Why Is Downtown Cleveland Building Small Buildings (Washington: to buy, tenant)

[Cleveland_Collector]

Originally Posted by reretarff

There's those types of tourists. And then there's the tourists who go to the cities they consider the biggest. Usually, that's in the number of sky scrapers they have. Example: Chicago and even New York.

Some idiots think "Oh that city has such a beautiful skyline and so many sky scrapers, so it must be popular! Lets go there because of how mainstream it is!"

Cleveland should at least try to attract these idiot tourists.

The last thing we need in this town is a higher concentration of "idiots." Although it would make for a great tourism slogan: "Hey, idiots!! Come for the tall buildings, stay for the pierogis!!"

In general, the areas and neighborhoods in NYC and Chicago that are attracting the most tourists are where the huge skyscrapers aren't.

[reretarff]

Originally Posted by Cleveland_Collector

The last thing we need in this town is a higher concentration of "idiots." Although it would make for a great tourism slogan: "Hey, idiots!! Come for the tall buildings, stay for the pierogis!!"

In general, the areas and neighborhoods in NYC and Chicago that are attracting the most tourists are where the huge skyscrapers aren't.

That's for the people who look closely and take time to research thriving neighborhoods, or are familiar with the area.

But, more people are going to go to a place like The Statue of Liberty or Rockefeller Center or The Empire State Building rather than a little restaurant behind an ally in Chinatown.

[bjimmy24]

We all know that tourists really only go anywhere for the skyscrapers. That's why nobody goes to Paris anymore. Paris needs to attract idiot tourists! What are they thinking?


This is one of the dumbest threads I've seen in a while.

Let's build Burj Khalifa on Public Square because some people might show up. I can't believe anyone has so little respect for their city that they want to resort to expensive and illogical gimmicks in hopes that someone might want to take a picture. It disgusts me.

[Cleverfield]

Yeah, really, Rome has no skyscrapers, neither does Venice, doesn't stop these from being some of the biggest tourist cities in the world.

[Clevelander17]

Why do people in Solon care about downtown Cleveland development? You should be more worried about bringing Rockne's back to "downtown" Solon.

[SquareBetterThanAll]

I think a lot the overly negative responses are in response to who posted the question and not the topic at hand.

In my opinion it is 100% supply and demand. Cleveland doesn't have any restrictive zoning in that regard and there is no other outside push to limit the size of buildings. Actually, while the skyline isn't bad, Cleveland's skyline isn't particularly impressive compared to other midsize cities.

There just isn't a need for large amounts of additional office space. Even the large projects that have been built are just responses to existing tenants looking for new class A space (like Flats East Bank) and not because there is an overall demand for more office space.

The comments about skyscrapers being good for tourism and other things like that aren't going to make a difference, really, as anyone that does care about those sorts of things isn't going to build one they aren't going to use themselves (like local government) and anyone that is going to build one doesn't care about tourists (like developers, who only care about ROI) or companies (who only care about utility or, maybe, vanity of the company itself).

The reality of it is developers are only going to build buildings when there is a demand and we don't have the economic growth in the region to support anything like that. The best we can hope for is that local businesspeople start getting motivated to move Downtown from the suburbs, much like Dan Gilbert has done in Detroit. I think he's up to having moved 7.500 of his employees to Downtown Detroit and renovated like 7 or 8 buildings to do so so far. Unfortunately I don't see Progressive or others like that making that sort of move anytime soon.

[ehfp]

I think some of the negativity also might be because this has been a big part of the Cleveland Development Discussions thread over the last week or so - might have been a little topic fatigue.

[Clevelander17]

Originally Posted by ehfp

I think some of the negativity also might be because this has been a big part of the Cleveland Development Discussions thread over the last week or so - might have been a little topic fatigue.

My response is based on my apathy for a discussion started by someone whose actions (moving to a sprawlburb and defending it vigorously) betray his feigned concern for what's going on in the urban core.

[reretarff]

Originally Posted by bjimmy24

We all know that tourists really only go anywhere for the skyscrapers. That's why nobody goes to Paris anymore. Paris needs to attract idiot tourists! What are they thinking?


This is one of the dumbest threads I've seen in a while.

Let's build Burj Khalifa on Public Square because some people might show up. I can't believe anyone has so little respect for their city that they want to resort to expensive and illogical gimmicks in hopes that someone might want to take a picture. It disgusts me.

It's not that I don't care. But most people who don't pay attention to detail go to bigger cities with more tourists attractions. As a Clevelander, I try to find the smaller, best kept secret type places to go on a weekend. But, even though someone who lives in Cleveland might know of a good family owned restaurant that's not all over Google or some other travel website, most tourists don't know if any better place to go then the most mainstream places.

[reretarff]

Originally Posted by Cleverfield

Yeah, really, Rome has no skyscrapers, neither does Venice, doesn't stop these from being some of the biggest tourist cities in the world.

That's completely different. They are old European cities with some of the best restaurants in the world. But unfortunately, American cities like Cleveland don't have that quality because they are so new and get more American tourists than foreign tourists.