A familiar feeling coursed through Tucson’s business community last week: outrage at the city government for blocking a development.
Last week’s victim wasn’t a builder of student housing, or a big-box retailer, though. It was a proposed new fast-food restaurant.
Whether McDonald’s should have had a chance to build a new restaurant on the northeast corner of South Alvernon Way and East 22nd Street could say a great deal about one of the top questions in Tucson: Are we moving beyond strident NIMBYism into an era more open to economic activity?
I have had the sense during these years of recovery from the recession that Tucson is learning to resolve neighborhood conflicts, those ritualized disputes in which somebody proposes a development, and neighbors or historic preservationists rise up to kill it.
Despite neighborhood opposition, the new student-housing towers at Main Gate were built, after all. And there is a small Wal-Mart at El Con Mall, almost 16 years after a big-box ordinance was passed to prevent a Wal-Mart superstore there.
But was I naive to think we’ve learned?
Cortlandt Chalfandt appears to think so. He was a key player in the McDonald’s development, which was to be heard by the City Council on Tuesday. When McDonald’s withdrew its request before the hearing, in part due to neighborhood opposition, Chalfandt wrote a scathing letter to the mayor and council that has been circulating in Tucson.
It begins: “After 20 years of loyal commitment to Tucson’s economic development, charitable and social causes, I moved to Austin, Texas, in December. I made that move not because I wanted to, but rather because it has become too difficult to make a living in Tucson. Too few opportunities, too much opposition and too little leadership.”
After the McDonald’s experience, he writes, “It seems that my decision to move to Austin was the right decision to make.”
Chalfandt, who did not return my calls seeking additional comment, held the ground lease for the property where McDonald’s was planning to build. Right now, the corner is home to a boarded-up Shell station. A key argument for the new McDonald’s was that it would replace that blight.
However, this McDonald’s was simply going to replace the existing one a half-mile down East 22nd Street, at South Randolph Way. Residents of that neighborhood, Julia Keen, opposed the plan because they feared the McDonald’s, once closed, would become a blighted property.
Worse for the new site, McDonald’s planned to buy a house on East Camino de Palmas, the residential street one block north of East 22nd Street, to make room for parking. That was the main reason for the rezoning request that gave neighbors leverage. In short, those living nearby didn’t want a McDonald’s bordering their property, even with concessions the company made such as a decorative 8-foot wall and landscaping.
The Darko family, whose house would have been next door to the McDonald’s parking lot, led the opposition.
“What about the $60,000 in value my parents’ home would lose?” Tim Darko said when I visited the home Friday. “Everyone’s house would depreciate immediately.”
I’m skeptical of those dire predictions, and opinions in the neighborhood were mixed: San Gabriel Neighborhood Association President Jerry Ledingham supported the plan. But the key point is that McDonald’s put itself in a position of needing rezoning, and therefore neighborhood support, by trying to re-zone residential property.
Chalfandt had a further complaint, which was that city planners in December recommended approving the rezoning, before the zoning examiner held a hearing, considered neighborhood complaints and recommended against it in February. Then, before the scheduled council vote last week, city staff recommended against the rezoning as well. That change cost the project’s backers $250,000, he said.
“The single-biggest reason for McDonald’s withdrawal is the inexplicable and unprecedented last-minute reversal by your planning department,” he wrote.
Council member Steve Kozachik, who represents the area and was criticized by Chalfandt, seemed unfazed by the outcome.
“This isn’t Tesla,” Kozachik told me, referring to the electric-car maker whose battery factory Tucson tried to land last year. “This is McDonald’s moving from one location to another.”
It’s true that referring to this project as “economic development” would be a stretch. However, a city with a struggling economy and high poverty can’t afford to shrug off employers.
Kozachik and others in business and government told me the city has improved at resolving neighborhood development conflicts by getting the sides together, forging compromises and moving forward. One example he noted was the planned Natural Grocers at Broadway Village, the historic shopping center at East Broadway and South Country Club Road.
The grocery store plan is going ahead, but the experience landlord Craig Finfrock described was not smooth. To recruit Natural Grocers, Finfrock proposed demolishing an adjacent property that his company also owns, the Americana Apartments, and replacing it with a parking lot.
A negotiation with neighbors, historic preservationists and the city ensued, Finfrock said. To assure the rezoning needed for the added parking, his company gave up two building pads and agreed to allow Broadway Village a new historic designation. The company also promised to give the local neighborhood association $10,000 to help it win historic designation, he said.
“That was a fairly significant concession on our part to get what should have been a no-brainer,” Finfrock said. “It was a two-year process, $100,000 and six neighborhood meetings to do this. I think the neighborhood activists in Tucson are out of control.”
Developer Thom Warne told me he has seen some progress in taking the edge off the city’s NIMBYism, but it still takes a lot of talking and listening to get things done. He worked with neighborhood representatives on rezoning a large “infill incentive district,” passed by the council earlier this year to encourage development in areas near downtown.
And he is moving toward redeveloping the property on the southwest corner of East Broadway and Rosemont. In 2005, neighbors succeeded in killing a proposed Wal-Mart there. This time, they like Warne’s inclusive approach.
“This is a whole different experience,” neighbor Kitty Reeve told me. “It’s really been going well because there’s been so much interaction between the (neighborhood association) board and the architect and the developer.”
Even notoriously neighborhood-oriented council member Karin Uhlich insists the city gets it.
“I’ve said this probably 10 times in the last six months: The fundamental question we have to ask, especially after such a horrible downturn in the economy, is ‘If not this, then what?’ ”
“Investment is important to everybody,” she said. “We need people to invest in the urban core of the city. We don’t forget it, because we’ve suffered as a result of this economy.”
So Tucson remains a place where to move a contested development forward, business people have to forge a compromise with neighbors. If not, and if the development isn’t particularly prized, it will likely suffer the fate of the McDonald’s. Even more interesting projects, like the grocery store, still require too much time, talk, and money to move forward.
But the city’s decision on the McDonald’s is defensible and doesn’t spell doom in a city where good projects are getting done — eventually.
