Khorasaurus1

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).

I almost put 'the first half of 2021", which, you're right, would have been more accurate.

Honestly, Occam's Razor suggests that a real estate company has decided to invest in real estate, but is being as hand's off as possible on the management side. And that the CAA sees an opportunity to add a venue to its portfolio, which can now be more effectively used when pitching potential conventions. There might be more to unpack, but it's also possible that it's as simple as that. Now what this means for the BOB, I'm not sure. There has to be more to that story, given that Gilmore closed it in advance of the sale - which would indicate that the potential buyer was planning significant changes.

That's quite the article, because you could literally just change the names and places to Grand Rapids people and places and it would ring completely true. Though Spokane does seem to be a year or two ahead of us in that trend. I'm not honestly sure what the solution is. I guess the answer is "build more housing", but that takes time, even without NIMBY opposition or more legitimate concerns like environmental/farmland preservation and gentrification. One potential angle of attack is converting underused office space to housing. But that takes time, too.

There are a number of factors that go into the unusual population trends seen in those estimates. There were more deaths than usual in 2020 and 21, not just from Covid, but also from Covid-adjacent things like overfilled hospitals, suicide, etc. Sad stuff, but it shows up in demographics like this. There was almost no immigration in 2020 and 21. Borders were closed. The decennial census asks people where they are living as of April 1. I assume the American Community Survey form does the same? So it's going to capture people living at cottages and lake houses, even if they don't plan to move their permanently. I'm not sure covid restrictions were as big a factor in people moving to Florida as weather. If you don't have to commute, but you also can't go to bars/concerts/sporting events, you may as well be somewhere warm. That said, there definitely is a trend of people with resources leaving more densely populated places to places where there is space and natural beauty. When you can work from anywhere, why not live in Northern Michigan rather than suburban Chicago? I think GR and West Michigan are poised to benefit from this trend, though. We offer urban amenities without the hassles of big cities - you can sell a place in Chicago and net enough to buy a condo in downtown GR and a place on a lake, and get from one to the other in 20 minutes. Or buy a bigger, newer home in Forest Hills, send your kids to good public schools, and put the difference in cost of living into the college fund. Or be 5 minutes from Lake Michigan, 10 minutes from Holland, 30 minutes from Grand Rapids, and 2.5 hours from the Loop. We just offer a lot to people who are used to overpaying and overcommuting, and now realize they don't have to do those things anymore. I wonder if other parts of Michigan will benefit similarly. Kalamazoo is well positioned for sure. I wonder if this could be the saving grace for the Bay Region communities. I don't know what to think of Detroit. Can it position itself as "big city with more space and less cost"? Or is it going to be a "worst of all worlds" situation - especially if Downtown Detroit doesn't bounce back from losing a huge chunk of its office employment, hotel occupancy, and gaming/convention/sports business for 18+ months.

Why is it tax exempt? It's an office building, not a medical facility. Is everything Spectrum owns tax exempt? I think the brownfield incentives are a good idea, and that program has been extremely successful in helping clean up urban sites and get them redeveloped. But a full tax exemption seems like overkill. I guess the city will collect income taxes off the employees there...

EGR's had that slogan for at least 30 years, if not longer. Given the steps EGR has taken to remove the superficial trappings of a being a closed-off priviledged enclave (renaming Franklin/MLK, repealing their panhandling ordinance), I wouldn't be surprised if that slogan gets removed at some point. Obviously, the steps to not actually being a closed-off priviledged enclave are much more fraught. And I say that as a resident and EGRHS grad.

I think joe was talking about the Gracewil development in Alpine Township.