A rendering of the proposed apartment and retail complex, as viewed from Indiana Street. Memorial Stadium is in the background.

The future of a $75 million apartment/retail project near Kansas University’s Memorial Stadium is again in doubt after the project failed to win a key parking exemption from City Hall.

City commissioners at their Tuesday evening meeting said they were worried a 100-space reduction in the proposed project would create serious problems for the adjacent Oread neighborhood.

Now commissioners will have to wait and see whether the Chicago-based development group will proceed with the project, which is slated for 1101 and 1115 Indiana Street. A representative with the development declined to comment on the future of the project after Tuesday’s meeting. But he previously has said an exemption from the city’s parking code was “vital” to secure financing for the project.

Several neighbors of the Oread neighborhood urged commissioners to reject the plan that would have allowed the project to proceed with a 237-unit apartment building that would have 624 bedrooms but only 461 parking spaces. The development group said the reduction was justified because they believe about 30 percent of the apartment’s residents won’t have cars. Neighbors said that was an unrealistic assumption.

“To live in the virtual world is different than those of us live in the real world of the neighborhood,” said Rene Diaz, who has lived in the Oread neighborhood for 26 years. “There are more questions raised by this project than are answered.”

Commissioners rejected the parking exemption without taking a formal vote, but none of the commissioners expressed support for the idea. But all commissioners said they hoped the project would move forward using the city’s existing parking code. Several commissioners said they believed this debate should spur a larger conversation about whether a permit parking system is needed to fix the overcrowded parking conditions in Oread.

“I just don’t know that the Oread neighborhood is ready for a project like this because of the pre-existing problems we have with parking,” said City Commissioner Mike Dever. “It makes me sad that we’re regulating our community based on parking when we want to be a sustainable community.”

In other news, commissioners:

• Approved a plan that will keep both lanes of traffic largely open in the 800 block of New Hampshire Street during the upcoming construction of a downtown apartment project.

Lawrence-based First Construction will remove the existing on-street parking in the 800 block of New Hampshire Street from Ninth Street to the mid-block crosswalk. The removal of the on-street parking will allow two-way traffic to continue during the company’s construction project that will be underway at the northeast corner of Ninth and New Hampshire. Previously, the company had wanted to limit traffic to one-way through the construction zone.

There will be a two- to three-week period where both lanes of traffic will be shut down while a waterline is replaced in the street. The company agreed that work will not begin until after the Lawrence Farmers’ Market closes for the season, which is on Nov. 22.