KJP

Based on the amounts that Berges paid for those homes, I would hardly say he "kicked them out." Residents were fairly compensated and then some. And most of the demolitions he undertook were more recent. I'm sure you're well aware Doug of how much vacant land existed on Duck Island 20 years ago and, for that matter, why it was called "Duck" Island. If anyone should be held in disregard for pushing poor people out to create more vacant land, that would be the late Mafia princess Rosemary Vinci (aka Madame LaRue).

From Jersey barriers to Raptors on Public Square By Ken Prendergast / May 19, 2023 Out go the Jersey barriers. In come the Raptors. That was the decision today by the Cleveland Planning Commission to redesign downtown’s Public Square from its 2016 redesign. In fact, the $3.5 million plan as approved would restore one aspect of the 2016 Public Square renovation which cost $50 million. That would be to restore the planned sharrows on both sides of Superior Avenue in the middle of the square. The approved redesign places 60 new bollards along the slimmed-down street which will remain bus-only through the square. MORE: https://neo-trans.blog/2023/05/19/from-jersey-barriers-to-raptors-on-public-square/

@NR It's going to be a Dollar General store, according to a building permit submitted last December for 5617 Memphis Ave. A $1.5 million construction project by property owner MSP Development of Beaver Falls, PA https://mspdevelopment.com/ BTW, the streetviews along Memphis Ave past that site are from May 2023. Doesn't get much more up-to-date than that!

BTW, I found a second pro forma on the OHFA site. The number of apartments is the same but the dollar amount is higher in this one. I'd bet this is the same project but updated, which also explains their $2 million tax credit award last December to offset higher project costs because this project has been in the works for so long.... https://ohiohome.org/ppd/proposals/2022/BGF/Warner-SwaseyII.pdf

While most of the article is about Ohio City, the article mentions Duck Island quite a bit, including the lead photo.

As Duck Island fills, Berges goes SOLO By Ken Prendergast / May 19, 2023 Don’t tell Matt Berges that new home construction in the U.S. is in a 15-month-long slump. The owner of Cleveland-based housing development firm Berges Home Performance LLC will tell you that success depends on what you’re building and where. The where in this case is the near-West Side, specifically Duck Island, a neighborhood Berges helped rebuild. But it is running out of space for more new homes, prompting the 23-year-old firm to look elsewhere to satisfy an as-yet insatiable housing demand. MORE: https://neo-trans.blog/2023/05/19/as-duck-island-fills-berges-goes-solo/

Of all the projects that won LIHTC awards this week, the Depot on Detroit is my favorite. Not only is it near where I live, but it's one of those developments that was built because of its proximity to a rail station. While I wouldn't call the project TOD, given its lack of mixed use and presence of a surface parking lot, every RTA rail station needs to have at least one 60-unit apartment building next door to them. If not tens of such apartment buildings. So this is a good next step, following on the likes of Aspen Place, Mayfield Station, Intro, Waterford Bluffs, and more.

Pennrose is very patient -- thankfully. Their renovation of St. Luke's Hospital into senior apartments also was a long haul. I've heard from a number of developers is that it's hard for them to tour investors around that neighborhood and get them to buy into it with that huge hulk of a building (Warner & Swasey) sitting there gutted and falling apart.

I'm not familiar with all of their financing. Their pro forma is here, but it tell you only what they needed at the outset to move forward, not what they have in hand now. If you can go back and find news of what public financing they've received so far, it's possible to figure out where they are on the public side of things. No way to know what private financing they've received or have pledged to them... https://ohiohome.org/ppd/proposals/2023/CentralCity/WarnerandSwaseyII.pdf

Why I'm not hopeful about getting Ohio on board passenger trains. Our legislators decided that saving lives at railroad crossings wasn't worth a measly $100 million. So they cut it, which would cause the federal dollars they would attract to go elsewhere. See the following from our friends at the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen: Re: State Budget Cuts to Rail Safety and the Ohio Rail Development Commission: Legislative Action Alert: Please reach out to your Ohio State Senators ( https://www.ohiosenate.gov ) and ask them to restore funding for the Ohio Rail Development Commission (ORDC) to Governor DeWine's original proposal. This week is the deadline for amendments to Substiture House Bill 33 (the Operating Budget) and ORDC funding is critical to our safety mission and to rail growth among our short line divisions. The Governor proposed annual funding of $10 million and a one-time grade crossing separation fund of $125 million to leverage federal dollars from the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act (IIJA). The House version of the budget reduced the annual funding to $6 million and completely eliminated the grade crossing funding. Our request is that the Senate amend HB33 to restore the Governor's requested funds. Talking Points: ORDC projects added over 3,300 permanent industrial jobs in Ohio between 2015 and 2022. This doesn't include temporary construction jobs and permanent support jobs, such as rail crews that service the new facilites. Funding the ORDC has a direct link to job growth in Ohio. The grade crossing separation fund provides an opportunity for municipalities to apply for federal dollars to separate road and rail in critical locations. Grade crossing separations cost in the tens of millions of dollars, and are simply not attainable for most smaller cities. The $125 million fund suggested by the Governor allows these smaller cities to leverage IIJA funding. If Ohio doesn't claim the money in the IIJA, another state will and when it's gone, it's gone. This is a once in a generation chance to bring these funds into Ohio. ###

Only a portion of the PA Turnpike follows the old Portage Railroad. And the turnpike has since been rerouted from the former RR ROW. I think a 200 mph HSR line is doable, especially considering the number of cities that could be connected -- from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh in the west to Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York in the east. Imagine eliminating nearly all of the flights between those cities for cheaper, all-weather, environmentally benign high-speed rail. You could travel NYC-Chicago in five hours, downtown to downtown (with slightly slower overnight trains offering on-board hotel service that saves you time, stress and money, arriving in Chicago or New York hourly at 6, 7, 8 and 9 am). You could travel from Cleveland to NYC in three hours, or to Chicago in two, or Washington DC in two and a half hours. Or how about Detroit in one hour, or Pittsburgh in 40 minutes? This is how fast the trains are in Europe, the Pacific Rim and increasingly in other places like Morocco, Vietnam, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, etc. In Italy, I rode a high-speed train across the mountains between Florence and Bologna. Some 95 percent of that 60-mile segment was in tunnels. In China, the Lanzhou to Chongqing high-speed line is 500 miles long and travels through some of the most rugged country in China including the Qinling Mountains. Engineering-wise, it can be done. Politically? That's a whole 'nother matter.

