LlamaLawyer

Gettin’ some more love from CityNerd

I think there's a lot of data showing that building housing (even "luxury" housing) is good for bringing down prices in general. But I'd like to see someone with a megaphone point out that there's a more direct connection now due to the tax abatement reform Cleveland just passed. New developments in strong market areas now either have to have an affordable housing component or else pay a per-unit fee that goes to a fund to get dumped into affordable housing/investment in more depressed market areas. By building new luxury apartments, you're demonstrating the strength of the market in the area, which means that future development in the area will be subject to the affordable housing requirement because the market area will be considered strong. In the future, when the new requirement goes into effect, this link will be even more direct. So the NIMBY excuse that "we want something affordable" is evaporating.

Wow I love this. Is there enough room to build it without demolishing FE though? That would be my big concern with the location, since I'm guessing a demo on FE while the replacement is under construction would be no bueno.

D'oh! Yup, I misunderstood. No need for apologies!

I totally didn't know that top level of round windows ever existed. The original facade is quite striking, and I think the band at the top of the building covering up the old elements was clearly a mistake.

I'll keep it brief to avoid getting off topic, but the census defines downtown differently from the Downtown Cleveland Alliance.

Just think— These three projects will increase downtown’s population by 10%.

I just learned about the existence of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program. Can someone help me understand is this a program designed for Ukrainian Americans to help their relatives get over here or is there a way for Americans who don't know any Ukrainians to find a Ukrainian to sponsor and sort of "adopt" them (using that term very loosely) for two years?

No I get this. I'm just saying it because (1) it's not carbon neutral, (2) with ethanol it takes the equivalent of 100 gallons of gas to produce an acre of corn, which then produces something like 450 gallons of ethanol, and (3) if it's not cost effective or not scaleable, what's the point in even discussing it? There are an infinite number of not cost-effective ways to generate renewable energy. If we're gonna talk seriously about ethanol, maybe we should discuss getting a bunch of people on stationary bikes to power our cities. I agree with that. The point I'm making is just that there is a blueprint for achieving most power through nuclear (e.g. France). There is also a blueprint for hydro (i.e. Norway). There is no blueprint for achieving most power through wind and solar. As far as I can tell, no country on earth gets more than half of its power from a combination of wind and solar (Denmark is the leader here). The U.S. plans call for XX% renewables in year 20XX but (as far as I can tell) have no technical plan for how to get there. E.g. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/US-Long-Term-Strategy.pdf

While I'm on the topic, I also have to add that the average French citizen's carbon footprint (which again, I think France should be a model) is higher than the average human. In other words, notwithstanding that 93% of French electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and renewables, French still create more greenhouse gas emissions than the average human. This illustrates the challenge we face with the developing world.

@Gramarye All of your points are extremely well taken. It's a little bit ludicrous to blame these issues (which are long in coming) on Biden. I think the problem (which no one person or party is to blame for) is that for the past 35 years we haven't been investing enough in new and existing technologies. In the not-so-distant past, there was far too much opposition from environmentalists to nuclear and hydroelectric power. Carl Sagan's testimony to Congress in 1985 should have been a massive wake up call to invest in nuclear and other existing alternative energy sources. Instead, 1985 was about the peak year for nuclear plant construction and our nuclear generation capacity peaked in 1996. Our hydroelectricity capacity also peaked the 1980s. In 1985, nuclear and hydroelectric alone made up more than 27% of our electricity generation. In 2011, nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, and wind combined to make up just over 30% of our electric generation. Today, nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, and wind make up 37.2% of our electrical generation. Nuclear and hydroelectric are a smaller percentage of our generation now than they were in 1985. So from 1985 to 2011 in terms of our actual renewable generation capacity we basically accomplished nothing. And so the problem now is we are starting to walk down a bridge that isn't fully built and doesn't even have finished blueprints. True renewables* are still only about a third of electricity generation and are only up 10% since 1985. But at the same time, we (understandably) are phasing out fossil fuels (in particular coal). So meeting our 2030 climate goals means converting about 40% of our current fossil fuel electricity generation (representing about 25% of our total generation) in the next 7.5 years. We have 7.5 years to accomplish 2.5x what we accomplished from 1985 to present. I am not convinced this is actually possible using wind and solar. And the problem that is resulting is that in at least some localized areas we have lost power generation at a faster pace than we've been able to replace it. Thus the blackout concerns. If we had done things better in the 1980s and 1990s, we'd be in the position of France, with most of our energy being nuclear and less than 10% coming from fossil fuels. And so that's why I said initially the problem is partly on the "decarbonize now" crowd. Because for all the talk of "green new deal" and our goals, there is no actual plan I've ever seen. And if someone on this forum is aware of one, I'd love to see it. But I've never seen a plan that actually explains how we're gonna build enough solar panels and windmills to halve our 2005 emissions in the next eight years. I've also never seen a plan proposed to build 200 nuclear plants over the next 20 years. Though that actually might let us meet our GHG goals. * I refuse to count biomass based diesel and ethanol as being "renewables." They're stupid gimmicks.

