Dredger wrote:Mark, I think your tackling it as exactly as it needs to be tackled. First and Foremost, you have to find and create a market to fill existing buildings. If that means using an existing empty lot as parking, so be it. Demand will create the rising property and rental rates that will be the basis of driving Infill. I'm still dumbfounded on how choking parking off will create market demand in a city and region surrounding by plentiful and cheap space. Especially if you got a lot of built environment that sits empty as it is. Simply put, work to fill what you got and then worry about whether a gravel lot is paved or not afterwards.
This is definitely a chicken-egg issue. On the one hand, you're correct. Land is cheap and plentiful, so placing any restrictions on where parking can go seems premature. On the other hand, if this becomes a trend (that is, more surface lots fronting Olive instead of more buildings), what you have is less than Loop-like, which I think is the goal.
Yes, the Loop has significant off-street parking space (especially present at that enormous lot off of Leland at the west end of the Loop). But the Loop also has many, many more visitors, and at least the bulk of off-street parking is concentrated in a couple spots as opposed to intermittent surface lots everywhere.
The only way retail, specifically, will work in the City of St. Louis, including Midtown Alley, is in the form of a walkable district like the Loop. The threat of surface parking establishing visual dominance over what could become a dense stretch of retail is what people are reacting to here. Every commercial district must mature and wean itself off of a parking oversupply, and surely Midtown Alley is not there yet. Still ,it's important to watch where parking goes in the growth process and to make sure it doesn't eat up too many future development sites now. If there's a parking solution already extant, then that should be the top priority.
