City Council continues to show that it is serious about opening the core transit corridors to Vertical Mixed Use development by standing up to neighborhoods trying to wriggle out of the VMU bargain. 
A couple of recent actions by Council are especially reassuring:
The neighborhoods in the East MLK Combined Planning Area asked to opt out all of their eligible tracts, most of which lie along Manor Road east of Airport Boulevard. They offered the typical pretexts (pp. 8-9) -- e.g., lack of infrastructure (although citing chronically stopped up toilets was probably a first), increased impervious cover, inadequate planning and coordination -- while still managing to invoke New Urbanist guru Andres Duany as cover for their unambiguously anti-Urbanist stand.
Props to Council. At its February 28 meeting, it voted 7-0 to retain VMU zoning on all of the tracts, and approved parking reductions and additional ground floor uses to boot. (This was 1st reading only; 2nd and 3rd readings are on the March 20 agenda.)
Bryker Woods was not nearly as intransigent as the East MLK neighborhoods. It agreed to leave most of its tracts in the VMU district, but asked to exclude seven tracts (mainly over worries about parking, from what I saw of the Planning Commission hearing.) Council voted (6-0) to zone five of the seven tracts VMU anyway, and deferred the other two to its March 20 meeting.
Council has decided that it is not a rubber stamp.
Not every neighborhood is an East MLK. Some neighborhoods have embraced VMU unreservedly. Not only did North Loop not ask to exclude any of its VMU-eligible properties, it asked to opt in several other tracts. Some neighborhoods, at least, recognize that VMU developments will enhance their neighborhoods even as they provide additional room for multi-family development.
