That's close timing, since the interim development controls the council passed to keep the developer from breaking ground during the negotiations expire the same day. An ancillary item sponsored by Council Members Raul Alvarez and Danny Thomas would extend those controls another year or so, giving everyone involved a bit more breathing room. With Bennett on the agenda, it's a good bet that at least a few angry Eastsiders will show up to protest that allowing upscale commercial uses and pricey townhouses to be built on their side of the highway is an open invitation to big developers to swarm in and throw longtime, low-income residents out on their duffs. With retail property, office buildings, and expensive housing come increased property taxes, rising rents, yuppies, and everything else that drives the old-timers out of the area. Or so the worriers believe.
Nobody has too clear an idea what gentrification is, or how it works, or when and how it happens.
City staff did some research and prepared a memo on the subject a few years ago, which has languished in obscurity ever since. Another motion by Thomas proposes to convene a Gentrification Task Force that would use that memo as a starting place to look at just those questions. Another item that could keep the council in its chambers late this week is the question of how to spend the money that would have gone to pay for light rail. Following rail's narrow defeat at the polls in November, Capital Metro voted to return the quarter-cent in sales tax they had been setting aside for rail projects. The public gets their say again in a public hearing before the council.