Khorasaurus1

Anecdotally, I have a co-worker who lived (with their three person household) at their cottage in Charlevoix basically from Spring 2020 to Fall 2021, before moving back to their house in Oakland County. But I do think there will be a broader trend towards places with lower cost of living and natural beauty and away from crowded and expensive major cities. But once people move to those destinations, there will definitely be a cohort that chooses urban living. It just might be in Spokane, Boise, Portland (Maine), Burlington (Vermont), or even Grand Rapids, rather than Chicago, LA, Dallas, or New York.

Is there such a thing as similar fast food places being too close together? I thought they loved clustering. In fact, I once heard the Burger King's site selection process was just to find locations near McDonald's, because one aspect of their customer attraction strategy was "get McDonalds' overflow when their drive through line is too long."

This one of the few instances where I would support the PC waiving the activated ground floor requirement for the parking garage. Though I don't like how it looks in the rendering. There's a middle ground between non-viable retail and a blank concrete wall behind a dinky patch of grass. Even a bigger setback and some trees (like they have on the corner) would be better.

They are going to keep a significant white collar presence in BC. The new cereal and vegetarian spinoffs will remain HQed in BC, and the snack company will continue to have employees there. My understanding is that most Kellogg's execs live in Kalamazoo and its suburbs (particularly Texas Township).

Two new lights on Division? It used to be you could go from Leonard to Lyon without stopping. It was like an expressway to bypass Monroe North. Not that that was a good thing, though.

It's definitely true that holding an older strip mall, making minimal investments, and filling it with whatever will take the space is profitable. But with the housing crunch (and nearly every major suburban housing development becoming a knock-down, drag-out fight with neighbors), some of those out of town owners may start getting purchase offers they can't pass up. Redeveloping a commercial strip site isn't the ideal way to develop housing, but if the entitlements process is one quiet meeting approving your by-right development, as opposed to 12-18 months of high stakes and controversial PUD negotiations, that starts to change the calculus,

I think for the smaller sites, the idea is that a developer will see value in demolishing an aging one-story commercial building and replacing it with a brand new multi-story mixed use building. We've seen it closer to the core on Wealthy, Michigan, Bridge, and even Plainfield itself, so why not further out? Certainly there's no reason to prohibit a developer from doing that via zoning. May as well allow it and let the market decide. For North Kent Mall, I agree it would be a difficult and expensive process. Not impossible, but it would need significant financial and logistical support from the Township and buy-in from (or buy-out of) the existing business owners.

Albany sent 178 people to GR and received 0 in return, which is funny. Though I personally know someone who moved from Holland to Albany, but Holland's not in the GR metro, right? Just the Combined Statistical Area?

The Planning Commission is subject to the Open Meetings Act, and is basically prohibited from doing anything except during an open meeting, so none of them can comment until the actual meeting itself.

I noticed a lot of closures in the Chicago Loop as well. And Downtown Lansing has been absolutely gutted (Old Town and the Ballpark area are OK, but Washington Street...yikes). GR actually seems to have made it through Covid with less restaurant/nightlife damage than many places. I think the key to downtown nightlife/restaurant scenes surviving the last few years is residential populations. That's allowed Downtown Detroit to stay surprising vibrant despite GM/Rocket/Blue Cross still being largely work-from-home, and I think GR benefits from that as well.

I don't think there's a "do nothing" option. The options are new bridge or bring Wealthy down to grade. Both are expensive and disruptive, so we may as well do the one that will have long term positive benefits.

It seems like it would make sense to build a 3ish story building next to Ryerson, with approximately the same setback. Use the setback for some outdoor seating space and some landscaping/trees. Then build the parking garage immediately north of that. Put the parking entrance on Fountain next to the library's loading dock, allowing continuous active street frontage from that point to the corner, and then all the way down Ransom to Library. Build the residential so it looks like multiple towers sticking out of the garage, with some "step-back" from the edge of the garage. That will make the massing less imposing, and allow for more windows/balconies. I doubt the residential would get super tall - I'm picturing a larger version of this development in Holland: https://www.towersonriver.com/ Anyway, that's how I'd design it.

Flip side is that a large portion of the viaduct on the Lower West Side is wide enough for three lanes, it just isn't striped that way. They're also widening westbound to three lanes from Chicago Drive to ...other Chicago Drive. Seems like they're slowly eliminating impediments to going to three lanes each way.

Oh yeah, you're right. There is a tunnel north of the McNamara terminal as well as south. You can get to the Evans terminal from 94 without going through a tunnel, though.

