 I was in the room last week when the Bloomington City Council voted to delay — again — on the Hopewell South Planned Unit Development. And honestly? I left frustrated. Not because I think the project is perfect. It isn’t. But because this community keeps asking the wrong question. We’re not refining anymore. We’re stalling. And there’s a cost to that. The real question sitting in front of Bloomington right now is simple: Do we want this project — and the housing and economic activity it brings — or don’t we? My father used to say, "No, is a perfectly good answer". The Risk Is Real: We Could Lose This Project Every delay, every new round of requirements, every additional condition stacked onto this petition pushes the project closer to a breaking point. At some stage, the Administration and the Redevelopment Commission may conclude it’s no longer viable. The petition gets withdrawn. The site sits. Meanwhile, the private market doesn’t wait. It keeps delivering large-scale, by-right multifamily developments — with less public input, less intentional design, and fewer community benefits. So we’d be trading a thoughtful, mixed-use, community-oriented project for more of the same. Not because the market forced our hand, but because we couldn’t align on a path forward. Hopewell has been underutilized since 2018. At what point is delay no longer a strategy — it’s just an answer? On Affordability: Good Intentions Aren’t Enough I understand the push for affordability requirements. Everyone in that room wants more accessible housing. But wanting something and engineering the right policy to achieve it are two different things. What I heard from lending professionals, Habitat personnel, and developers involved in projects like the Summit Hill District was consistent: layer in too many complex, perpetual affordability covenants, and you don’t get more affordable housing — you get no housing. The project becomes financially infeasible, supply shrinks, and costs shift to other units or phases. That’s the law of unintended consequences. These are people who live this work every day. We should be listening to them. One of my hallmarks is to understand my limitations. I know what I don't know. This frees me up to understand from the ground up and ask the right questions. By the end, I can better comprehend the situation. Often, members of the council appear to know more than they do. PUDs Are a Framework, Not a Wish List Part of the problem is that we’re asking this PUD to carry too much weight. A Planned Unit Development is designed to establish a clear land-use framework, provide flexibility to respond to market conditions, and allow a project to evolve responsibly over time. It is not designed to be a comprehensive policy document that dictates every programmatic detail — especially on something as complex and dynamic as affordability covenants. When we overload a PUD, we break it. It loses its purpose and becomes harder to implement. This process is a useful moment to ask a harder question: Is our PUD framework functioning as intended? Because right now, I don’t think it is. A larger issue is the inane UDO that requires us to use PUDS to streamline the overly complex permitting process. Perfect Is the Enemy of Progress What I observed in that council chamber was a conversation less focused on what we want — and more focused on eliminating everything we don’t. That’s not how development works. Projects don’t get sculpted into perfection. You reach a point where you move forward, or you don’t. It’s also worth remembering: this is just the South neighborhood of Hopewell. Not the whole site. There will be additional phases, additional discussions, and additional opportunities to shape what comes next. This isn’t the final version of Hopewell — it’s the starting point. Treating it like our only chance to get everything right is how we end up getting nothing at all. Process Is Eating Progress What should be a transformational redevelopment effort has become tangled in procedural, legal, and structural debate. Every new revision cycle increases costs, introduces uncertainty, and sends a signal to the market: Bloomington is a hard place to invest. PUDs are built for flexibility — not to become exercises in navigating dense, difficult-to-interpret frameworks. And yet here we are. I left yet another meeting convinced that the process has begun to outweigh progress. That’s an ongoing problem — and it’s getting old The Choice in Front of Us Hopewell South is a chance to do something meaningful — to pilot a more flexible, more responsive approach to development and deliver housing without leaning on additional subsidies. That opportunity is real. But it won’t stay on the table forever. Sooner or later, the choice becomes unavoidable: move the project forward — or risk losing it entirely. I know which side I’m on. Bloomington needs to decide which side it’s on, too.
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