LlamaLawyer

The 1st and 13th are really a silver lining here for democrats. I was thinking this whole time that no matter what happens top ballot at least J.R. Majewski should lose. The 1st and 13th pleasantly surprised me.

As of 5:30 PM, turnout in Cuyahoga County passed 2014 levels. But the last two hours have to be really active for us to get to 2018 turnout levels. If we're not matching or at least coming close to 2018 turnout, that bodes poorly for Tim Ryan.

This kind of makes sense when you put it that way. I'm not clear whether Seren has the authority to unilaterally meet the school baord's demands, but if he is, I agree with you he's smart enough not to let this deal fall apart.

Agreed. To my above point-- Nobody knows what the answer is, but if we keep growing the downtown residential population, we'll eventually figure it out, and stuff like Med Mutual leaving won't matter in the long term. 1 downtown resident > 1 downtown commuter.

https://www.cleveland.com/community/2022/11/cedar-lee-meadowbrook-project-still-on-hold-as-cleveland-heights-school-district-stuck-on-shared-use-agreement.html If the school district derails this project, so help me...

Maybe or maybe not. That's my point. It's not a law firm or prestige company as @E Roccput it well. Most Med Mutual employees are 9-to-5ers doing what's essentially "back office" work. If there's 15 minutes less traffic and parking convenience so they get home at 5:15 instead of 5:30 and save $200 a month on parking, to a lot of people that's an unambiguous win.

I'll wax philosophical for a bit. The problem is this. Exactly what incentive is there for a company like Medical Mutual to be downtown? It's not an investment bank or cutting edge tech company. The downtown office exodus is a national problem right now. It's unfortunate in the short term, but as long as the downtown residential population continues to grow, that's what really matters in my opinion. The dense urban core has existed for ten thousand years, while the modern office, as a concept, really only came to exist late in the industrial revolution. With the way tech is changing work environments, I'm not really sure what downtowns will look like in 50 years, but if we keep growing downtown's population, we'll be there for it--whatever it is.

That’s what I was hoping it was lol.

Is that the lot east of Warrensville or the lot north of Van Aken?

This would be better at Hopkins too though. Hopkins is already one of only a few U.S. airports with heavy rail that goes right to downtown. Burke is a little more connected to downtown, but it’s actually easier to get from Hopkins to Ohio City or University Circle.

I forgot about air ambulance, which is important, but as others have pointed out, County is a similar distance from the Clinic. And I hear you on the NIMBYs, but if the county decides to close Burke and expand County as result, a few homeowners won't stop it any more than Bobby George will stop Irishtown Bend Park from being built. People have gotten used to using Burke for certain things, but that doesn't mean Burke is actually a good use of land. It's just people expect it. There's nothing about the land that makes it inherently good for an airport except for the fact that an airport is already there. And it's a small enough airport that uses can be replaced by other airports nearby with very minor modifications. Boston Logan is terribly located and it's so big that I can't fathom how it could be moved. But there are still lots of people who seriously want to relocate Boston Logan. This is an opportunity on the same scale, but with far, far, far fewer opportunity costs. 99% of what Burke does would just be absorbed by Hopkins with nothing more than a grumble. And the 1% is just a matter of thinking through problems one by one, which is what I assume this study will be looking at. My main point is just that, when push comes to shove, I'm very confident there will be a solution for every potential issue with demo-ing Burke. The number of people who will be seriously inconvenienced by the move is vanishingly small. Will a bunch of athletes and execs be PO'ed that they've gotta use Hopkins? Sure. Welcome to basically every large city where there isn't an airport right downtown. I just find all of these critiques to be the equivalent of "But if that parking lot goes away, where will we park for Cavs games?" or "But if that parking lot goes away where will we hold our annual festival?" People will miss it when it's gone because they were used to it, but that will fade quickly. Just like people miss parking lots when they're gone but nobody in their right mind looks at a vibrant building and thinks "man, I wish that was a parking lot so I could park easier," people will initially miss Burke when it's gone, but after a few years, nobody would think "man, I wish we had an airport right there."

Bad idea. The boulders may work well. Next best solution would be for the city to give the homeowner 125% of FMV and just demo the home. The city's real problem was giving too much control over a huge important parcel to the landlord, and that decision was probably made in a time when the city had no leverage. I'm not sure when the lease ends (I think it's soon). But Wal-Mart has been paying rent. That's the main reason things haven't gotten better recently. The investor that owns Severance is getting rent without any of the obligations of a landlord. I think long-term we'll be glad it was empty for so long. When the city does redevelop Severance, they'll probably use Van Aken as a model and come up with something really cool. Had Severance been redeveloped in 2005, the end product would have been more short-sighted and dumb.

I'm glad these studies are being done, and I'm pretty confident about what they'll find. Burke's chief benefits are (1) saving athletes and executives a 15-minute trip from Hopkins to downtown when they fly in, and (2) hosting a really cool air show once a year. That's it! It does not benefit the community. It's a net negative. The only people who will miss it are the people who've gotten used to using it, and (since it's largely athletes) half of them will be gone in 5 years! I think a good test for land use is "if this entire parcel were a grassy field, would a proposal to use it the way it currently is being used be taken seriously?" For Burke, more than any other piece of land in the entire city, the obvious answer is no! Nobody in their right mind would put an airport there if the land were a blank slate. I simply do not believe that the objections about reliever airports are real obstacles. The city can kick 5 people out of their houses with eminent domain if County needs to be expanded. That's the worst case scenario.

