The Newport Hills Shopping Center will remain as it is for now after developers pulled a request for rezoning from the Bellevue City Council.

The Toll Brothers development company had submitted an application with the the city to rezone the 6.4-acre shopping center from neighborhood business to neighborhood mixed use during the city’s annual comprehensive plan update. This would have allowed them to build a much higher number of housing units than is supported under neighborhood business. As of July 23, it had withdrawn its application.

However, during a June 27 meeting, the Bellevue Planning Commission unanimously voted to not recommend that the rezone be considered in the comprehensive plan update following a nearly four-hour meeting where dozens of residents addressed the commission. The rezone request would have been presented to the city council for consideration at a July 23 meeting, but Toll Brothers withdrew its application. Toll Brothers was contacted for this story but had not responded as of the deadline.

Newport Hills resident Ann Brashear said the current shopping center provides a central meeting place for the neighborhood and was worried that a residential-focused mixed-use designation would take remove that.

“If you start filling that stuff in, making it into private property, you really change the character of the neighborhood,” she said.

The shopping center houses a 60,700-square-foot strip shopping center, a brewery, restaurants, a popular batting cage, a shipping business and a gas station. It was built in the 1960s and according to city planning documents, has struggled to define itself in recent years. Around one-fifth of its commercial space is currently vacant. Its current zoning allows for around 90 housing units with a focus on neighborhood services business, but an upzone to mixed use would increase the number of housing units allowed.

The Toll Brothers application is the latest in a number of attempted rezonings. The previous one was attempted by Intracorp, a Seattle-based developer that asked the city to designate the shopping center as an R-30 zone, the most dense development permitted in Bellevue. It had planned to build 23 units per acre but residents resisted this application due to fears of increasing traffic congestion and overburdening area schools. These same concerns were expressed during the planning process surrounding the Toll Brothers application.

While Toll Brothers had planned to include space for businesses in its development, Heidi Dean, the Newport Hills Community Club president said in a previous story that if they couldn’t find an anchor tenant, commercial space could be reduced to 13,000 square feet.

Brashear said she was not opposed to redeveloping the shopping center as long as it remained open as a public meeting space for the community.

“My bottom line is you have to look at the way the neighborhood is planned in the first place, that shopping center is kind of our public square, our gathering place,” she said.

This story will be updated when information from Toll Brothers becomes available.