Does Downtown Really Require a New Parking Garage?

Does Downtown Really Require a New Parking Garage? What do a commercial print shop, an upscale beer market, an olive oil bar, and a popular diner all have in common? For one thing, they're all either currently doing business or anticipated to open in the coming months along Union Avenue, just around the corner from Market Square. (You do the math. As I've said before, I don't mind parking garages per se. Add to that that there seems to be precious little in the way of hard evidence that downtown actually needs another parking garage, and the project becomes a little questionable (it would only be available nights and weekends to the public). When your parking problem is that companies want suburban offices with surface parking, I'm unsure building another garage downtown helps. As Union is finally returning as a lively, pedestrian-friendly street with everything from an anticipated new Urban Outfitters to the locally owned Just Ripe grocery, carrying that success around the corner toward Chesapeake's could create a retail area encompassing several blocks to the west of Market Square. Union is proof that there's still plenty of opportunity to re-establish pedestrian connections throughout a downtown that has been returning to life for the last decade. Over that period, numerous passageways and pockets that had lain dormant or uninhabited have sprung to life. The News Sentinel reported last November that the company, which had been leasing parking from TVA, found that the 457 parking spaces in their agreement were not suitable for the 330 employees who worked there. But perhaps worst of all is that despite the city's own Downtown Design Guidelines, which state that any new parking garages should provide commercial space at street-level and should not have blank walls, are being haphazardly ignored in the plans for the new structure. Where Union now terminates at Locust Street, Kendrick Place, one of downtown's oldest and most distinctive residential developments, has housed the tawdry and the tony for nearly a century. And there are still others that provide the opportunity to build on that success. Parking, downtown's perpetual purported problem, was rumored to be among the reasons for their tentative move. " Nevertheless, the city sprang into action and just last week signed a memorandum of understanding with TVA to explore developing yet another parking garage one block off of Union Avenue adjacent Kimberly-Clark's building. The relatively quiet two-block stretch is also home to a few hundred center-city residents occupying the Pembroke, the Residences at Market Square, and the aforementioned Daylight. " So does limiting it further by absorbing another block with a garage that fails to supply for additional commercial space really make sense?. But they're able to also be ugly, monolithic structures that, when flanking a city block, create a stark concrete canyon with little or nothing to deliver the people emerging from them. Meanwhile, just across from Chesapeake's, near one of those remaining stagnant pockets, changes of a different nature have been taking place. By the way, remember those shops and that diner along Union that I mentioned earlier? They all have another thing in common: Each of them occupies part of a parking garage project. Does Downtown Really Require a New Parking Garage? Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 07/06/2012