KJP

That should also help other downtown housing developers line up financing for their projects as well. I'll bet that, in the next few months, you'll hear other prospective downtown developers announcing their projects (just a gut feeling -- I'm not privvy to any info however).

It irritates me to no end when past trends are use to forecast future planning needs. If that were true for people planning their own futures, then I better go out and buy some pants with a 48" waist, I should no longer have shampoo in my grocery budget and I will need to practice using a white cane. The Cleveland-Cuyahoga Cuyahoga Port Authority uses its $3 million in annual taxpayer support to leverage nearly $1 billion in development. So how is it that RTA, with its $160 million in annual taxpayer support, pleads impotence in being able to influence more transit-friendly development patterns? This is a constraint of imagination and will, rather than of structural, financial and legal capacity.

skin flute TMI :behind:

I've seen warmer for a whole season (1982-83, 1996-97 to name two), but it has been mild. Even if we get hammered the rest of the way, it can't change the fact that January was one of the warmest, if not the warmest on record.

Pope, what instrument?

You can go to Columbus Public or OSU's Science-Engineering Library and see their collection of transit studies for Columbus. I think they built a separate wing to shelve all those studies, didn't they? :|

necromantical Some people like to be "squashed" up against others. I, for one, live in a seven-story building with apartment-style condos, which is very quiet and peaceful, yet I know the names of all the neighbors on my floor and we look out for each other, feed the others' pets when we're on vacation and so on. I also don't have to cut grass (thank God--I had enough of that in Geauga County!), make repairs to my roof, basement, hot water heater, etc. To say that "people need space" is a horrible generalization not based in any fact. Look at the rediscovered market interest in cluster homes, townhouses and new urbanism in general that the privacy-community pendulum is swinging back over to the community side. Plus, look at the marketplace. About 75 percent of all households don't have school-age children (no need for a yard), the Baby Boomers are retiring (no need for taking on home maintenance), and the population in general is getting older (need higher density, mixed-use, walkable areas where driving isn't required for everything). Some people need space, and obviously that applies to you. But don't project your preferences on others, including me. You're doing both of us a disservice.

The photo, below, truly captures a great urban setting, and says a lot more. Every city of at least medium size in the U.S. should have areas like this, and look like this on most nights. It's what I call a "symptomatic area" that cannot happen without the rest of the city being of a certain density, have a sufficient mixed-use character, and have a transit system of decent quality. In my opinion, if a city doesn't have at least one area that looks like this, then the city needs to re-evaluate what it's doing. I love this...

We need to dream big and then crunch the numbers to see if the dream makes sense. Dismissing a new idea without further thought hurts Cleveland as much as building the big project without doing a prior reality check. Well said.

If you want to read some interesting articles on energy issues, please visit the "Great Peak Oil Thread" in the transportation section. By the way, oil will never run out. Why? Because the last barrels will be too damn expensive for anyone to afford. In the absence of an oil alternative, a more serious issue is the bell-shaped curve of oil production, be it on a per-well, per-reservior, per-nation or global basis. Modern economies depend on borrowing against future growth, and without a replacement for oil, there will be no future growth. Yes, I think we can develop a replacement, but it will take a national commitment on the scale of going to the moon or the Manhattan Project to achieve something that has the energy density and portability of oil -- things not even coal offers. By all estimates, it would take one to two decades for the U.S. to make a relatively painless transition to a significantly less oil-intensive economy. That includes our revamping our energy-intensive land use policies. What would I do to revamp those policies? Here's a short list: > Roll back over 5-10 years oil industry federal subsidies (tax breaks and direct payments for research, exploration, export financing, refinery/capacity construction, sustaining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, guarding the movement of oil supplies) which total upwards of $250 billion per year (cut personal income taxes by a like amount). Fully rolling back these subsidies would introduce market pricing which, for motorists, would increase their costs at the fuel pump by up to $1.50 per gallon. Phasing out subsidies over a period of years would soften the increase in fuel prices and promote production of more efficient vehicles, increased conservation and more private investment in alternative fuels, railways and more compact land uses. > Since gas tax revenues and driving already flattening out with recent increases in gas prices, higher gas prices would likely gas tax revenues to fall. New ways to pay for roads is already under consideration by states and the federal government. One idea gaining greater favor is to lease public highways to private operators who would convert these roads to tollways to add a more free-market approach to transportation. Reduce gas tax rates by a commensurate revenue amount. Lease revenues could be used to fund other roads, and leverage private investment in high-speed rail, freight railroads and urban transit (all of which nurture more compact land use patterns than highways). > Eliminate tax abatement incentives in enterprise zones which originally were intended to benefit cities based on distressed conditions (including the presence of vacant land, but is frequently used in suburbs and rural areas having "vacant" land -- meaning all of them can use it!). There are other subsidies that exist, but are even more controversial. Eliminating them might also hurt cities (ie: grants and low-interest loans for building roads and utilities into new commercial/industrial parks, increasing city water rates for non-city customers, adding sewer system impact fees for impervious surfaces and others possible changes). All those would cause more compact land use patterns, stop the throwaway mentality when it comes to housing/neighborhoods, and save tax dollars for having to maintain duplicative infrastructure and sustain low-income people stranded in core cities where access to exurban jobs is extremely difficult.

