By: Robbie Whelan

Apart from waiting to see who’s going to fill the next big round of office vacancies in Baltimore, most of the news around here has been piecemeal and incremental. In the meantime, here’s what’s happened in development and real estate news in the last week or so.

• Monday night, Baltimore City Council’s Live Entertainment bill, which has riled art school kids and Federal Hill NIMBYs alike, passed second reader, and is inching toward becoming law.

• Baltimore planners bumped three downtown buildings to the front of the line for preservation, and in theory, threw written support behind the idea of the Charles Street Trolley.

• Law firm Thomas & Libowitz re-upped for 15,000 SF in the Legg Mason tower, which must be a relief for its owners.

• The humped, circus-tent roof of the UMBI building in the Inner Harbor could be replaced by a cheaper, more manageable, flat roof, because of budget concerns at the University System of Maryland.

• The Sun reports that Harborplace’s tenants are dropping like flies. Vacancy is up five percentage points in the last year. But on the upside, Iguana Cantina’s going to re-open as a “rum-bar”.

• Prince Georges County is helping folks pay downpayments and closing costs on foreclosed homes.

• Voting on an important Howard County Council bill, which would determine the way Columbia’s Village Centers could be redeveloped, has been tabled until the end of the month, so sayeth The Sun.

• The Baltimore Development Corp. is looking for someone who will knock down a section (.pdf) of the Westside Superblock for between $2 million and $3 million. Any takers?

• Maryland got $44 million from the Feds to build affordable housing, including a 91-unit garden apartment complex in West Baltimore’s Penn-North section, as the BBJ has it.

• And elsewhere, the Sears Tower is getting a $350 million “green” retrofit. Oh, what we could build in this town with a spare $350 million.  National vacancy rates are damn near 16 percent.  Oh, and there’s this interesting deconstruction of the popping of the Harlem housing bubble in the New York Times.