What you're saying is that clients like Bobby George take it from hell to heaven, right? /s

Why limit it to 1.1 million? We accept (per capita) less than half the immigrants Canada does. If we were at the same rate as Canada, that would be 2.2 million per year. By the way, that's about the per capita immigration rate we had in the late 90s. And I agree that increased birthrate would be nice too. But how exactly do you accomplish that? Places are trying and nobody's figured out how. Increasing immigration is as simple as hiring more staff and tweaking a couple laws. We know exactly how to do it and (in the grand scheme of things) it's not expensive.

I was trying to say it in a funny way rather than being precise. We're not going to force retired people back into the labor force, and we're not going to tell people what they can and can't eat for the good of their health. Those are just ways that people naturally behave. Immigration, on the other hand, is always artificially depressed because we limit legal migrant flows. For example, I have multiple personal friends who were here on visas (I think H-1B), briefly lost their job, and had to leave. Because when you're here on a visa we don't let you take time to look for a job and we usually don't let you take a job that isn't within your field. My friends were prohibited from becoming a waiter or waitress even though there's a shortage in those positions.

Pretty sure it's legal only. FWIW, it's harder to form numbers about undocumented folks since they're...undocumented. That being said, we were at multidecade lows of border apprehensions (a proxy for illegal migration) until very recently. And the major spike only brings us back to roughly 1999 levels. I'm not running numbers, just eyeballing charts, but by every metric we have, the 5-year moving average of net migration looks very depressed. There's also a big gap in the kinds of jobs businesses are complaining they can't fill and the kinds of gaps illegal migrants often occupy. Not that there isn't some overlap, but it's incomplete.

The simplest explanations are the best. Look at this. And also this: And also this: Wanna solve the labor crisis? Hint, two of these three things are hard to fix without forcing people to do things they don't want to do. One of these things is easy to fix if you just let people do what they want to do.

I think it's reasonable to expect every part of the country to get slammed. The difference is this time the midwest-northeast is positioned for a smaller dip and quick recovery, while the southwest (and to much a lesser extent the southeast) looks like a bubble that could take a decade or more for prices to recover. The average home in Las Vegas is "worth" 50% more than two years ago. That's a bubble. So, back to Bedrock. I really hope they can still start work soon. I agree that 7% interest rates (although shocking to a millennial like me) are normal and probably healthy. There's a good argument to be made that higher interest rates would be beneficial long term as they encourage banks to lend more freely. But in the short term everybody's balance sheet starts looking really bad really fast. To one of the points above, Rocket just had huge amounts of equity erased. So they may suddenly be waayy overleveraged because low interest rates have been artificially inflating land and housing prices.

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announcements/20221025-1457029/1457029_cshomeprice-release-1025.pdf Cleveland's housing market the strongest of any in the 20-city Case Shiller composite that just released. Prices were flat from July to August on a seasonally adjusted basis. They fell in every other city except Charlotte. Bit of speculation here, but I think we'll see the Cleveland Case Shiller fall a lot less than other places over the next year. If you look at the data, we're one of only three cities (Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago) with CS below 200. Three cities (Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego) are over 400, which just boggles my mind. U.S. GDP is currently 240% of what it was in 1999, which makes me think the U.S. average Case Shiller oughta be about 240. Obviously this is very back of napkin. But anything over 300 looks pretty bubbly to me and anything under 200 looks like value.

If they can still build this thing with 8% interest rates, God bless 'em.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2022-10-18-Cleveland-Clinic-and-IBM-Begin-Installation-of-IBM-Quantum-System-One YO YO YO, IT'S MY FAVORITE DEVELOPMENT BACK IN THE NEWS AGAIN

I don't understand why people think it's a disappointing design. It meets or beats my expectations. It will be one of the nicest buildings on the Clinic's campus, and it replaces one of the ugliest buildings on the Clinic's campus. And in any event, it's not like the building fronts on Wade Lagoon. This will be pretty well enveloped in the Clinic bunker. Basically the only people who have to look at it are patients, doctors, and whoever drives by on Carnegie. But the best thing about this project and the other ones in the pipeline is that the Clinic is serious and all of this stuff is likely to get built and the jobs created even if we have a major recession. Healthcare is fairly recession proof and even when economic disaster strikes, it will take out the little guy (i.e. what few independent hospitals are left) and help big fish like the Clinic.

It's pretty hard for me to believe that Wegmans, which has no Ohio locations, would choose this pretty small urban footprint for their first store in the state. That being said, a Wegmans here would be great.

I don't know how likely Aldi is to go into a space like that. I'm sure it will fill up eventually; hopefully it does soon. It was a really nice Dave's that had much more of a neighborhood feel than any other Dave's I've been to. It will be missed.