Still lots of out-of-state license plates everywhere here on the west side. True, that's anecdotal. But the hard data (see my article on Brain Gain) shows that people are leaving in greater numbers from the coasts and many of them are ending up here in Cleveland. As for schools, I think there's some misunderstanding as to the educational options in the city. There are many more school opportunities in Cleveland now than ever. We live in the suburbs. Our son goes to a gifted school in Cleveland. We pay $100 in annual fees for him to go there. At the end of each school year, we get $600+ back from the Lakewood schools because we don't ask them to take our son to school in a school bus. Since my wife drives him to school on the way to work, we're actually coming out ahead financially.

Six local housing projects win tax credits By Ken Prendergast / May 18, 2023 Six housing developments in Cuyahoga County won federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs) yesterday from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA), improving their chances of seeing construction in the near future. Those projects and 23 others elsewhere around the state received conditional LIHTC commitments. Developers will use those awards to leverage additional financing in the creation or rehabilitation of rental housing for low- to moderate-income Ohioans. MORE: https://neo-trans.blog/2023/05/18/six-local-housing-projects-win-tax-credits/

Six local housing projects win tax credits By Ken Prendergast / May 18, 2023 Six housing developments in Cuyahoga County won federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs) yesterday from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA), improving their chances of seeing construction in the near future. Those projects and 23 others elsewhere around the state received conditional LIHTC commitments. Developers will use those awards to leverage additional financing in the creation or rehabilitation of rental housing for low- to moderate-income Ohioans. MORE: https://neo-trans.blog/2023/05/18/six-local-housing-projects-win-tax-credits/

Six local housing projects win tax credits By Ken Prendergast / May 18, 2023 Six housing developments in Cuyahoga County won federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs) yesterday from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA), improving their chances of seeing construction in the near future. Those projects and 23 others elsewhere around the state received conditional LIHTC commitments. Developers will use those awards to leverage additional financing in the creation or rehabilitation of rental housing for low- to moderate-income Ohioans. MORE: https://neo-trans.blog/2023/05/18/six-local-housing-projects-win-tax-credits/

Forty-three years ago I became a teenager and was old enough to be caught up in the incredible stories that surrounded the explosive eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. I was amazed at how the landscape could be so altered, from the top 1,000-feet-plus of the mountain getting blown away to the landslide that buried Spirit Lake and the home of an eccentric Harry Truman (not the president) and his many cats. He refused to leave so he and his cats were buried under hundreds of feet of collapsed mountain and ash. The eruption blast flattened forests with huge, old-growth pine trees flattened in patterns of the pyroclastic flows that moved at hundreds of miles per hour. Thousands of acres of beautiful forests were turned into a moonscape in a matter of minutes. Fifty-seven people died in that massive eruption, the worst in US history. Ironically, a cool summer was forecast because of the ash cloud spreading across the USA and Canada, and recurring, subsequent eruptions. As one radio station quipped -- "Don't bother coming to Washington state this summer, because this year it's coming to you!"

There are no plans for such a service. It's just a wish by a congressman. Lots of elected officials over the decades propose things like this and they never go anywhere. Even if this one did, the new Acela trains will likely be retired before a project development process advances far enough to where the the types of trains can be considered.

That was a bad neighborhood more than a century ago and had a large shantytown during the Great Depression that Eliot Ness burned down. In 1938, Cleveland safety director Eliot Ness conducted a police raid of the Kingsbury Run shantytown. 300 squatters were evicted and 100 shanty homes were burned during the raid. https://clevelandhistorical.org/files/show/3497

Uh oh, here it comes again.

All cities from antiquity have gone through at least one if not several waves of large-scale abandonment and reconstruction. Even some newer ones like Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco were briefly and partially abandoned as a result of different causes. Economics is perhaps the most difficult one to overcome because it sows doubt in that city's reason for existing. Cleveland still has reasons for existing where its urbanity remains intact (or enhanced like UC) but most are the result of manmade actions that can be duplicated elsewhere and are not the consequence from the geographic arrangement of natural resources.

Eventually everyone becomes a taxpayer. I don't necessarily care if someone came here legally or not if that's what they had to do to improve their lives. It's ironic for us to steal somebody else's nations and then claim others came here illegally.

Federal Equipment expands in Cleveland’s Kinsman By Ken Prendergast / May 17, 2023 Historically, when a company outgrows its aging facilities in the urban core, they tend to move out to a larger, more modern structure in the suburbs. But not Federal Equipment Co. which is expanding its presence in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood that it’s called home for more than six decades. It’s the latest real estate investment along the Opportunity Corridor and the Blue/Green light-rail transit lines in an area of the city derisively dubbed as the Forgotten Triangle, until now. MORE: https://neo-trans.blog/2023/05/17/federal-equipment-expands-in-kinsman/

That photo is from before 1955 which is when construction began on the previous Cuyahoga County Administration building that was at the SE corner of Ontario and Lakeside. It's just a parking lot here.