Doubts face a new proposal for prominent downtown parcel

He sees the stars finally aligning for the property where the Southern Hotel used to stand. Clarke has proposed developing a 22-story apartment tower and parking garage there. There's now strong demand for housing and parking downtown, Clarke said.

The project would incorporate three vacant buildings fronting East Baltimore Street, but not the Thomas Building at the corner of Light and East Baltimore streets that's home to a McDonald's.

City development officials, disappointed by many false starts, are skeptical that construction will happen there any time soon.

"Our board of directors doesn't believe the current ownership … will ever build anything on the site," said Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, which monitors economic and real estate development in the city center.

The partnership has asked City Hall to consider moving toward condemnation so that new owners can try their hand at developing the properties.

The land is owned by Capital Guidance Corp., a private global investment firm with offices in Washington, Paris, Geneva and Beirut. In the early 1990s the firm brought on Clarke, who has worked on apartment and office buildings throughout the metro area, including the Baltimorean Apartments in Charles Village, to develop the Indoor Positioning System.

Two decades ago when he was first brought on, Clarke sought to use the site for an office tower.

"In everybody's mind, that was Main and Main," he said of the Light and East Baltimore intersection, just steps from Charles Center. Though an office building seemed like a natural fit, no one wanted office space at the time, he said, and the idea fizzled.

The Southern Hotel, which was to be incorporated into the redevelopment, eventually was torn down and Clarke considered other options over the years. A hotel integrated within an office tower was proposed, as was a mixed hotel and residential building. Proposals were submitted for headquarters buildings at the site for T. Rowe Price and Exelon. Nothing stuck — except for the surface parking lot, which has been leased to tenants of 10 Light Street.

Capital Guidance believed Exelon to be a good prospect, Clarke said. The utility company could get a "huge amount of parking" and easy access to the city's metro system at the site, he said. "At the end of the day, they chose Harbor East."

In 2011, a consulting firm commissioned to analyze the site determined that its true economic potential was in residential use.

That same year, Clarke and Hord Coplan Macht Inc., the Baltimore-based architecture firm that has worked on various plans for the site since the early 2000s, presented a 16-story residential tower to the city's architectural review board. The residential tower, called One Light Street, was well received by the design panel but that plan, too, failed to move forward.

When it rains it pours or so it must feel to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives as the many accumulated clouds on their horizon finally give way to a perfect storm.

By now the Prime Minister probably wants voters to forget that he ever mused about his hope for an Ontario Conservative trifecta made up of Ontario’s Tim Hudak, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and himself.

The last thing Harper needs as he tries to control the damage of a spending scandal in the Senate was another hit on the law-and-order image of the conservative movement.

In his book, drug allegations involving Toronto’s leading municipal Conservatives almost certainly qualify as an additional “distraction” — to use the word he chose last week to describe the Senate crisis.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s 2013 budget played to tepid reviews. He has been battling a painful illness. In the lead-up to a mid-term shuffle there has been unprecedented speculation as to his future role in the government.

For different reasons, outgoing Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright — who both played strategic roles on Harper’s economic watch — are simultaneously out of the picture.

For the first time since Harper became leader, some elements of the religious right have waged open war on his leadership. That comes on the heels of a public collision between the prime minister’s parliamentary lieutenants and the social conservative wing of his caucus over the abortion issue. That clash has morphed into a larger internal battle over the democratic rights of government MPs.

An early attempt to clip the wings of Justin Trudeau seems to have backfired. Polls suggest that the latest Liberal leader is less vulnerable to the black magic of Conservative spin doctors than his predecessors.
In yet another first, the prime minister lost a seat to a byelection earlier this month and, in the process, his only Newfoundland-and-Labrador minister. Peter Penashue had initially resigned over 2011 election spending violations.

On the same general theme, a federal court judge found that fraudulent phone calls to non-Conservative voters in the last election were part of a systemic attempt to prevent them from voting. While last week’s ruling did not point the finger at the Conservatives, it did conclude that whoever was behind the manoeuvre accessed the party’s data bank.