According to the IBJ Property Lines blog:
The Department of Metropolitan Development’s division of planning on Thursday was set to hear Browning’s request for a variance to allow for an 85-foot tall building and a 35,000-square-foot grocery store earmarked for a Whole Foods. That request has been continued until July 11 while Browning makes changes to the design. Jamie Browning said the developer will reduce the height of the building to about 70 feet (35 feet is permitted) in addition to the floor space for the grocery. Browning said he didn’t know how much smaller the space might be but is confident the developer can still attract a national retailer. Under city zoning guidelines for the area, just 8,000 square feet is permitted for any single commercial use. Browning will also modify the design to make it look more residential and less contemporary. “We’re trying to be accommodative to what people are asking us to do,” Jamie Browning told Property Lines.To see the rest of the story, click here.
10 comments:
Getting the community upset about a development is a standard tactic of developers?
TIF dollars are shifted / diverted from the normal expenses of government (police, fire, etc.) to service the incurred bond debt (typically 25 yrs).
Assessments then "trend" toward the new or Legoland accelerated, subsidized "standard," whereby TIF area taxes increase, depriving the area of needed public safety dollars which later result in bureau-cries for more tax dollars to cover those formerly covered costs & up the rocket goes; til it runs outa fuel & falls back to economic earth.
TIF schemes deprive legitimate development (that free market thang) of oxygen, to naturally / organically progress. Government's not a business, it's not a developer of any kind- it's an obstacle to those who know how.
The referee has a responsibility to objectively monitor, not arrogantly or officiously insert themselves in the free market.
Whole Foods is being irrefutably selected as a winner at the expense of other, legitimate, free market
business.
Where again, exactly, does the party of small government exist? TIFS have become Kiosks of corruption, wherein the uninformed consent of those whose income and / or property are pledged or collateralized, is a real, SEC quality, legal problem, when measured in terms of disclosure standards, etc.
Goodneighborsam,
To get a community to accept an unpopular development by proposing something even more outrageous and then cutting back to what was originally intended, is most certainly a tactic of many developers.
I do not like or agree with the comments on IBJ. Much too pro-developer and almost always present the false dichotomy of an abandoned Shell station verses a new shiny strip mall. Some of the other arguments are equally bad, 88 apartments replacing how many leading into some sort of cheap affordable housing for those young urban professionals, that this use of $5 million in TIF is the only way BR will be developed, etc.
I had no idea of the level of this conspiracy. Iamgine trying to bait us into something we might like by suggesting something we didn't like, and doing it by pretending to listen to us. Well I, for one, don't plan to stand still for that sort of rubbish. In the future, I'm adopting a firm policy of never, ever, liking anything, no matter how much I like it. Let them try to get around that one.
I'd bet Whole Foods backed out because of the bad publicity. To cover their arses,Browning is just saying they are trying to make the dvelopment more acceptable to the neighbors.
Gees Pat, just listen to Paul. It;s a fiendish conspiracy, and you have to sit back and watch all the plot twists as it unfolds.
Good Neighbors AM: The pretense of feigned naivete is a gateway drug of corruption.
Goodneighborsam also probably believes there was nothing wrong with what they were, allegedly, doing at the Land Bank.
All part of the same massive conspiracy - the NFP's were secretly assembling the parcels as a front for developers who were then going to propose a series of 40 story strip club/cricket fields that would later be swapped out for more Whole Foods stores to the terrified neighbors.
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