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Matchetes
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Posts posted by Matchetes
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Man that's a bitter pill. I kept track of this over the years but I've gradually lost faith. If something happens one day it will be a pleasant surprise but I'm expecting the river to run dry before the rapids are restored
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19 minutes ago, GRDadof3 said:
Yeah, I was at the Chamber the other day (in the Calder Plaza building) and walked by that parking lot by 5/3 Bank building. What a waste of prime real estate right in the core. That site is made for a 30 - 40 story tower. 500 footer!
Any chance something could be built there in the future? Is there some major structural problem in the way?
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I laugh every time I read the acronym in a newspaper. Did they have no one on staff around to point out that BAMF is a very well known slang acronym?
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At long last some public movement on this. There will be a period of public comment on this starting Nov 10th. It's to asses the cultural and historical legacy of the dams which is......okay sure I guess they're historical in the sense that they were built in the past. So not very exciting, but it is at least something public
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25 minutes ago, MJLO said:
Official 2020 census numbers are out. Though I can't find any easy to convert data sets so it's going to take a couple days to build some stuff to report. A few quick notes from what I see. Most of the states underestimates from 2020 happened in SE Michigan/Detroit metro. GR metro was underestimated from the 2020 numbers by about 6,000 so the official total is 1,087,592. Most of those underestimates came in suburban areas, Ottawa, Montcalm, and Ionia counties. Kent County was shorted a little but was largely accurate. Here's the quickfacts data for those counties. Note you have to look at the 4th row down to see the 2020 numbers. The first bolded row is still the 2019 estimates.
Grand Rapids city was overestimated by a couple thousand people, official numbers come in just below 199k people. That official 200k number continues to allude GR. Wyoming officially surpassed Kalamazoo in population. Kzoo was surprisingly overestimated and came in at 73,598 for official 2020 numbers. Wyoming is 76,501. Kentwood was significantly underestimated coming in at 54,304 an 11.5% jump in growth. I had been saying that the 2019 and 2020 estimates were off in both Kentwood and Wyoming. They both have large immigrant populations and logic tracked a slow down in growth in more diverse municipalities over the last couple years of the decade. I think this is largely going to prove true across the board. The table for select cities below. More to come
Ooofff coming in just under 200K. That's tragic. I don't know what bragging rights come from being a 200K city but I know that I want them.
The data will be released in a more manageable format on 8/16 to be used for redistricting purposes, though i think the most user friendly version is coming in September. You may just want to wait until Monday before spending hours with the data sets
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I think the windmills dotting the landscape are actually really cool. I live in the Detroit area now (I went to GVSU for school) and have at times deliberately driven up 127 to get up north even though 75 would be quicker just so that I could drive through the windmills north of Lansing. It's nice to see actual attempts at solving the climate crisis instead of endlessly talking about it.
Besides, we're reaching the point that renewable energy is cheaper than coal and gas. Capitalism will see this through even if the Gov't won't. You can't stop the changes that are coming anymore than stablemen could stop the automobile
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28 minutes ago, arcturus said:The public attack on police thanks in part to 'defund' has emboldened criminals IMO and the silence may be simply because it doesn't fit today's media narrative but hey, we'll agree to disagree.
This is a forum about development in North Monroe and you've chosen to throw in what is arguably the most contentious civic issue of our time into the mix. How do you think that will go? We could just as easily talk about how horrifying it is that they had such easy access to guns in the first place. Debating it here will only raise hackles and hurt feelings. Nothing more
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1 hour ago, Raildude's dad said:
My first reaction is bigger is not better. Beaumont has had a bit of bad press unlike Spectrum which had pretty good press through the pandemic and before. I'll still make my same comment Spectrum appears to a bit lost in direction. They have a announced more than one plan that didn't materialize. Merging your medical system with another to enhance your health insurance arm rubs me the wrong way. Work on making your west Michigan facilities and staff the best there is.
That’s what frustrates me. Isn’t providing quality care to West Michigan purpose enough? Is this about improving healthcare and achieving economies of scale, or is this about the strange American compulsion to always pursue growth?
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1 hour ago, walker said:
Interesting choice of words considering the history of Dr. Beaumont, the hospital chain's namesake:
Ha! I knew that story but didn't even think of it while writing the comment. Maybe my subconscious was guiding me
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Probably not the best long term place for this topic, but it was just announced that Spectrum and Beaumont are planning on merging to form Michigan's largest healthcare system with the intention of having two headquarters in Grand Rapids and Southfield. My gut reaction to this is concern. Beaumont's reputation has been declining since it began it's wave of merges a few years ago.
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On 6/15/2021 at 12:16 PM, GR8scott said:
lol the grandville has its back to the river, then mows down all the trees except the ones right on the river and wedeges a parking ramp then a surface parking lot next to it, at least the tx one has a dock and a couple of buildings to embrace the waterfront there
To be fair, that's a pond that it's up against, not the river. The highway sits between the caste and the river
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A new study from Rueters showing that 40% of job growth went to 20 superstar cities. Detroit and Grand Rapids were the only superstar cities of the ‘rust belt’ interior
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2 hours ago, GRDadof3 said:
I kind of thought the jobs market might cool off a tad, but that doesn't appear to be happening (and anecdotally I read a lot more about companies hiring and expanding than layoffs).
