there’s a 3-over-1 (3 stories stick-built residential units over a 1-story concrete retail podium, the new urban mid rise idiom) going up nearby that for a while looked like 2 different buildings, separate foundations with separate fences and separate contractor placards, and only clearly one now that it’s being finished and clad

That’s probably to do with being on uneven ground, but I wonder how much that served to tamp down local resistance to the full-block monolithicness