For years, the Kasold Curve — that area where 31st Street turns into Kasold Drive — has just been an area where I close my eyes and hang on extra tight when I’m a passenger in my wife’s car. Now, it may be an area that’s showing Lawrence’s renewed appetite for residential construction.

It looks like a deal has actually materialized to develop about 19 acres of the vacant ground at the curve into a mix of apartments and duplexes. All the way back in 2009 we reported that the Lawrence Wesleyan Church purchased 33 acres of property along the southeast edge of the curve. Plans called for the church to use part of the property to build a new church building and to sell the rest of the property to a private development group.

But, if you recall, the residential real estate market in 2009 was a bit like a K-State Wildcat at a Final Four party: lost and depressed. (Hey, it is gameday, after all.)

Church officials, however, now have told city leaders that they have a deal with a group of Lawrence investors — including real executives John McGrew and Mike McGrew — to purchase about 19 acres to develop about 55 duplexes (or about 110 living units,) plus a small apartment complex. The church will keep about 14 acres to use as part of its development of a new church building to replace its current building at 3705 Clinton Parkway.

The project is looking for a little bit of help from the city. Developers on Tuesday will ask the City Commission to approve a benefit district to finance about $690,000 worth of public streets and water mains for the project. Benefit district financing is common. The city provides financing for public infrastructure, such as a streets and utilities, and the property owners pay the city back through special assessments on their property tax bills. But the city’s policy caps the amount to be financed at 75 percent of the expected infrastructure total. In other words, the developers are supposed to pay for 25 percent upfront.

But church officials are asking commissioners to wave that 25 percent down payment in this case. The developers aren’t asking the city to pay for any of the infrastructure, but rather just want the city to finance about 90 percent of the costs instead of the normal 75 percent. Developers have said the extra up-front costs make the project infeasible. Commissioners will consider the request at their 6:35 p.m. meeting on Tuesday.

As for the development itself, look for it to change the traffic flow at the curve a bit. The plans approved by the city call for a new 50-foot long left-turn lane to be installed at the curve. The lane will accommodate traffic looking to turn into the new development. I haven’t yet seen details on the apartment portion of the project. But it doesn’t appear to be a large new apartment complex of several hundred units. The amount of ground set aside for apartment development is less than 2 acres. The bulk of the property is set aside for duplex development.

In other news and notes around town:

• As we have reported, the City Commission on Tuesday also will consider issuing a request for proposals from companies that are interested in improving the community’s broadband service. This comes at the same time the city is trying to figure out whether to give a $500,000 grant and other incentives to Lawrence-based Wicked Broadband to do a pilot project to bring super-fast Internet service to downtown and East Lawrence. The super-fast speed would be the same 1 gigabit service that Google Fiber is providing in the Kansas City metro area.

During this whole discussion, I’ve certainly heard several people say they just wish the city would make more of an effort to convince Google Fiber to add Lawrence to its Kansas City project. And come to think of it, there probably is a legitimate question out there: Has the city of Lawrence ever formally sent a letter to Google Fiber asking them to consider Lawrence as part of the project? I know there was talk of it, but I don’t remember if a formal request ever came about. I’ll check on it and provide an update.

But Joshua Montgomery, one of the owners and operators of Wicked Broadband, is now touting that his company’s pilot project may be the community’s best chance to get Google Fiber to come to Lawrence. You can read his whole thinking here, in an op-ed that ran on the technology website arsTechnica. But in short, he’s touting that the pilot project he hopes to build will feature what is called a common carriage network. What that means in this case is that the fiber optic cables in the ground would be large enough to allow up to four Internet service providers to operate on the network. The way it would work is that Wicked would occupy one of the four spaces, but if any other company wanted to use the network, it could lease space on the network to do so. That includes Google. That’s not how Google is operating in Kansas City. It is building its own network there, but Montgomery is opining that Google’s strategy may be flawed because it will take Google far too long to build networks in as many places as it would like to serve. He thinks Google may be open to another approach.

“Google needs to franchise its technology and marketing to municipalities,” Montgomery wrote. “By franchising its operation to municipalities, Google can use its three most important assets to grow its network: branding, engineering and marketing. Municipalities can use their strongest abilities — managing infrastructure construction and providing long-term finance — to make the projects successful.”

It is a new wrinkle in this discussion, so I wanted to pass it along. Whether Google has any interest in providing high-speed service in Lawrence is a bit of an unknown currently. Google has signed deals as far west as Olathe, but its plans in Kansas City have been a bit spotty, as this article notes.

But this whole broadband subject has been an interesting subject to watch. There are people who say that having high-speed broadband service in a community will be as important as it was to have a railroad or an interstate come through your town decades ago. But, of course, we’re talking about the future, so it is difficult to prove or disprove that assertion here in the present. I have no answers, but I’m betting that it will continue to be interesting to watch.