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Mayor Fenty has asked for direction from Ward 2 Councilmember Evans; Mr Evans suggests that he will let the local community decide whether a current proposal should permitted to go forward with an "affordable" (but not low income) rental residential building for Parcel 42 this year, or whether the District should wait until the economy turns around.

Update: Housing complex has got input from leaders last week here.

“Those [affordability] requirements were going to relaxed in order to get the project built,” said Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans at [the May 25 CCCA] meeting.

Importantly for the developer, it’s also now a matter-of-right development instead of a planned unit development, which shaves months and thousands of dollars off the approval process. And importantly for the District, the project would now require only $6.5 million in subsidies.

But it’s not good enough for the people who fought for years to get the bigger project. ANC 2C Commissioner Alex Padro tells Housing Complex that community leaders have unanimously declined to support the new plan.

“It really is such a dramatic scaling back from the original project,” he says, “that most of the community leaders feel comfortable waiting another decade if necessary for the market to bring us the kind of project that we thought we were going to get.”

In 2007, The Washington Business Journal noted that Commissioner Padro took a different stance on the project:

Alex Padro, an advisory neighborhood commissioner who preferred the design and more market-rate residences of a competing project, expressed disappointment with the city's choice of Parcel 42 Partners, calling its design a repeat of "the affordable housing built in the 1970s and 1980s that was so terribly unattractive."

Parcel 42, northeast corner of 7th & R Streets NW, north of Rhode Island Avenue