Civvik

This is not entirely inappropriate. What does Dunhumby do? They aren't in the business of making loyalty cards. They are in the business of tracking people's activities and compiling information. In that sense, I think the building is somewhat...appropriate.

I am so confused about this initiative. I thought high speed from Indy to Chicago was a done deal, and that was prompting Cincinnati to think about hooking into it? If they had daily service to Chicago from Cincinnati, I'd go way more than I do now. And by that I mean I haven't been since 2007.

It sounds like you have pretty much exhausted your options within a 100 mile radius, or don't care for what you've found. There just aren't that many touristy little towns in this part of the country that are also within walking distance of natural attractions. Granville's a great little town in the foothills east of Columbus. It has a few historic inns and a wonderful brewpub called Brews. The campus of Dennison is very attractive but it won't fill your day.

1) Why do you think Newport Covington would have a bigger system impact than Uptown? I don't see nearly as big of a development opportunity or ridership opportunity. 2) This looks like a pretty big loop, could these two small cities really afford to add more to the operating costs than the extension would take away? Not opposed to NKY, just not any time soon.

Hard to get excited about a high quality building when the project utterly destroyed the Edwards streetscape for no reason. This continues to show that conventional developers build trophies to themselves, not pieces of the urban fabric. Meanwhile at the Banks, we get the opposite. For all of Cincinnati's changes this decade, it's still a really unsophisticated development market.

Finally, someone who shares my dream of a Central Parkway Kroger! Also, I heard from reputable sources that the OTR Kroger operates at a large loss, mostly due to theft.

Bahahahaha. I'm not the only one who thought that the box in the render from last month was just something an intern made as a space-filler. And then they actually trotted it in front of the review board.

Well, sorry, I just don't share the strict urbanist view on this one. To me this project is about upgrading transportation within the existing metro area. The entirety of Cincinnati's future does not rest on LRT and the Streetcar. Even if, by some miracle, 50% of the next 20 years of population growth chose to re-densify Cincinnati and Hamilton County, we would still have to accomodate 150,000 to 200,000 new people. I guess we will continue to just plow them up I-75, since that seems to be the manifest destiny of southwest Ohio.

I don't think this is even about opening up new land for development, it's just about making the existing areas of Clermont more attractive and efficient. There is so much poorly developed and under-developed property hugging I-275. I think what I am saying is that it might be 14 miles from downtown, but economically it's developed about the same as South Lebanon or Monroe, which are 25 miles away. Cincinnati as a region deserves balanced, efficient growth. Clermont is just part of that equation. Ignoring the access problem from Clermont isn't going to make it go away. 275 is already a parking lot from 71 to Milford during rush hour. You're right, 275 is much too large, and the eastern arc of it serves no efficient purpose right now for access OR mobility. What I really don't understand is Hamilton's opposition. Where is it coming from? I frankly don't think 95% of Hamilton county even cares. I've been traveling that corridor my whole life. There is nothing important down there, it's just floodplain. Newtown is nothing. It couldn't possibly be so politically powerful that it thwarts this whole project. My intuition is that the East Side thinks of the Little Miami river as a kind of bulwark against Appalachia.

As someone who grew up in Clermont County, I am all for this entire project. It has been sad to see perfectly convenient areas in Clermont continue to fester in white-trash-spawning low land values and lack of sophisticated developer interest, all because you have to go around half the metro area to get into Cincinnati instead of enjoying a direct route through...what? An already-urbanized river tributary? A dog park? Flood plains? This is and always has been about putting real infrastructure a little too close to the rich f*cks along the base of Indian Hill. Meanwhile, Cincinnati continues to burst northward towards Lebanon, because that's where the infrastructure investments have been made. For some metros, such an uneven development pattern would be due to geographic constraints. In Cincinnati, it's because a swatch of rich people half the size of a county didn't want any big roads.

This screams OTR to me:

I think it's a little premature to say Bourbon Street will bounce back like nothing happened.

3CDC putting off large projects is bad because they are the major player in terms of parcel acquisition. It's easy to get excited about Cincinnati when you're standing in the middle of The Banks or Vine and 14th. But Denver has seven times our absolute population growth. That puts things in perspective. Cincinnati is still a fragile market.

Oh, the New York Post. Is there a more irritating newspaper?

I use this: http://www.nancyboy.com/viewcategories.asp You can get along in the world if you're smart. I didn't see any detergent. Situation critical. It's there.

Streetcar 2016. Hotel 2016. GE 2016. Bet they wish the All Star Game was in 2016. And yes. Carter fails again. Now that they have GE they should just fire CarterDawson and let people bid on individual blocks. Couldn't get a worse product than the barracks Carter built.

I use this: http://www.nancyboy.com/viewcategories.asp You can get along in the world if you're smart.

I paid $800 for a Crate and Barrel sofa that someone ordered and then didn't like the fabric. It was just sitting in the store in Kenwood. Sometimes you just gotta look around.

They could start implementing micro-apartments in some of the new projects. Small yeah, but maintain quality and not have to be subsidized as much either directly or by inflating the market units...

I think Columbus, because of its sheer geographical area, benefits from something not often considered in population statistics: household size. Columbus enjoys more housing stock that is larger, younger and less obsolete than Cincinnati or Cleveland. A little 2 bedroom 1940's house in Cincinnati might have raised 2 or 3 families by now, and has "retired" to housing a single older person. A 1980's subdivision house, or even a 1960's ranch, in Columbus still has a nuclear family or two left in its life cycle. It means that when Columbus adds infill (which it is also doing at a faster rate than Cin or Cle) it enjoys an actual population boost rather than just treading water. This will ultimately settle out, I think. Market forces will always provide someone to buy a good house, and you can't replace one householder with any less than one householder.

I know what you mean by "true urban area," but cities don't have to follow an exact prototype. I think the basin could be as well served by a large grocery on the streetcar line as a few smaller ones not on the streetcar line. The most important thing is that it needs to be VISIBLE and reassure new residents that they actually live in a full-service neighborhood.

I still think they should build a big urban format two-story grocery as part of a residential mid-rise at Walnut and Central Parkway. I can dream.

I've been spending a lot of time in Dayton lately, driving from Cincinnati. It's time to abandon CVG and DAY, build Cincinnati-Dayton Int'l in Monroe, link the two centers with high speed rail, and form some kind of economic and governmental cooperative zone.

I think there's merit to both arguments. But with the upswing of downtown and downtowns in general, I wonder if it would be prescient for them to stay...

I think Tiffany belongs as a classy urban storefront, not in a mall. It's one of the only retailers that I can think of that I just can not ever see in a mall. Too classic. Saks definitely belongs in Kenwood, though.