[combusean]

The City doesn't solely rely on "TPT" (i'm assuming that means transaction privilege tax) but like 3 or 4 categories and scored appropriately. There is a slight issue of building to the RFP that gave us the Central Station proposal rather than the more interesting Davis proposal, but the City doesn't and shouldn't consider visual impact because it's entirely subjective. Some jagoff could just as easily think 500' on that parcel could have been too tall.

And Central Station is getting BUILT, unlike Davis which has sent a number of pie-in-the-sky renderings for *unserious* projects. If I seem to recall the Davis proposal hardly considered the RFP to begin with and didn't propose some key element(s) like student housing the City was really wanting to see on that lot.

The Central and Adams lot has always been challenged by its small size. Period. It is incredibly difficult to get a taller project to pencil out there. If the city just sold it off, it would have languished and horse traded and eventually maybe something like Cambria would have developed there. I think most people would prefer ~225' than seven or eight stories.

The RFP process is imperfect but it's about as good as we can get. Sure, it can be tweaked to ensure performance guarantees but that adds uncertainty to projects that should be shoe-ins. The slow growth of RFP projects is likely because of two reasons: nothing given away for free is valuable, and, the institutional investors that move on these projects have probably on the order of five year timelines anyway and that's probably before being informed by local market conditions that they might not be up to speed on like Medistar who was both new to Phoenix and dicked around on the programming for the project.

Downtown's history of land banking and over entitling land should be reason enough to be more judicious with the lots the city does have, especially when these parcels are off the beaten path. Grace Court has hardly filled up in 20 years because someone grossly overplayed their hand.