UPDATED Nov. 1 District 10 Council Member Alison Alter's office has organized a community meeting regarding the proposed redevelopment of the Great Hills Market. The meeting is at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1 at Great Hills Market, 9828 Great Hills Trail, Ste. 550, Austin, in the empty space between the Lakeshore Learning Center and Hallmark. For updates and meeting reminders, residents may join the email list here. POSTED Oct. 30 A redevelopment proposal involving a beloved movie theater in Northwest Austin has received approval from the city’s zoning and platting commission and will make its way to City Council on Nov. 9. The proposed project, which needs council approval to change the zoning from general retail and limited office to general commercial services with a vertical mixed-use overlay that permits 60-foot buildings, could change the face of a key development off Great Hills Trail between Jollyville Road and US 183. A developer is proposing to transform the 154,886-square-foot Great Hills Market retail center into a mixed-use center with 372 apartment units, restaurants and retail on the sites of the Regal Arbor 8 @ Great Hills movie theater and Manuel’s Mexican Restaurant. Phase 1 would not begin until Manuel’s lease expires. Phase 2 would transform the existing retail building at a later date. “I think it’s a wonderful project. It’s a great location and the heart of the Arboretum area. Redevelopment is long overdue,” said Commissioner Jim Duncan, a Northwest Austin resident who lives near the site, shortly before the zoning and platting commission voted to recommend approval of the zoning change Oct. 17. The Great Hills Market case is one of a handful in the Northwest Austin area making its way through the city’s zoning change process—a process many say often pits residents and developers against each other in a battle for managing traffic and neighborhood characteristics with responsible growth. “[The process] is probably working as well as it ever has in Austin, but Austin has its own way of doing things, which is not the right way,” Duncan said. “In Austin, it’s who can yell the loudest [wins].” For some Northwest Austin residents, that has resulted in having to negotiate directly with developers on building requirements. From A to Zoning Zoning change cases are required any time a property owner wants to modify the zoning on a site from anything other than the current zoning. The process includes notifying residents within 500 feet of a site of a zoning request and allowing residents to sign a petition protesting the change if their property is within 200 feet of the site. After receiving approval to change the zoning, developments still have to go through the site plan and permitting process, according to the city’s planning and development department. District 6 Council Member Jimmy Flannigan said residents should not have to negotiate with property owners for the best project. Not all neighborhoods have active associations, and that can lead to an inequitable fight, he said. “It is an unfair ask to say to volunteers in a community that have their own lives to deal with that they should also understand and research and verify every zoning case that comes before council. There is an imbalance,” he said. District 10 Council Member Alison Alter agreed. She added that residents’ hesitation over new development stems from concerns on how to balance the city’s growth, traffic and a project’s compatibility with neighborhoods. “[Residents] don’t have a lot of evidence that the city’s going to provide them with the infrastructure needed to allow that growth to not negatively impact their quality of life,” she said. Coming to agreement Residents who have participated in the zoning change process say it can be time-consuming. “[It works best if] the surrounding property owners work either with the developer and come up with a deal or work with a City Council member as a mediator to come up with a deal, which is essentially what happened to us,” said Dennis Watts, who lives off Spicewood Springs Road. “It’s laborious in the sense that it requires a lot of time with meetings.” On Spicewood Springs, several cases have come up in the past few years: the Austin Oaks planned unit development, the Overlook at Spicewood Springs office project and the Austin Board of Realtors headquarters. Watts said he did not have time to invest in the zoning process for the new ABoR office that opened in December 2014. Many residents were shocked at the scale of the building that is also used for meetings and events, he said. Several neighborhood groups, including Watts’ Spicewood Green HOA, became involved in the Overlook project that sought to build an 18,500-square-foot office building on land zoned for single-family use. Residents opposed the size of the building because of concerns about the impact on traffic and the  environment. Council approved the zoning change in February 2015 but limited the size to 12,000 square feet. Residents were surprised when the developer requested in May an amendment to permit an 18,500-square-foot building so that the project would be profitable, Watts said. “To me you had a settled case, and I’m not sure why city staff would [recommend] that,” he said. “That’s the part of the system that flabbergasted all of us.” Austin City Council denied the request Sept. 29. CodeNEXT’s implications As the city continues toward the finish line of completing its yearslong overhaul of its land development code, some speculate that CodeNEXT might not make the zoning change process easier. “The procedure section: It’s 240 pages, longer than most zoning codes,” Duncan said. “It’s so important because that’s what frustrates everybody.” Part of the CodeNEXT process to rewrite the land development code, which has not been significantly updated since the mid-1980s, includes updating the city’s zoning maps. “The simplicity in zoning to me is a huge, important value to CodeNEXT,” Flannigan said. “The more we can simplify the process, the easier it will be for everyone to understand what there is and the more predictable those land uses will be in the future.” Alter said the idea behind the new zoning maps is to have fewer changes. “It should be clarifying what the options are and making it so not everything is negotiable,” she said. “Part of the problem we have now is depending on which approach you take, everything is negotiable. If everything is negotiable then it just complicates the system.” Added to her concerns are how new developments under CodeNEXT changes could affect affordable housing options in the city. Alter said she does not want any affordable housing to be displaced because a developer receives entitlements for high-end developments. Should the Great Hills Market developer choose to build under the requested vertical mixed-use overlay 10 percent of the rental units would have to be available at no more than 80 percent of the area median family income in exchange for fewer parking spaces. New CodeNEXT regulations could bolster these requirements under additional programs that give developers entitlements for adding affordable housing. “We would welcome the opportunity to have this project participate in CodeNEXT; we just need to start working on it before the implementation of CodeNEXT,” said Amanda Swor, director of entitlements and policy with Austin-based real estate law firm Drenner Group—the developer’s agent.