Civvik

Under Lippert's interpretation of precedent, one could paralyze government ad-infinitum just by circulating petitions. PS: If you are reading this, Wayne Lippert, please take me off of your damn e-mail newsletter.

This one already looks like it could go anywhere, it's lost so much of its architectural value.

Having just walked past it the other day, I'm putting my money on "It's a groaning pile of shit." Nearly everything about it has been degraded by history except its general shape and fenestration. Eve that's precarious, as the entire north wall is bulging rather uniformly out towards the street. You could, with unskilled subcontractors, recreate everything that this building has left to contribute to the neighborhood; a well-ordered two-story brick facade is pleasant but not historic.

Unless strong and swift court action can be mustered, this will continue to wallow in appeals for a while. A lot of people got shorted. BofA might not even be liquid. It's one broke guy chasing another over a rusted hulk. Nice real estate, though.

A little Kunstler to brighten your day: "...The United States has already half killed itself at the Golden Corral steam-table of deep-fried debt. I guess we could go all the way and shoot what remains of the dollar in its pitiful, lolling head." http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/08/change-you-dont-have-to-believe-in.html

Command and control economies don't work. You are threatening a concept that nobody even cares about anymore, much less aspires to. This is one of the main problems with American conservatism at this point in history. You guys won your battle. Those liberals lost, and changed. We do not live in a USSR-USA deathmatch in which policy decisions must necessarily point us away from a forgone ideology. Claiming that a nation's government and private sector serve a common higher, even symbiotic purpose is not a prescription for a centralized economy. It's just an ethic.

That's under the false assumption that the government is somehow alien from the people. The government is the people. The question of whether or not it has the power to control us is ridiculous: It does! The real question is by how much! We should feel comfortable molding its authority and using it to serve whatever purpose we deem it most fit to serve. What if it was truly most fit to serve the purpose of, say, health insurance? The real false dichotomy is that of bad government versus good private sector. The actual discussion should be bad government versus good government, and bad private sector versus good private sector. Because the discussion should ultimately be about good versus bad, independent of the mechanisms. Compounding that pursuit is what is dangerous. The family's business and household budgets are ultimately the same thing, just different ways of describing their activity.

More accurately: If the family takes all $140,000 out of the family business, then that means not paying its workers, its suppliers, its utilities, its contractors, or its taxes. Therefore, the workers stop showing up, its suppliers stop supplying (meaning that its workers couldn't sell anything even if they showed up and worked for free), its utilities get cut off, no one fixes the plumbing or mows the law, and the government comes and puts the store on the next tax auction. Remember, GDP is a measure of revenue, not profit. A business with $5 billion in revenue and a profit of $0 is considered to have added $5 billion to GDP. To make the analogy work, therefore, you have to think of the $140,000 as a revenue figure, not a profit figure. This is one of those beautiful, truly beautiful, conservative debating tricks that really has no equal comeback: Stating an obvious fact that everyone already understood (profit versus revenue). By stating a totally obvious fact as an elucidation, you have inserted a kernel of doubt into all observers that...well...maybe I didn't know what profit was until you just told me. But all you've really done is totally ignored the actual debate, which is how much of the business's revenue we divert to the family budget to ultimately sustain the business.

I agree with Gramarye on this, if only because it is inescapable. Yes, those are all the entitled. But so are plenty of other people, I think by "entitlement programs" he's referring to Medicare, Medicaid, etc.

You're totally missing what I'm saying. The family's business IS the United States economy. This analogy doesn't make sense to people who have heard their whole lives that private and public sector activity is fundamentally different. The 'family business' is the US government. Not all the US businesses and their incomes. The real difference with the simplified examples was two main things: - the ability to print money - and the ability to collect and raise taxes. Dude you are totally on your own tangent now. You didn't even listen to what I said lol.

The problem is that it's not an affordable piece of property. It's caught in the classic American downtown paradox of being too expensive for its own good.

You're totally missing what I'm saying. The family's business IS the United States economy. This analogy doesn't make sense to people who have heard their whole lives that private and public sector activity is fundamentally different.

Call me crazy but I actually don't see the huge appeal of the 5th and Race site. The Banks strikes me as a much more exciting and high-profile location. The "energy" I get from 5th and Race is that it's the back door entrance to a couple slow department stores. Cincinnati's energy seems to be in the Gateway Quarter and The Banks.

Except it's not a family budget, it's a national government budget. They aren't the same. This is what people refuse to accept from fucking NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS like Paul Krugman. Here's the real analogy: A family has a business that makes $140,000 a year (GDP). They currently elect to take home $23,810 to cover a household budget of $35,520. They could take home more, but dad left a chunk of the money in the business account so he could buy a $10,000 teak conference table. He now wonders why this hasn't increased his business income. Mom wonders, too, but is increasingly angry at the fact that they keep using the credit card to pay for household expenses, so one month she threatens to not pay the credit card bill.

