LlamaLawyer

Would this make Cleveland the only city in Ohio to have two dispensaries downtown?

Wow. Edwins is obviously great, but I was really hoping that someone would come along to resurrect Nighttown.

The location and timing (assuming planned schedules are met) for all of this should be perfect. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but the orthodox community in that area seems to have been growing incredibly fast since 2020. I've got to think there's a big need for more housing there.

Two adults and one juvenile arrested for the W. 25 street takeover on September 15. They hailed from the rough and tumble, crime-ridden streets of (*drumroll*) Barberton and Norton. Just goes to show you can't rely on stereotypes for these things. 😜

Hopefully the ballpark village turns out very well. I'm thoroughly whelmed.

@Ethan and @Foraker, I agree with most of what you said, but I think the difference in cost could potentially make this a bigger deal than one would expect. Also, the "surge" event issue is real, but that's probably where busses and vans come in to mitigate the problem. The bolded italicized part of what I said above is important. Musk estimated a cost per mile to the consumer of $0.40 for robotaxi. That figure immediately makes me think of the federal mileage rate, which is 67 cents a mile for 2024. In other words, if the Musk numbers worked out, robotaxi would be cheaper than driving your own car. To take a tangible example of potential numbers, the average American drives 14,000 miles a year, which at $0.40 a mile translates to about $450 a month. So let's say Tesla wants to drive adoption of robotaxi and they make a plan that's like cell phones. In the "Tesla family plan" you get unlimited mileage to destinations within 50 miles of your house. It's $500 a month for you and $200 a month for each additional rider. Routes beyond 50 mile radius are priced at $0.40 a mile. So let's say you have a three-person household with two cars--one oldish car that they own outright and a newish car that has a car payment of $500 a month. Well this Tesla package looks like a really good deal to them. So they sell their newish car, and now for $900 a month (just $400 more than their car payment) they get basically chauffeured around almost all the time without ever having to worry about driving or maintenance. They probably drive their oldish car occasionally and use it for long trips. But they're already paying $900 a month for the Tesla service, so they feel like it would be a huge waste not to use it whenever they can. And it's just so nice to be able to read a book or scroll your phone instead of paying attention to the road. The owned car gets used less and less. If they have a big suburban house with a 2.5-car garage, the car that they own probably just sits there along with the other kinds of rarely used junk people keep in their garage. They are car owners, but not reliant on their car at all. This could be a very common situation. There's also a world where all car ownership becomes much less common though. Let's say this family above is looking to move. There's a townhouse that's a nice option, but it's got no garage and no easy street parking. In 2024 that would have been a deal-breaker for this family. But in 2040, that's not nearly as big of a deal. After all, they can always just sell their old car. They don't really need it.

The robotaxi demo from Tesla I thought was interesting primarily for its focus on the death of the parking lot. That spurred a lot of thoughts in me about the future of urban design in a self-driving world. I would be pretty pessimistic that something like robotaxi actually hits the roads in 2026 as Elon promised, but I think the writing has been on the wall for a while that something similar is eventually coming, probably not in two years, but probably less than twenty. There's a lot of eye rolling about self driving, because it's something the industry has been talking up and promising for more than a decade now. But if you look at Waymo/Tesla performance as of 2024, I think it's fair to say that self driving is pretty much solved and the remaining regulatory obstacles are probably higher than the remaining technical obstacles. I'm personally pretty curious how a transition away from car ownership would affect development patterns. Although you certainly would increase car access, that increase would be pretty modest since 92% of households already have a car. On the other hand, due to efficiencies of scale, relying on autonomous taxis should be *vastly* cheaper than car ownership. So car ownership would almost certainly decline; it's not hard for me to imagine a version of 2050 where only 1 in 10 households own a car that they rely on for transportation. I would think that may increase demand for walkable neighborhoods because calling a taxi to drive a route you can walk in 10 minutes just feels much crazier than taking your own personal car to drive a route that you can walk in 10 minutes (something that people of course do all the time, and which diminishes the value of walkable neighborhoods). Certainly, parking minimums, parking garages, parking lots, oil-change places, auto-parts stores, car dealerships, and all sorts of auto-related infrastructure and business would become absurd and obsolete in a world with limited car ownership. Would people still want to go through drive throughs in a robotaxi, or would it become a rare curiosity like the drive-in movie? What I would be more worried about is rail. I really like rail because it's inherently more carbon efficient than auto-based transportation as well as being *far* superior from a microplastic standpoint. In theory, rail also should be able to get you from point a to point b faster than auto-based travel, although that often isn't the case in this country. You've also got the level of comfort that comes from being able to walk around and use the restroom on many trains. And obviously in high-traffic situations, trains become a lot better from a time standpoint. All that being said, I could see trains doing very well, particularly as a shift away from car ownership removes the stigma of public transport and as easy access to cheap taxis improves access to train stops for those who don't live within walking distance (e.g., your commute may be a 4 minute robo-taxi ride followed by a 20-minute train ride). On the other hand, if the powers that be who are in charge of managing train-based travel aren't forward looking and careful, I could see a world where lots of rail systems get left in the dirt by extremely convenient and cheap autonomous taxi options. A lot of the above is just speculation, but these seem to be considerations that any urbanist should be thinking about. It may not happen in 2026, but self driving will be here long before your new 30-year mortgage matures.

