Civvik

And Mahogany's couldn't POSSIBLY be racially inspired either...

Would that be a "Dayton Special?"

then I don't know what they are talking about. I don't think *they* know what they are talking about.

Most cities have parking maximums, Cincinnati does not. I recently worked on a building in a small North Carolina town and they had requirements for maximum allowable parking. It replaces a 3500 calorie diet with a 3500 calorie diet that is a bit more appetizing. We need a 2000 calorie diet. As someone who has hand-crafted form base codes, this is terribly hard to do. It is often much more complicated and subjective to codify form than it is to codify use. Except that current Euclidian codes prescribe both use AND form. Such codes are loaded with setbacks, height limitations, floor area ratios, lot coverages, fire department accesses, and the like. You throw away the use-based stuff from a Euclidian code and what's left is form-based. It's crappy form, but it's form nonetheless. Still, that's half of the old stuff gone right there, and you take the form-based stuff that remains and tweak it to be not as crappy. What follows from that, ideally, is far fewer zones that correspond to the various transects you want to utilize. That's the real problem with zoning codes today, even here in Cincinnati that has what I consider to be a pretty good code (there's many form-based elements in the higher density zones, and for the most part few uses and building types have to grandfathered in compared to other places). Nevertheless, there's way way too many zones, and they're constantly micromanaged like some sort of land-use gerrymandering nightmare. When you have a block getting downzoned (whether with a traditional Euclidian or more clean form-based code) to prevent infill development, or when in general you use the code to mandate stasis, then you have a problem. Yes, I agree the zones are ridiculous. Anyone who has taken a look at even a simple suburban zoning map probably walks away wondering what the f$&k they just looked at. Codifying form is so tempting. I worked with so many smart people on form based code, and in a wide variety of contexts...be it for a private developer trying to control his home builders, to municipalities who bought into New Urbanism. I will say that good form based code is better than Euclidian zoning. I've seen a lot of great stuff built under form based code, but a lot of crap too. Unfortunately it's hard to legislate good taste.

I know this is totally pedantic, but that's not at all what it was. The taking of property and handing it over to developers happens all the time and has been upheld as legit. That's how public housing projects got built and how many "redevelopment" plans go forward. After all, while states and cities do have their own transportation departments and crews to build roads and sewers and other such infrastructure, they aren't building contractors or developers. They need to get someone else to actually build buildings and the rest of the development anyway. The Norwood case was struck down by the Supreme Court because Norwood declared the neighborhood to be deteriorating. Not deteriorated, not blighted, but deterioratING. It was a case of semantics. They also ruled that "economic development" by itself is not sufficient to justify a taking of property, and that was the only criteria being used for the project. Regarding the parking situation, I'm all for removing parking minimums, but I think imposing maximums is just another evil side of the same coin. Enforcing arbitrary minimums or maximums both distort the market and create unexpected consequences. I say just remove the regulation and see what happens rather than totally flip-flopping and likely incurring a lot of political fallout. Parking maximums also sound a lot like "the damn socialists are waging a war on cars," whereas urbanists and libertarian types can both get behind the removal of parking regulations even if it's for different reasons. Parking maximums were never much of an encumbrance to developers who were doing structured parking. Those spaces were already so expensive that it was never a struggle to get them to do less. Likewise, it was never much of an encumbrance on small developers because their projects were already limited in land area and they liked to maximize their leasable or saleable square footage. The only major encumbrance it posed was to uses that were accustomed to big surface lots. But, two things there. One, you usually only impose maximums within a certain radius of transit stations, and that's just good planning. Two, as a planner you are always trying to get those surface parking users to slim down on the massive day-after-Thanksgiving parking fields.

Most cities have parking maximums, Cincinnati does not. I recently worked on a building in a small North Carolina town and they had requirements for maximum allowable parking. It replaces a 3500 calorie diet with a 3500 calorie diet that is a bit more appetizing. We need a 2000 calorie diet. As someone who has hand-crafted form base codes, this is terribly hard to do. It is often much more complicated and subjective to codify form than it is to codify use.

And I don't necessarily agree with that either so unfortunately it doesn't provide prospective. One is just a lesser evil (hyperbole used there). I'm not an opponent, I'm a strong proponent who just happens to dislike eminent domain. They are taking it if the owner doesn't want to get rid of it. Just because they aren't compensated doesn't mean it isn't taken from them. If I walk up to a kid and take their toy but throw some money at them I think people would still consider it stealing. As to your second paragraph, like I said, I know there are times when eminent domain is the only option. But a zig zag highway reference doesn't really apply here. I don't know the circumstances here so maybe someone can fill me in: what other options were explored and what made them choose this location? Were there other locations but the city didn't like the price tag,or didn't like the location as well as this location? Or was this the only legitimate option? Yeah, well, that's why they call it a taking. Again, the constitution doesn't ensure that your tangible assets can't be taken from you. It just ensures that there is value to these things, that you have the right to lawfully claim them, and that you live in a society that recognizes this and that you can thus claim compensation for your loss. This whole whine against eminent domain will, I suppose, always be with us. But we couldn't have a functioning society without it.

I'm probably jumping into this late, but I know two things: 1) Cities with cutting edge transit-oriented development codes actually threw out their parking minimums and went with parking maximums. (Wrap your mind around THAT for a minute.) 2) Qualls is highly educated in Urban Planning, having gone and earned an Ivy League masters in the field after her stint as Mayor of Cincinnati. She knows what's going on at the cutting edge. Which is kind of ironic, because by cutting edge, I really mean "common sense city-building policies that we threw out six decades ago."

