The city’s Department of Planning and Development says the city is ready to meet with stakeholders to revise the Pike/Pine update. Rebecca Hertzfeld, supervising analyst for City Council central staff, said there will be a special meeting of the land use committee within the next three weeks to discuss solutions. She said a panel of stakeholders will be invited to speak including property owners, developers, community members and small business owners.

“The goal is to hear from various stakeholders on the proposal and whether they think it could be better or would like changes,” Hertzfeld said. “I expect questions about the balance of wanting to encourage preservation of older buildings and creating [an overlay] developers can work with.”

Last week, CHS was first to report Betsy Hunter, director of real estate development for Capitol Hill Housing, and the Pike/Pine Urban Neighborhood Council took a stand against the city’s plans for zoning changes in the neighborhood, calling for a moratorium on any demolition in Pike/Pine until a solution is reached. The group said new rules being considered didn’t go far enough to “preserve the character” of the area while giving developers the environment they need to develop Pike/Pine in a responsible, high quality way.

Hunter also appeared in front of the City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods committee on Wednesday, March 25, to speak about the weaknesses in the current plan to update the Pike/Pine overlay. You can watch that session here.

Talking earlier this week with CHS, Hunter said she hoped her appearance in front of the committee would help bring city planners back to the table to help develop a new set of updates. “We worry that it really hasn’t met the goal of preserving the neighborhood’s character,” Hunter said about the updated overlay plan as currently written. “So it makes sense to get people around the table and talking about how to make this better.”

One thing that will not be solved in this process — transfer of development rights, the seeming holy grail of effective preservation-friendly development. That weighty topic, Hertzfeld said, can’t be tackled until a second phase of legislation. “One reason to do the current piece of legislation first is that it clarifies the zoning so you could use transfer of development rights in the future,” Hertzfeld said.

But given that the current phase of reworking the overlay has taken over a year, the prospects for putting a complicated TDR solution in place any time soon aren’t good.

Hertzfeld offered an optimistic 9-month estimate. “The current overlay is 10 years old and there have been many changes that need to be accounted for. In a way, this kind of clears the decks and makes everything ready to do a transfer of development rights program.”