Thanks for the heads up. That sounds very fascinating and I'll give it a listen.

Honestly not surprising with how important the medical profession is here. I expect it to continue to increase.

It's a good location. I'm sad because it's a farther walk from my house, but hopefully it can be the start of making Cedar-Taylor feel a little more like Cedar-Lee. Interested to see what the aBUNdance coffee place will be like too.

I don't know whether anyone in the administration reads this forum, but if they do, your "has no spine" comment may have hit a nerve (pun intended). Bibb just announced they're stepping up traffic enforcement action to prevent this and encouraged people to submit tips with any information they may have to help police identify the perps.

I'm incredibly glad this is finally almost done, because it should be an important part of the local urban fabric. As a distant secondary matter, I've been pretty disappointed with the overall appearance as the cladding is put on. The original renders looked really great, but the finished product looks fairly cheap so far.

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announcements/20240924-1474554/1474554_cshomeprice-release-0924.pdf Cleveland housing market looks really good this summer.

The latest iteration seems to be clearly an improvement over previous last three. I know it's not a popular opinion here, but I continue to believe the design is basically fine if not above average and it's being judged more harshly because the first couple iterations were much better.

No, the VA is like half a mile down the road. Wanting retail there definitely makes sense though.

https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/oh_cleveland_msa.htm August BLS numbers look okay. We're back into y/o/y growth. Unemployment is below 4% again too.

I like the design a lot. I hope that they actually have the rooftop greenery shown in the render, because it would be a substantial visual enhancement.

Really looking forward to @KJP's article. My little two cents (for whomever is interested) is just that Artisan appears to have about 20 units available to rent today, based on its website, with a much smaller inventory or maybe five or six units becoming available in the next two months. So unless they have unlisted units, that would indicate an occupancy rate over 90%.

I completely agree with all of this. The only point I'm trying to make is that when you take the $9.6 million/yr. figure (which is a big number) and the acreage of Burke (again, big enough that it's hard to visualize) and break them both down into smaller chunks, you get a vivid illustration of just how little value is being extracted from the land under the current usage.

The mobile homes thing is a thought experiment, lol. I would be strongly against actually using the land that way. I agree with your general point about promoting Burke more, but why not do that with Hopkins instead? As far as air taxi, aren't most of those vertical take-off and landing using a helipad? Do you really think personal air transport would take off (pun intended) using a technology that requires an airport? I would think such services would *only* have broad appeal if you could use them without having to set foot inside an airport.

So basically the net economic benefits for the region of having Burke (as opposed to bare asphalt) on the lakefront amount to $9.6 million a year, which is about $21,333 per acre per year, or a little under $1,800 per acre per month. I think the report demonstrates what many suspected--that Burke is a horribly inefficient use of land. Let's take an absurd example. Say we take 200 acres and turn them into a trailer park, leaving the rest to the Metroparks to do as it will. On the 200-acre trailer park, let's say very conservatively that you can get 10 mobile homes per acre. That's 2,000 mobile home lots. If you rented each lot out for $400 a month base rent, you would exactly match the current $9.6 million in net revenue, just through rentals, without even considering the economic benefits from having 2,000+ additional residents. I think the highest and best use of this land is obviously *not* a mobile home park. And so the fact that Burke could be operated more economically as a mobile home park than an airport demonstrates how absurd it is. I've seen enough. Let's shut it down.

It's imposing in person and is a surprisingly prominent addition to the UC skyline when you're driving down Cedar Hill. It's really remarkable how much this area has changed in the last ten years, and I can't wait to see the next ten.

The fact that basically only 1% of all downtown residents are under 18 strikes me as pretty unhealthy. I would think the administration should consider whether there are policy fixes or amenity type improvements that could make downtown more palatable for families. I think downtown will always have fewer families than other parts of the city, but it really ought to be at least 2-3x where it is now.

Sounds like really good news! I'm not familiar with these quarterly numbers. When you say "revisings" were they revised or is this actually the initial report of Q1 2024? I see that these numbers come from unemployment insurance--do you know if they get run through the infamous birth/death model? Are they counting jobs based on residence location or employment location (i.e. are they more like the houshold survey or establishment survey in terms of commuters)? Sorry if these are dumb questions. EDIT: I'm still not understanding the numbers. This source https://data.bls.gov/maps/cew/OH?period=2024-Q1&industry=10&geo_id=39000&chartData=4&distribution=1&pos_color=blue&neg_color=orange&showHideChart=show&ownerType=0 appears to show robust y/o/y growth, but nothing approaching 129K for the region.

The plant is going to happen. If Intel were to declare bankruptcy tomorrow, the federal government would almost certainly make sure that some other U.S. company picked up the pieces and carried the torch. It's a matter of national security and pretty much as close to a sure thing as you ever get with developments.