court for not drawing a fair map, and "whoops" it's too late for the next election. They've also passed two extremely controversial bills that (I hope) have no chance of becoming law. These two bills I'm sure will distract everyone while the map issue takes a back seat.

Wow! I'm glad there's people in this photo... the scale of the hole was lost on me without those people and the folding table in the picture.

Surprised you didn't get photos of the infill a couple houses down on Siam. Cleveland Bricks is building 3 detached single families there as well, all with two car garages. It's actually a pretty unique site plan imo and shows some ability to think outside the box. The three houses will share a common driveway in order to make use of the extra deep original lot. I wish we'd design more lots like this to add some density where possible.

Ken's article says that the street level parking (underneath the main pedestal) is accessed from Abbey across from W12th... this would be roughly the same spot as Sokolowski's existing on site parking. There's a second level below grade that is proposed to be accessed from those roads. I don't see any curb cuts in the rendering though. Ideally I think you'd make both levels accessible from Abbey though and remove all vehicles like you propose.

If the choice is an ugly city with lots or people or a pretty city that's empty I'll take ugly every time.

There's plenty of space from the towpath plaza section so that it won't feel imposing, you can see it in this photo sphere from google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.4851453,-81.6903762,3a,90y,187.65h,97.03t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipNWeesB1RuQELbeFekZDvXN6G0y7YVnfsH8GS8N!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipNWeesB1RuQELbeFekZDvXN6G0y7YVnfsH8GS8N%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya54.463455-ro-0-fo100!7i8704!8i4352 It does seem like there isn't quite enough space on the north end for what the headline image shows though... Unless they take over one lane of Sokowlowski way (to make it one way) there doesn't appear to be enough room for the stairs.one lane of

I like the renderings too. At first I didn't like the site plan, but with KJP's extra graphics it became more clear. I think those that dislike it are picturing things like I did at first, 180 degrees from the actual site plan. The deck isn't over Abbey Ave/West 11th, it's on the other corner of the site. That corner was literally just parking before the towpath plaza was built, now it's just a useless street that doesn't lead anywhere. There's also a bit of greenspace/setback on Abbey Ave so it won't feel like you're going into a subway tunnel approaching as a pedestrian from the street.