Yes the development at the NW corner of 11th & Lewis will really tie everything that has been done around Mother Road Market together. It also starts to pull new development to the north toward Whittier Square. Hopefully it is able to move forward.
While Renaissance and the other new developments have been street-fronting you have the fairly recent building at 3rd & Lewis that isn't (and easily could have been). The dentist office at 6th & Utica is one of the worst examples, still pisses me off when I see it.
The QuikTrip at 11th & Utica still makes me the most mad, because they essentially killed any leverage the city tried to get in demanding urban style development in that neighborhood.
I think it took Renaissance almost a year of working with the city to get them to approve the plans they built and it seems like such a no brainer now, so I'm glad they stuck with it because the examples you just mentioned didn't try very hard to get the city to allow them to build to the street front and where the city tried to require it, they just let developers and businesses to walk right over them to build whatever they wanted.
I believe the city is working on a new overlay for this area that will reduce parking minimums and ease some of the requirements for smaller infill projects. So I'm encouraged that we won't see too many more of those dentist office type developments in this neighborhood going forward. Reducing the required parking will help a lot.
I'd hate to start seeing this area turn into what's happening on Cherry Street where to get permits they're having to buy up homes nearby and level them for surface parking. It's really disappointing to see how far back the parking is creeping around those new developments on 15th. I'd wish the city or the businesses would pool together and come up with a parking plan to build a common garage somewhere so they can keep more of the existing homes/small apartment buildings from being razed.