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/SMU26243400000000001?data_tool=XGtable
20,000 more jobs than this time last year, or a 3.8% bump year-over-year, to 543,000 non-farm workers empoyed. My guess is that will push the umemployment rate locally into the 2's percentage wise.
Other peer MSA's:
Raleigh, NC: 1.5% annual growth rate, now within 30,000 workers of GR MSA at 577,000 workers
Rochester, NY: 1.1%, 540,000
Omaha: 1.8%, 498,000
Salt Lake City: 3.2%, 686,000 (on a very similar track as GR)
Richmond, VA: 1.0%, 641,000
Providence: 1.5%, 584,000
Des Moines - West Des Moines: 2.9%, 358,000 (not sure it's really a peer anymore)
Jacksonville, FL, 2.0%, 641,000
Hartford, CT, 1.6%, 581,000
Birmingam, AL 0.9%, 521,000
What's interesting is that if you dig a little deeper into the numbers, the GR metro area initially peaked in Nov, 2000. It took a slump and then a decades long job stagnation, followed by the great recession. It wasn't until October 2014 that GR hit a new peak. The exciting things is that it looks like we're growing at a 90's like clip again!
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The bottom section does seem pretty bland, but i like the overall concept. Hopefully the bottom will become more interesting as it goes through revisions
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GR_Urbanist is right. The pie in the sky stuff is really irritating after awhile. If streetcars spur so much economic development, why not build one out in a cornfield somewhere?
All of this public/mass transit discussion is grating, because each and every time, no one talks about the comparative cost of a ride on the shiny new toy. That cost, per trip, is typically more than it costs to take a decent used vehicle, including the cost of gasoline, insurance, and depreciation on the vehicle. I did the analysis here one upon a time, and so far as I can recall, no one could really dispute it. If anyone actually had to pay what it actually costs to ride the bus, the bus would be virtually empty.
If you want to "spur economic development" along a bus route like the much-vaunted Silver Line, it would be cheaper and more efficient to use the cash to build buildings and rent them out at below market rates for two decades.
Let's call a spade a spade: Public transportation in Grand Rapids at its core is typically a redistribution program which taxes primarily middle class property owners and tax payers and generally transfers it to the poor because, in Grand Rapids at least, that's who rides on the stinky, slow buses. That, and college students. Whether you're okay with inefficient redistribution programs is one thing. Gussying that up in the language of "economic development" and "investment" is another, and is absolutely ridiculous.
You're wrong about investing in public transportation as being merely an income redistribution program, but so what if it is? I'm no fan of European style cradle to the grave benefits but I do think everyone should have as fair a shot as possible at making it in life. Part of that is to have adequate access to transportation and education. I'll gladly give away some of my middle class income for those two causes, I don't think people should have lost before they even began.
If you can give me a reasonable scenario where a poor person in Grand Rapids who genuinely wants to make it to their new job and better their lot but this job is 10 miles away and they have no reliable access to a car gets there without using the bus, than maybe I'll rethink my stance. Besides, even if they do get a car and drive, it's not like the roads they use are any less tax payer supported
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Hello, a mostly lurker here.
While I won't say anything specifically about this plan except that I have very mixed feeling about it, I will say this - Infrastructural can and is used to enable and shape development patterns rather than directly respond to a need. American suburbs exploded in response to the construction of the freeway system and, while there was certainly a desire to move out of the densely populated inner cities at the time, the spacial development of the burbs more often than not followed the layout of the freeway system and not the other way around.
China's amazing economic development over the last 20 years has been in large part to an infrastructure led investment. The government builds the infrastructure for a city that doesn't exist, and then the city and industry develop in response to the infrastructure. When neighborhoods in NYC and other cities began to redevelop many of the first ones to do so were the ones with easy access to mass transit. The neighborhood became hot and desirable because of (among many many other things) its access to mass transit, not the other way around.
Revitalizing an urban area faces a Catch-22. People would be willing to move to an urban center if it had certain amenities, but those amenities won't exist if enough people don't live there. Just look at how difficult it is to get a grocery store downtown. Sometimes someone needs to bite the bullet and go for it.
Don't read to much into those examples, I actually think this would be a bad idea at the moment. Big expensive projects like this can just as easily become white elephants. This was just a rather wordy way of saying that you need to keep in mind the potential alongside the current need when debating a project such as this.
Hope this all made sense
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Population Growth
in Grand Rapids
Posted
Interesting graphic. West Michigan is an island of blue in a sea of orange along with other rust belt standouts Columbus, Indianapolis, and Madison. The growth in the south, particularly Florida and Texas, is just incredible.