I live in an east side suburb and recently noticed at least one person with a bunch of bags/sacks sleeping at an RTA bus stop on multiple occasions. I've lived here since 2016 and this is the first time I've seen homeless in this part of town. Just today I saw on facebook some person complaining about the homeless at bus stops around here, and I was wondering what I could do to help them.

Obviously, I can buy them food or give them some money, but I'm more worried about their lack of shelter and exposure to snobby suburbanites who don't want to see them around as well as shitty suburban cops.

Does anyone know of resources I could give them to find shelter nearby?

In a legal filing, an attorney for the landlord wrote that remarks Scott made in a TV interview and an unrelated court hearing are evidence of bias against his client. In the hearing, Scott accused a pair of Shaker Square landlords – both based in New York City – of having “incestuous” business connections with one another.

This could be a massive boon to the city. Fingers crossed it actually comes to fruition!

I fucking hate these people

In recent years, the Cuyahoga County court system has drastically cut its use of cash bail. That means fewer people sit in jail while awaiting trial.

The shift followed calls to dismantle a bail process that created a two-tier system: one for those who could pay for their freedom and one for those who could not. Local and national reports showed those who could not were most often poor or Black.

The Marshall Project reviewed the bail decisions Cuyahoga County judges made in nearly 70,000 felony cases filed between 2016 and 2022 to understand how their bail practices had changed. Overall, judges are now setting cash bail in felony cases far less frequently and are more often setting personal bonds — which don’t require payment for release.

Check the link for the whole story. There's been positive changes, but nothing institutional to ensure they keep going.

I havent been following this closely but I wanted to see if any of the Clevelanders have an opinion.

Photos taken at Forest City Yacht Club

Then came the pandemic. Since then, it seems no matter what Mims does, she can’t attract workers. She’s tried job listing websites. Word of mouth. A sign in the window of the center in the Southgate USA strip mall. None have brought the candidates she needs to reopen three classrooms closed since the early days of the pandemic. The center has a long waitlist of families, some waiting months for spots to open.

What about higher pay?

There are nearly 20% fewer child care slots available in Northeast Ohio than there were in January 2020, even though demand hasn’t decreased. This finding comes from a survey of child care providers by Cleveland-based Starting Point, a nonprofit focused on child and youth issues. Overall capacity is mainly down because of 2,500 vacant child care jobs, most of which were filled before Ohio officially entered the pandemic in March 2020. The vacancies mean providers have had to waitlist or turn away families.

This is perhaps the longest and most severe child care staffing shortage ever in Greater Cleveland, according to everyone Sigal Cleveland interviewed for this article. They range from workers to people who have studied the child care field for years. The staffing shortage was also fueled by vacancies created when Baby Boomers and older Gen Xers, who were a sizable percentage of employees at many Greater Cleveland child care centers, left during the early days of the pandemic.

“We built this quality system based on wages that weren’t that competitive,” said Starting Point’s President and CEO Nancy Mendez. “It wasn’t a huge issue.Then COVID came and what it did was definitely expose the weakness in having a low-wage child care system. You have sectors, like restaurants and customer service, offering salaries of $20 and above. This is devastating the early child care system.”

More at the link.

Fuck this

Early this year, I created an RTA expansion map proposal that I shared to Reddit and Mastodon. I got a lot of feedback, and in the mean time I've learned more about modern rail construction in the US and analyzed the city more closely. I've put together a new proposal that starts fresh, coming to a lot of the same conclusions but also doing some things very differently. I want to break down each section here and get some input to keep improving it.

Red Line Expansion West First, expanding Cleveland's flagship rail service and busiest transit line. On the west side, I propose the addition of two new stations, one infill and one extension. After Hopkins, I suggest extending a fresh stretch of line. 2 miles of this would run on current rail, and then it would convert to a streetcar for another half mile down Front Street to connect to central Berea and BW's campus. This touches on a few themes I'll come back to: First, taking advantage of the incoming rolling stock's ability to seamlessly shift from mixed traffic to street level to mixed traffic. Second, bringing educational institutions into the rail network. Additionally, I'm proposing an infill station at W.43rd, because the gap between the W. 25th and W. 65th stations is way too huge.