I did 9-6 as an urban designer. People came in any time from 7 to 10, and left from 4 to 9. I did not appreciate the "I got up before you so I'm a better worker" attitude that is pervasive in America. The people that rolled in at 7:30 were no better or worse than those who came in at 10, and were usually gone by 4:30. I often did my best work in the evening when nobody else was around. I hate ties and I hate banker's hours. I'm actually really looking forward to various shifts in health care, although I will ultimately work pretty standard daytime hours.

Why should there be a rural landscape near the core? That's wasteful. It goes against every core belief we have as urbanists that human settlement should make use of proximity and efficiency. There is a huge difference between thoughtful green space, recreational connectivity, watershed protection...and underutilized land. It's quasi-country. And the only real reason things east of 275 remain underdeveloped is because Indian Hill and Terrace Park prevented connections. This whole state of affairs was not a plan for open space, it was the by-product of no plan, or rich obstructionism. I agree with you about the future of capital, but where is the capital for real transit infrastructure going to come from then? We might honestly be looking at a future of busways rather than rail. I can't believe I would even say that, but I don't see America pulling its shit together to execute a strong transit-oriented public policy. Not lately.

I did my thesis on this project. Have you looked at a satellite photo of the metropolitan area recently? Do you really want the growth wavefront to continue rolling up the 71-75 corridor? Western Clermont county is pathetically underdeveloped given its proximity to I-275, because of the connectivity issue. Do you think that the Warren/Butler alternative is somehow better? That development is also trash. Not connecting Clermont to Cincinnati is not going to magically make the region invest in density and TOD. I'm just being realistic. It's not like I wouldn't prefer that alternative.

Promoting development in the underdeveloped east side is preferable to all other options except density. Unless one wishes to see vehicle miles traveled and its associated economic burden go up because growth continues up I-71.

Really? How do you figure? Anecdote: I had to take an Anatomy and Physiology sequence last year. The private online college choice was $9,000. The private brick and mortar choice was $5,400. The public community college choice was $1,250. Where is the pressure on that market? It's for the public to go up, as a consequence of government austerity. Not for the private to go down. Extrapolating beyond that trend is impossible. What happens if the whole thing just collapses? Who knows. You really let your ideology lead you to strange places, man. Oh, I don't know, maybe because <a href="http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/08/10/bill-gates-technology-can-lower-college-tuition-to-2000/">Bill Gates was talking about it last year</a>. Also, I can't link to it from where I am, but there is a very interesting TED talk by Sugata Mitra (focused on younger children, not college age kids) that I would recommend regarding the use of technology to help children self-teach. Bill Gates' wife also was quoted by Terry Gross saying that she thinks every American should get a Bachelor's degree. Right.

Really? How do you figure? Anecdote: I had to take an Anatomy and Physiology sequence last year. The private online college choice was $9,000. The private brick and mortar choice was $5,400. The public community college choice was $1,250. Where is the pressure on that market? It's for the public to go up, as a consequence of government austerity. Not for the private to go down. Extrapolating beyond that trend is impossible. What happens if the whole thing just collapses? Who knows. You really let your ideology lead you to strange places, man.

You can't turn his argument against him because it's rooted in the fact that there are core human aesthetic values which are reflections of our own physical form. He isn't lamenting a discipline, he's lamenting lack of any discipline.

Most of the streetcar opponents think of the streetcar as an amenity similar to a museum or park rather than basic infrastructure such as a bridge or water main. The proponents see the streetcar as basic infrastructure. That is the main difference between the two sides. Both sides claim that the other "doesn't get it." I don't think its basic infrastructure. I think it's got a good chance of returning its investment. That's the only thing people "get" or "don't get."

This is unfortunate. Here is someone who is trying to think deeper about cities, but really doesn't get it.

Look, I think you do a nice job with your blog, but you're kind of talking out both sides of your mouth with the issue of these buildings by saying that you support the Mercer Commons development almost as a disclaimer in the posts about the buildings they want to knock down. Especially if you know more about them than you let on in your blog posts. So what's the agenda? It really does not seem clear to me. I would think the highest aim would be to get 3CDC to articulate why they felt these two buildings had to go, and then presenting the historical background in that context. Without that context, these buildings seem like sacrificial lambs. There's already been unnecessary hackles raised over 1314 Vine. I've said this here before: Not every old building becomes historic. We've got a whole mess of 20th century building stock that is going to hit the historic threshold in the next generation, and we've got to foster a pretty clear and pragmatic attitude about what's special and what's not, or the whole process is just going to turn into a shitstorm.

You guys should try to get some kind of perspective from 3CDC or the architect on this before you write "journalism" pieces on the buildings that don't show up in their renderings. How much is actually salvageable? What's their current interior condition? What kind of obstacle do they actually pose to the development plan, from the developers or designers perspective? I mean come on, some of you do actually work in this industry. This might not be as simple as just finding the Sanborn maps and creating an overnight celebrity out of a building shell that you don't really know that much about.