This is 100% true. We could have more power in Ohio, for instance, if Republicans weren't trying to steamroll the Icebreaker project. The blame goes both ways. Decarbonizing without a good secure plan is a bad idea. Refusing cost-effective carbon-neutral solutions is an even worse idea!

Okay, well the Columbus power outage was caused by a storm. I don't think it's at all related to the potential rolling blackouts being warned of. Ohio isn't even on the MISO, which is the system expected to have problems..

Strongly disagree with this. Scorched earth politics burn you too. ARPA-H coming here would be a huge win. And if we beat out Boston and Austin, I'd rather have folks reading the papers thinking "Dang, how did Cleveland get this? Maybe it's come along farther than I thought" as opposed to "The only reason that butthole city got ARPA-H is because their @$$ of a senator threatened to tank the entire Biden agenda. Good riddance." EDIT: Just to clear, I do think our representatives should negotiate passionately to put it here. But I don't think they should do that in a way that puts Manchin and Sherrod Brown in the same sentence.

Not that I know of. It is for semiconductors though.

Dang, great catch. Who knows what it means, but I would point out that CSX lines from Brook Park are well connected both to Honda Marysville and to Lordstown (where the other LG plant is). So it's actually a pretty great location from a supply chain perspective. EDIT: I also learned that apparently 75% of U.S. cobalt deposits are in the Duluth area....Just a hop skip and jump away from Cleveland via Great Lakes shipping.

Do you really think you can read that much into what the grand jury is doing? I get what you're saying, but to me it's more plausible that the grand jury made a serious error than that a bunch of women with the same basic core of allegations were lying and lying in a way that is obvious to grand jury members but not to us. To me the allegations just make too much sense. And Watson's lawyer has conceded them in a sense, admitting that Watson had sexual contact (consensual) with some masseuses and stating that happy endings aren't illegal. Clearly Watson was reaching out to a ton of inexperienced masseuses in Instagram because he was interested in the quality of something other than the massage. It's possible that he met up with the women and said "excuse me ma'am. While I called you here for a massage, I'm really interested in some consensual sexual activity. If you accept that would be wonderful, and if not, then please just don't tell anyone about this." Maybe that's what happened and everyone alleging sexual imposition was just lying. Hard for me to believe.

This energy:

https://www.crainscleveland.com/technology/intel-hires-april-miller-boise-executive-vp-chief-legal-officer Some good news for Thompson Hine's Cleveland office.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-08/honda-lg-energy-eyeing-ohio-for-new-electric-car-battery-plant

The article doesn’t say what the deal is. Reading between the lines, I would bet that Bobby George tried to milk every cent he could and backed off when he got what he thought was the best deal to be had.

In case you are wondering how popular INTRO is, lol...

Do you think the combination of this design and Intro ups the ante for near west side design where just so-so designs become harder to justify? At this point it seems like Pearl and Intro will be in a league of their own.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-midwest-danger-rotating-power-blackouts-this-summer-2022-06-03/ This seems like a problem. Also (although I’m all for clean energy) a bit of an indictment of the “decarbonize now” crowd.

@KJPYou maybe wanna write about this to get it some additional attention? They're talking about a potential eventual budget of over $6 billion, so it would be very important for the region. Given we're sorta a swing state and the big competition is MA, there are the right political incentives to put this in Cleveland.