While some developers actively engage with the community especially in mixed-use, commercial, or residential projects others may rely on the municipality to manage community relations. Their level of involvement often depends on project scale, location, and public interest. Thoughts on this and what other factors are considered when working with a municipality.
Thanks for posting for the first time, welcome to the community. Working with cities, towns and local government is and can be very different.
I’ve seen dead zone projects, try to bring life to them and I’ve had responses that are “not in my backyard”, even for common sense/best use projects and other cities roll out the red carpet and not only invite development or redevelopment but actively engage in bringing it in the communities. The 2nd approach is best in terms of growth, public use, lower property taxes to the consumer as tax base is eaten up by the commercial use, and retail vacancy. Surprise, AZ uses the 2nd method and they have a 1.1% retail vacancy, compare that to many Midwest cities and their development attitude and it’s a stark contrast.
Developer market engagement is important for large projects, especially education. There are subtle things a government can do to kill a project or rile up its citizens. I remember one such project was converting a few units back into residential that were badly stiched together for an office and we wanted to get it back to its use. Building had no parking and under new parking laws needed 17 parking spots. Our use had 16 parking spots using the same calculations but the parking study was much much less. It’s previous use also was medical so that is 1000+ people per year vs the few people that would live there and their guests and their cars…all-in-all it made sense and required much less parking. However the city sent it out as you need 16 parking spots and you have 0, when in reality the use was going down from 17 required spots to 16 and you have 0. When you leave the first part out it caused a riot.