That's a good move. It seems very different than the Hoops in the last days of the CBA. There are a lot of creative ideas out there for stadium experiences that would be much easier to pull off at Van Andel than at the DeltaPlex. Also uncreative ideas like $2 beer night, which packs Griffins games already given the ability to go from the game to the bars in a few stumbles.

I'm agnostic on a tunnel to 36th Street, but it is clear that the airport is striving for a "big city" arrivals feel. Both the canopy over the drop off area and the "ramp" from 44th to Patterson were pretty clearly built with that in mind. I generally take 44th to the Beltline when I pick up guests, because that is a better gateway than Patterson, even if going downtown. Oh, and on an unrelated note, DTW has direct freeway access (to I-94) without a tunnel. It built a tunnel and a bunch of flyover ramps to connect to a surface street (Eureka Road) and for improved, but indirect, access to southbound I-275.

I'm pretty sure it's more common than not for a city with both a hockey and a basketball team for the two teams to share an arena. Detroit pre-Little Caesars was an outlier in that regard, and the split was due to regional politics, not stadium logistics. Van Andel was originally built to host both the Hoops and the Griffins, though it's possible that recent renovations have made it less basketball-friendly.

Is it true that back in the day the roof used to leak and the ice at Grand Rapids Owls games would get mushy from the dripping water?

Not sure I love the idea of putting a gas station there. That doesn't sound like a great long-term move. BUT a quality, safe convenience store with easy parking near downtown will do extremely well.

It could see this money paying for some new railcars for the QLine in Detroit. They could use a bigger fleet to reduce headways. Or maybe for the Detroit-Ann Arbor or Brighton-Ann Arbor commuter lines, but my understanding is that railcars are not the impediment to getting those two projects off the ground. Detroit-Ann Arbor is mostly about not having an entity and long-term funding to operate the system - it literally has stations, tracks, and cars ready to go. Brighton-Ann Arbor needs track upgrades, I think. Those are the only railcars I can realistically picture being purchased in Michigan in the short term. Maybe the People Mover, but I'm pretty sure they don't make the cars the People Mover uses anymore, and the People Mover already has really short headways. Meanwhile, in GR, if we're ever going to do rail transit, I think we need to really do it. No mixed-traffic streetcars connecting tourist destinations. If we build rail, it should be grade-separated, efficient, and designed to connect people to work, school, and retail. In the meantime, it's fantastic that we're getting more busses with the Federal money. More busses in the fleet means shorter headways, which has an immediate benefit to transit riders.

Ah, a GR "big dig." Looks like MDOT's plan is likely the opposite - a consistently elevated freeway that roads and pathways can connect underneath. The Ellis lot at Weston/Cesar Chavez is going to be a very high profile site as this all moves forward. The lot north of Weston is private parking for the building at 32 Market, right? Would be cool if that could become a park/gathering space, but I suspect the tenants at 32 Market will want to keep their dedicated parking.

At least one of the draft concepts had walkways over and under 131 - the one going over would connect the Charlie's Crab site to the top of the amphitheater seating bowl. The one going under would connect along the river from the Charlie's Crab site to the waterfront side of the amphitheater, and then cross the river to connect to GVSU. Those two, plus the Market Avenue sidewalks, would provide good connectivity across 131. They are pretty expensive ideas, though, especially the river crossing and the elevated walkway over an already-elevated freeway. Edit: This is the concept I was remembering:

The only thing that will reverse that trend is water shortages in some of the dryer southern areas. Which are pretty likely, but would need to be severe to drive migration.

I think Lyon Square has to be the winner, because the others all have obvious impediments (the complexity of the rapids project, the limitations on changes to Calder Plaza due to it all being "part of the sculpture", the number of moving pieces along Market, etc). But Lyon Square is just a city-owned road/plaza that could be renovated basically at any time and for 20 years it just...hasn't happened. I'm not totally sure this is wishful thinking. Given the demand for housing, and the fact that they aren't going to want the amphitheater to open in the middle of an active construction zone, I would assume a lot of it will happen simultaneously. It won't be the same scale as Tampa, but it could be several crains in the air at once. And if it's anything like the concepts from a height perspective, it (along with the Studio Park tower) could effectively double the size of the skyline.

That is weird. Des Moines seems nice, but you'd think we'd win out on Lake Michigan alone. It could be a function of them being the "metropolis" of Iowa, maybe? And being located on I-80 so you drive through there on the way from Chicago to, say, Colorado? The demographic note that you included, though - that's a city trend, not a metro trend, correct? It's largely from the black population being gentrified out of the Wealthy Street corridor and moving to Kentwood, right? And also new immigrant groups landing in Wyoming and Kentwood rather than GR proper (except the Camelot area).