A five-minute tour of Mount Washington reveals both the possibility of the place, and the inertia of it.

On Grandview Avenue there are no fewer than three undeveloped pits where condominium buildings have been promised, but delayed. On Virginia Avenue, one of three commercial strips twisting through the roller-coaster neighborhood, lies a former grocery store parcel that was supposed to be a coffee shop or deli - but nothing's there, years later, except grass. The dilapidated former Edge restaurant, once the prospective site of a Ritz-Carlton hotel, is still a hulking eyesore, with no plans to tear it down or rehab it.

Yet of Pittsburgh's 90 neighborhoods, perhaps none is so uniquely positioned for both retail and residential development as is Mount Washington. The views are unparalleled. Its 10,000 residents are captive to the hilltop. And unlike most city neighborhoods, Mount Washington receives a steady stream of tourists, delivered there by the inclined passenger railways from Station Square, thousands of them a week, looking to spend some money.

But the feeling among many of the business and property owners is that the Mount Washington, for all of its promise, is falling behind the chic city neighborhoods such as Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, South Side and East Liberty, scaring off serious would-be residential and commercial developers with lawsuits, infighting and endless arguments about tree height and parking availability.

"In their hearts, they think they're doing the right thing," said Chuck Wallace, owner of Wallace Florist on Virginia Avenue and a life-long Mount Washington resident. "But they're worried about 20 years from now. I'm worried about Mount Washington right now."

Right now, Mount Washington might be at the cusp of major change - or it might not be. The neighborhood's community development corporation is searching for a new executive director. The corporation's Main Street committee is designing a business district "vision plan," a blueprint to guide growth and cosmetic improvements through the next decade. Most controversially, the community and the city's planning department are drawing up a new zoning map for the neighborhood, one that could open Virginia Avenue for more commercial activity - or preserve it for residential use.

It is, by all accounts, a critical juncture for the neighborhood that once was home to coal miners, iron workers and their families, and now to a mix of blue-collar workers, young professionals, retirees, millionaires, and more and more college students renting duplexes.

"The real the challenge here is that people are unable to see the vision," said Greg Panza, of the Mount Washington Community Development Corporation. "People here just need to see" the possibilities, Mr. Panza said.

Possibility is one thing, accessibility another. For all of its built-in advantages - most of all, the sweeping skyline view that developer after developer has sought to exploit with plans for luxury housing - Mount Washington also suffers from some built-in disadvantages: narrow streets, poor parking and hilly topography.

Many of the homes on Mount Washington are more than a century old, built in the time before cars. That means that many of them are without garages, which means residents park along sidewalks, or on top of them. Ask anyone leaving St. Mary of the Mount on a Sunday how difficult it can be to navigate the side streets leading away from Grandview and toward the heart of the Mount. You're lucky to come away with your mirrors intact.

That's why Frank Valenta, new president of the MWCDC, bristles when he's called "anti-development" by people who want to build big condo towers, adding more cars to the streets.

"People are very possessive of their parking spots," Mr. Valenta said. "Parking is a real issue ... These are the cold, hard facts. It isn't that some people are just [automatically] opposed to what goes in there."

It seems like a manageable issue, but time and again, commercial and residential projects large and small have been derailed mostly - or entirely - by parking concerns.

Take the former grocery store parcel on Virginia, vacant for more than 40 years. That's owned by the Pirain family, which also owns the pizza shop across the street. At first, Richard Pirain sought community input via a Web poll, asking residents what they wanted him to build there. Eventually, he decided on a split-use building, retail shops on the bottom, some apartments on the top.

That was 2003. He battled with neighbors, City Council and Mayor Tom Murphy for the next two years on zoning issues, and eventually gave up. "I'm done with them," Mr. Pirain said. "It doesn't make any sense that these people don't look at the future. For some reason, [they] don't want change."

He's talking about Melanie Smith, who lives around the corner from that vacant lot on Maple Terrace, and house-mate Michelle Cunko, who consider themselves guardians of the Virginia Avenue corridor. The most vociferous of the project's opponents, they also objected to Mr. Pirain's pizza and six-pack shop, Cestone's. Regarding Mr. Pirain's more recent plans, they say the lot is too small to accommodate the parking needed for the stores and apartments.

But more than that, they say, Mount Washington doesn't need new commercial space when so much of the existing space is empty, on Shiloh, Boggs and Southern. "All three of those districts have problems," said Ms. Smith. "We really need to develop what we've got ... Until we do that, I don't think it's even appropriate to work on other commercial areas."

That years-old argument continues to play out today, as the city planning department goes about fine-tuning Pittsburgh's new zoning code. It gathered an initial batch of testimony from Mount Washington residents on Dec. 10, and interest was so high, the department hopes to schedule another public comment hearing for March, said planner Justin Miller. After that, the city will decide whether to expand the commercial zoning on Virginia Avenue, or keep it residential.

But for every substantive thing they fight about, there's something else like the tree-topping issue that has paralyzed community meetings for more than a year. The skyline view, of course, is Mount Washington's most valuable asset, and worth arguing about. Still, it's hard to fathom the acrimony that's stirred as residents debate whether forestry workers should prune the trees, leave them be, cut them down entirely, or lop the tops off, to preserve that million-dollar view. Also at odds are the city's new forester, David Jahn, and housing developers -- namely, Tom Chunchick, of R.E. Crawford Construction.

His company built three, 4,000-square-foot townhomes near Bailey Avenue. They're listed at $800,000, but so, far no takers. That's partly because of the bad real estate market.

But it's also because you can't see the city skyline with all the trees blocking the view. He's spent a year pleading with the city and battling a few of his Mount Washington neighbors, especially the church next door, he said, over the darned trees.

"I was there about six weeks ago. I had two prospective buyers there," he said. "Both of them looked out the window and said, 'You want me to pay this price for this place, and I can't even see the city.'"

What they see instead is a neighborhood not quite living up to its potential.