We were walking off a delicious One Shot lunch the other day, and our hearts leapt when we happened upon a couple of zoning notices about a block away. The notices were posted to 243 and 245 W. George St., two lots that have been sitting vacant for as long as we can remember. Just a handful of years ago, this wasn’t such an odd sight at this location, as there was a meadow for horse grazing on the northeast corner of Bodine & George, and a bunch of empty lots up the block on Bodine Street. Over time, the vacancies have mostly filled in on Bodine Street and that meadow has turned into a large residential development called the Stables.

Given all the development we’ve seen around Northern Liberties over the years, we figured it was a no-brainer that developers were going to build a pair of homes that would sell for over $600K. Also, with countless garage-front homes nearby, and a curb cut already in place for the eastern lot, it wasn’t out of the question that the developers were looking to build homes with garages that would sell for over $700K. In our minds, the only question here was whether or not the homes would include parking.

It seems we were asking ourselves the wrong question. Parking will indeed be included here, but the homes will be missing. The zoning notices are simply to create parking spaces on these properties and to build a fence around them. So that’s… surprising. The project went before NLNA at the end of last month, but we don’t know how everyone voted. Was anyone at the meeting who can share how the community responded to this plan? Aside from the fact that parking is at a premium, can anyone think of why it would make sense to use these buildable residential lots for parking and not development?