I am truly baffled by the comments here that are critical or suspicious of the city's proceedings on the maintenance facility. Not only has the general location been in the plan for years now, it's not a lot of property, it's not beautiful nor a priceless historic treasure, and the city is totally within its right to take it by eminent domain if needed. This is totally a non-issue. I think some of you are just bored.

I didn't see it as a dig. More of a quite vivid description of the abandonment and lack of investment in that area.

Ehhhh I'm pretty sure a full wrapping, in their conversation, meant meshing the windows. I mean, it's their conversation. So, like, you can't exactly tell them what they are and aren't admitting... If it means wrapping the windows, that's one conversation, and if it doesn't, like in your example, then that's another conversation. It's like...you're in your own conversation. Or am I missing something?

I agree... that's why I haven't been bragging about the "no murders in the past 6 months" metric. (No offense to those who have been.) It'd be pathetic to brag about a dearth of homicides but when the perception to some is "most dangerous neighborhood in the country" or a neighborhood rife with killings - it's worth sharing. I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that it is NOT normal human behavior to kill people, in ANY community. Aside from crimes of passion, or war. Neighborhoods where people are murdered regularly are the sign of incredibly distressing social or economic circumstances. We should not ever allow parts of our own cities to get this way.

Except that it provides an additional source of operating revenue to continue service or expand it. Perception outweighs even operating revenue in this case, for sure. Everything is riding (pardon the pun) on this first line.

I was down in this area today. People were walking on every block, a couple of people on bicycles went whizzing by, people were meandering around the Lager House plaza, and you can start to see the first parts of the park taking shape, including a couple stands of trees. Man is it coming together. It's actually kind of a strange feeling. It didn't feel like the Cincinnati I have known all my life at all, it felt like a dream.

NEEDS MOAR SWOOSH Metro Who Dey!

Ouch!

Why don't you give it a shot, ryanlammi?

I thought it was a perfectly nice article, honestly, coming from the Enquirer. The city released the renderings with the reversed skyline. The Enquirer could have picked the other image and flipped it so the skyline was in the right direction, and still had the streetcar facing the article, but nobody here expects that level of initiative from them.

Absolutely not. These suburban style campuses (whether offices, industrial parks, strip shopping, or even housing developments) do not even come close to repaying through taxes the investment to build and maintain the infrastructure that they require. As an example, a typical suburban housing subdivision would need to have its property taxes increased by anything from 2x-4x just to cover the ongoing maintenance of its own roads, never mind the sewers, water lines, schools, police, fire department, libraries, and other services those taxes go to as well. Cincinnati's outer neighborhoods are on shaky ground from a return-on-investment point of view as it is, and encouraging more low-density development which requires widened roads, more traffic signals, extra sewer capacity, and other things is only going to dig the city into a deeper hole than it's already in. It's simply not worth it to keep such jobs in the city if those are the conditions that they come with. The city income tax makes the situation a little less lopsided, but it's still a very dangerous direction to go. The way such suburban development has managed to work OK in the past 60 years or so is because when those long-term maintenance liabilities come due, they're paid for by the taxes from new development that hasn't aged enough to need that maintenance yet. The only way it works without significantly increasing taxes is to have more and more growth. Any city or suburb that's already "built out" can't keep growing like that, so when the maintenance liabilities start piling up they get in trouble. Older suburbs are getting hit hardest because they have no ability at all to densify and improve the utilization of their existing infrastructure. The city itself is in a better position to densify and redevelop a number of areas, but the trend has to be increasing density and doing so with as much existing infrastructure as possible. These suburban style projects are burdening the city with road and sewer expansion projects that the city can not only not afford to build in the first place, but has no hope of maintaining in the future. So that's definitely not the answer to the problem. Washington Park on the other hand, as expensive as it is, is the type of project that projects its value into the surrounding neighborhood. As values go up around it, that increases the tax base, and helps pay off the cost of the project. That's called value capture. The streetcar project is the same kind of thing. Widening arterial roads, adding turn lanes, traffic signals, expanding sewers to handle excess runoff, and other such work that goes into these suburban projects costs a lot of money, but they don't improve nearby property values in any reasonable proportion to what they cost, and immediately nearby many of them even reduce values. We need to stop such insanity. We did some studies on the infrastructure needs of TND developments versus conventional suburban developments, and until you hit such a high density that you are no longer comparing comparable housing products, there was at best a 30-50%% efficiency advantage for the TND. This is still good of course, but was rather disappointing to us as, we thought it would be much higher. I can see a path to regulating development patterns, but I don't know how you regulate the types of housing that the market demands. I know that's way off topic again but perhaps this whole conversation needs to go into a different thread.

I love this from their website: "Austin Landing is in the heart of the Cincinnati-Dayton Corridor, an area long recognized for forward-thinking, innovation and invention."

Oh my god, those things are so sleek and awesome.

Never, ever, ever dead end a perfectly good street. Given the power, some people would, and I mean this in all seriousness, dead-end every street that was important to them until they found that they couldn't actually get anywhere. This is a perfect example of reacting to a problem and making it worse instead of better.

One day such considerations will be somewhat obsolete.

Justine, what's the size of the area you want to cover?

I'm secretly glad they aren't pursuing a Kroger at that location. It keeps my dream alive of building a big one at the base of a residential tower at Central and Walnut, on the Streetcar line.