Red Line Expansion East On the east side, I'm suggesting a much more substantial expansion of the Red Line. I suggest that, after Stokes, it continue on that rail spur, with a station at Shaw (close to the high school), then turning up 152nd. Here, it should be new, elevated rail. There are a number of points in this where I suggest the tall but valuable task of fresh elevated rail lines. That would run along 152nd (with stops at St. Clair [Colinwood HS gets service here] and Cardinal) before turning onto Waterloo, hitting the arts district, and then turning back north somewhere between 156th and 164th to run to Euclid Beach Park. Collinwood, especially North Collinwood, is very disconnected from the city in terms of transit. There's also very little transit service to the lake. This seeks to remedy all that.

Waterfont Loop When the Waterfront line was originally built in the 90's, it was supposed to turn back south through downtown and form a loop. I say, let's finish that loop. I suggest going down E. 18th. I know that might seem a little odd, but it neatly hits Playhouse Square and CSU. Then, turn it onto Prospect to hit the Q and the Progressive before taking it down into Tower City. The whole additional stretch here is elevated. I'm also separating this out more cleanly from the Blue/Green Lines and making it definitively its own thing. I see it operating two ways: One, with a regular, dedicated looping service. Second, taking advantage of interoperability to allow any other line hitting TC to add a loop through downtown on some service. For example, if the Red Line were running 6 times an hour, one or two of those would additionally run the whole downtown loop. You could get very, very high frequency on this loop by combining these two options, or even with just the second.

Green Line Expansion West It's time to make the Detroit Superior Bridge a subway bridge again. Currently, there are two inaccessible stations at either end of the bridge, and then a tunnel that runs along Detroit to W. 28th. I suggest connecting Tower City's lines underground to the bridge, renovating both bridge terminal stations, and, where the tunnel ends, bringing the line up out of the ground onto new elevated construction. There, it runs above Detroit until connecting into Cudell. Here we hit another theme of my proposal: lines connect far outside of Tower City. This provides a great deal of resiliency to the network as a whole. There's also an alternative option where, instead of going above Detroit, the line turns north immediately after the bridge to hit Whiskey Island and Edgewater, then connecting into Cudell. This would use current rail ROW that could either be taken from NS or built above with elevated rail. Either way, after Cudell, this continues on or over that rail through Lakewood, stopping near the edge with Rocky River. It could feasibly go over the river as well, but I'm only extending to inner ring suburbs here. Lakewood service seems absolutely mandatory to me given its density and linearity.

Purple Line This is the first of two proposed completely new lines. It comes off the Waterfront line/loop as a spur. It carries briefly along established rail ROW moving above St. Clair as elevated rail at E. 36th, by Tyler Village. It then runs entirely over St. Clair, stopping every half mile to a mile, until connecting to the Red Line's new St. Clair - W. 152nd station. Again, I'm focusing here on satellite redundancy, hitting underserved areas, and providing good access for students - this line connects to four separate high schools. Taking advantage of interoperability, these trains could continue north onto the Red Line's lakeward extension. This line also serves Asiatown, which is due for rail connection.

Yellow Line After Lakewood, Cleveland Heights is the most densely populated city in the state. It's a traditional street car suburb squeezed between RTA's current rail lines. I propose here a mostly street-running streetcar that would link Red, Green, and Blue lines. It hits CH's main cultural institutions, provides further connections for East Cleveland, and brings rail into underconnected Southeast Cleveland. Where possible, I'd be happy to see this as elevated rail, but I think this is one of the few areas where a streetcar is appropriate (even if it's in mixed traffic for most of its time on Lee). This hits CH and SH high schools. It unlocks a huge variety of interoperability options: direct connections to downtown, a variety of looping east side services, massive system redundancy, etc.

So, that's my proposal. I think it's pretty good! Two new elevated rail lines, large elevated extensions of current routes, some streetcar service, tons of redundancy and interoperability, and expanded coverage that focuses on dense and/or underserved areas. I know this leaves the immediate south of the city with relatively little service, but I think this ultimately provides more value than southern lines. What's your input? What works, what doesn't? Is there any way that any portion of this is at all feasible, or am I living in a realm of pure fantasy?

I got caught up in this nonsense. Hopefully, we can get ODOT to pay out for the damage.

Woooooo

Big industrial consolidation (this time it's definitely different than the gilded age, though, pinky promise) may create a new skyscraper downtown?

As a member of FNB Cleveland I wanted to encourage other Clevelanders to donate if you can.