Yes, but the meeting was postponed until later this month.

I see what you're saying now. The West Side Sun News has downtown in its coverage area. I don't think we have many honor boxes down there, but you can get the paper at some newsstands, like one in Tower City, between the portico and the Renaissance Hotel.

You can "see" the heat in the pictures...the sun reflecting the hazy air, and the later pics look like they show some afternoon storms brewing.

By the way, Jane isn't a relative! The legal term is called "moving to the nuisance" if you bought a home near the tracks. The only exception is if you moved to the affected area before the trains started running. In most places, that would make you about 150 years old.

None of it was put in the papers or otherwise publicized except for people who subscribed to the weekly safety updates. Actually, the information IS put in the papers, at least in the Sun papers. We get the same brevity reports from the CPD and put as much recent info in each police blotter as we have room for. While the First District reporter doesn't put any names or addresses in his blotter, I write the Second District blotter and put names in only for felony arrests and sometimes their addresses -- usually if they are west side residents. We could put all the public information in the paper (as those in our east side office do!), but due to space constraints, I don't put much info in for non-felony incidents. MyTwoCents, Having covered suburban and city police beats and seen brevity/call reports from numerous cities, there really isn't much going on in the suburbs compared with what happens in the city. The only city where I see reports being withheld is Bay Village, and we regularly make jokes about that at the office. When I covered all the West Shore suburbs, if one of those cities had more than two cars stolen in a week, it was notable. In the Second District (covering everything from the Flats West Bank south to Old Brooklyn and east of about 65th Street), if there are as few as two car break ins a day, that's notable! I regularly write about major heroin, crack and other busts. Nasty assaults, shootings are a regular, weekly occurrence in the Second District, and that's not the worst area of the city. But if there was a shooting in one of the West Shore suburbs, the cops I worked with for nine years would call me up and say "Hey, guess what, we actually had a shooting in Rocky River today! Can you put this in the paper!" They were actually excited to tell me about it. So, while it's true some suburban police departments are trying to make their cities appear more quiet than they really are, it's a pretty rare thing.

It was a reaction I had at some point, and since has become standard practice. That's friggin' hilarious! But maybe it is and that we need it.

Hey, I just heard that Ponte Vecchio is closing. The reason is slow business and that the owner, Dominic something, is the same guy who owned the Flats Panini's -- and went to jail for tax evasion. The employees there are being paid directly out of the cash register... Sad to see this happening.

I think I would support it with the features that My2cents suggested. That would create the year-round underground city that I've long desired. But I'd still want to create a underground link from the convention center to Tower City as part of closing the intersecting roads in the middle of the square and to give FCE a consolation prize.

Yep, I recall. Sounds like no one was biting. I was worried about that. I would have loved to have heard RTA's sales pitch.

A saw an RTA press release that said the buses will run on Saturdays, unless some things have changed. I guess we'll find out at the public hearing tomorrow (2-15).

mxchris216, I agree about driving to MLK and getting on I-90 there, but I'd suggest going north on East 105th into Bratenahl, turn left on Lake Shore Boulevard and then get on I-90 at MLK. When I drive through bad neighborhoods, I also don't drive in the curb lane, I don't come to a complete stop at lights and instead inch slowly forward, and if there's a car stopped in front of me, I leave enough space in front so I can pull away if I have to. Plus, when I can, I never stop my car opposite of the windows of the car stopped next to me in the 'hood, just to avoid starting something even with an innocent glance.

The reason why Mayor Patton in FP couldn't be reached is because she's pissed at the PD for continuing to write articles like this. FP has been giving its school tax money to RR since 1928 and FP is supposed to feel sorry for them when they have a chance to abate it to help redevelop an aging retail complex? And RR doesn't have endure that sour taste of giving up tax base for nearly 80 years, just seven (the length of the abatement).

Thanks. I estimated the square footage for the residential and then based my retail estimate by dividing the total residential square footage by six and then by eight. That's half the retail-to-residential/office ratio of Crocker Park and equivalent to that which Stark proposes for downtown. I figure I should use the lesser retail quantity for this two TODs. But my goal was to make it possible to live within a half-mile of the Rapid system and be able to take care of much of your day-to-day needs (work/school, shopping, recreation etc) without having to venture more than half-mile from the Rapid system. Plus, some of the retail can be exchanged for civic/recreation uses, community theaters, social/public assistance needs and so on. BTW, I didn't have much time to delve into developing a TOD concept in the area near the Woodhill station. I needed get these land-use maps done in advance of a meeting tomorrow morning.

This second TOD (below) represents about 245 new single-family homes (in addition to the 25 or so still standing in the area), 565 multi-family units, 50 live-work units, roughly 150,000 square feet of ground-floor retail/restaurants and some 25,000-50,000 square feet of office/medical space. Like the other TOD estimate, this is a very broad brush. Considering that about 20 percent of TOD residents and visitors typically use transit each day. My guesstimate is that the ridership at this Buckeye/OC TOD would be about 600 transit trips per day (or about 219,000 trips per year).

I think we should get back to Tyler Village. I posted my thoughts on the Waterfront extension at: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5563.msg77220#msg77220