Not long ago there was a lot of optimism regarding Renaissance Park, formerly known as the Med-Tech District. Work is still progressing on the PeoriaNEXT Innovation Center, but the next big project that was supposed to land on West Main street has gone south — to Southtown, that is.

A joint venture that includes OSF St. Francis Medical Center, Methodist Medical Center, and RehabCare of St. Louis, considered building their planned long-term acute-care facility in Ren Park. Being on Main just up the hill from the hospitals seemed like a reasonable location, especially since it’s in an area the city is eager to see developed and might be willing to offer some incentives for locating there.

In fact, according to the Journal Star, the city offered “more than $1 million in financial incentives from the city, including $750,000 in property tax abatement over five years and about $300,000 in sales tax abatement.” But despite all that assistance, and even the willingness of the hospitals to pay a little extra to put their hospital on the west bluff, it still wasn’t financially feasible.

Why not? Because some property owners were asking more for their land than the hospitals were willing to pay. Second District Council Member Barbara Van Auken is quoted as saying, “We cannot get in a mode where the bid developments are being held up by extortion.”

That’s pretty strong language, considering this is simply the workings of the free market. Property owners are free to ask whatever price they want for land they own that someone else wants. It’s not like they’re obligated to take the first offer that comes down the pike. From the Journal Star article, it sounds like some of those property owners — maybe the ones with the high asking prices — aren’t all that anxious to sell.

So I don’t blame property owners for wanting to get the best price they can for their property, especially if they don’t really want to move. But it does seem to hamper the city’s strategy for the Ren Park area. The idea was to fill it up with medical and technology companies — either home-grown or relocated — because of its location close to the hospitals and Bradley University. If the property owners aren’t willing to sell, or have asking prices that make the city’s plans unfeasible, isn’t that a bad omen for the future of this area?

That’s what I asked Barbara Van Auken in an e-mail. She responded, “I can only hope that in the future property owners on West Main are more realistic in their financial expectations. If not, obviously development will be much slower than we had hoped.”

Not knowing which properties were at issue, we can only speculate about how slowly West Main will be redeveloped. But considering the size tract the hospitals are trying to purchase in Southtown (more than six acres), I’m going to guess they were asking for a pretty large chunk of land on Main Street as well, and that most property owners were willing to sell, but there were a few strategic properties that were asking a high price.

If that speculation is somewhat accurate, then it may just be that Ren Park is going to be transformed in bite-size pieces instead of large swaths. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If acres of land are taken up with a few large developments, it would make the area less diverse and, thus, less appealing as a new urbanist neighborhood — one of Ren Park’s big selling points.

It could be that this delay in redevelopment is really a blessing in disguise. Maybe instead of one development making a big splash, we’ll see a lot of smaller projects quietly remake the area without the need for a lot of city incentives. I kind of thought that was how it was supposed to work anyway.