New housing, even new luxury housing, increases the pool of availability properties and brings down the prices for everyone, including for those who can’t even afford the new housing. This is the very reason why many NIMBYs exist! They don’t want their “investments” being diluted.Let's say someone bought the site and built a tower or two for housing. Who do you think is going to afford this housing? I'd rather see a Dicks there than another block of unaffordable apartments or condos. Given the proximity to the entire Pru complex, which to my knowledge is solely luxury housing, the pressure would be too great to make the new one affordable. And what's affordable today? IMO it ought to be anything under $2200/month for a one bed.
500 units of new luxury housing would push down the overall cost of housing in the metro area by a tiny amount. However, that tiny amount is infinitely more than the effect of the number of housing units actually being proposed, which is 0. Additionally, the city could extract a guarantee that some percentage of the new units are income-restricted affordable.
Also, they could just build another store at the base of the new development! In three years we could have the sports store and hundreds of new homes.
Go look at the beginning of this thread and all the people sizing up this site for its development possibilities. I obviously don’t get to decide anything, but I think it’s clear that this location has enormous potential that isn’t even close to being captured.