The Economic Development Standing Committee convened on October 23, 2025, to review and advance several zoning amendments regarding housing production, a Business Improvement Zone petition, and various land bank and contract resolutions. The meeting featured extensive presentations from the City's Office of the Chief Operating Officer, the Department of Housing and Revitalization, and the Department of Neighborhoods detailing efforts to address the housing shortage by increasing density in R2 zones and relaxing parking requirements. Council members engaged in robust debate regarding the impact of these changes on historic districts, parking infrastructure, and the ability to build larger family-sized homes.
Economic Development Standing Committee for today, Thursday, October 23rd, 2025. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll? Council President Pro Tim James Tate. Councilmember Fred Durha the third. Present. Councilmember Letitia Johnson. Present. Mr. Chair, you have a quorum present. Thank you. We have a quorum present, which means we're not wrong with this thing. We're now in session. Uh colleagues, thank you for your patience and uh your prompt. Return back to the council table here, and we shall now dive back into the agenda. We can please take line items 7.5, excuse me, 7.4 and 7.5. Both are dealing with the business and the requested um business improvement zone that has come before us. So I'll move Mr. Chair. Thank you so much. All right. So colleagues, any questions, comments, concerns. I know I had some concerns before, and I think we still need to hear from the parties who are putting this forward to see what type of participation they have. Um and the reception that they're getting from the community. I believe I see Miss Gene there. Um take that seat right out. Right next to Graham. The one next to Attorney Anderson. All right. Good afternoon. Please introduce yourself for the record. Good afternoon, Gina Cavalier, Chief Community Impact Officer, Downtown Detroit Partnership. All right, thank you for being here. Now we've talked about the the biz, and then we were diving in and we kind of pulled it off to do some more massaging and conversations. Uh so if you can talk to us and tell us where those conversations led. Um thank you, Mr. Chair. We have continued community engagement. This is something that has been ongoing for quite some time. Um made some minor tweaks to the petition based on the feedback that we had received from the council and on behalf of the petitioners, the property owner petitioners, we resubmitted. Um the signatures that were presented to the city clerk represent um more than 45 percent of the property owners. Um since the date of that submittal, we have some additional, so we currently sit at about um close to 55 percent of the property owners represented have executed the petition. The statute requires um 30 percent to initiate the process. So we are um well above that. We believe that we have strong support um from a very diverse representation of the community to make sure that we had um newer property owners, long legacy property owners, large and small, and I think that you'll find that um all of those um individuals and those those types of owners are represented as petitioners as and also on the proposed board of directors. Awesome. Thank you for the work that you've done uh in the meantime. Uh question though, is uh I know there were some of those who were in opposition that were in a more peculiar place than others based on the climate uh uh economic climate that that we're in. Uh what has that looked like in terms of kind of warming them over, if you will. Uh, there were some who were very, very vehemently against this because they believe that we're already you know getting taxed in so many other different ways and got new uh expenses that I didn't have before. Um what what is those conversations?