March 15: Alterra’s Broad and Washington plans | Voluntary street sweeping | Deregulating garage businesses

Mayor Jim Kenney is doubling down on the idea of bringing back street sweeping services, but only for neighborhoods who accept alternate-side parking. It’s still unclear what the administration will consider an acceptable threshold of neighborhood support. “I’m not forcing people to have a clean street,” he told Andrew Thompson at NBC, “We should clean the city at least twice a year with a massive clean-up, which we’re planning. But in the meantime, on a bi-monthly or monthly basis, I’m not going to have people screaming and yelling that they don’t want to move their car from one side of the street to the other because it’s such an inconvenience, when they do it in Manhattan twice a week.”

Jacob Adelman has renderings of Alterra Property Group’s plans for Lincoln Square, a nine-story mixed-use development on the northwest corner of Broad and Washington, across the street from Bart Blatstein’s blocksized tower and rooftop retail village proposal.  

Katie Colaneri looks at the Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Communities’ idea for a developer impact fee to support the Housing Trust Fund. The fee could generate between $3-12 million a year for submarket development, but the report prepared for PCAC by Econsult Solutions found it could also depress new construction. “On the higher end, a fee of $4.80 per square foot could “reduce market rate activity” by as much as 14 percent,” writes Colaneri.

Related: An argument from Daniel Kay Hertz at City Observatory that real estate capital gains taxes, collected at point of sale, are the most economically-efficient and distributionally progressive way to fund affordable housing programs.

Did you know there are over 320 bird species recorded in the city of Philadelphia? Yesterday’s Radio Times episode was all about urban birding, the best spots to watch birds, and how we can make the city even more avian-friendly.

Conrad Benner shares some photos from his exploration of Philly’s abandoned subway tunnels

Nolan Gray thinks city zoning codes should go further to legalize residential garage conversions for different types of business activity.

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