Building management tends to have highly restrictive contracts for any new businesses in the spaces available. For example, Sally's Apizza on Summer Street was a BLT building and had similar management as everything down in Harbor Point. You may be thinking "Sally's is the exact kind of thing I want!" Well, not really. Those locations can include stipulations like the lease being guaranteed through other income — which is another way of saying it has to be a chain. Sally's could open in Stamford only because they were already a super successful business elsewhere in the state. It's also not merely having multiple locations, but other locations that are so profitable they can pay for downtown/harbor point leases in addition to operating their original business.

Effectively, the building management has selected out for any creativity. They're not in the business of innovators. They're in the business of incredibly reliable tenants — which just so happens to be incredibly boring, overpriced, and dull establishments. You can hem and haw about the management, but they won't respond to those arguments.

Ultimately, the most persuasive argument would be to allow for zoning changes that allow for housing/commercial that's somewhere between high-rise luxury apartments and crappy single-family homes. These — of course — are things the local board is consistently against for a bunch of bad arguments (parking, water drought, "character" of our neighborhood), and etc. Honestly, they were against BLT too but they just had no grounds to oppose it and BLT had the gumption to take on legal battles to get their buildings built.

Some might say this is why Stamford is a cultural hellhole...