Here's the solution to underused parking structures: convert them into places for people to live in instead of storage spots for cars.
We Need to Design Parking Garages With a Car-less Future in Mind
Eric Jaffe, The Atlantic
The Joni Mitchell song "Big Yellow Taxi" rues the day they paved paradise to put up a parking lot. But on East 13th Street in Manhattan, they're doing the reverse. The New York Post reports that a developer has turned a former Hertz garage into an uber-luxury residential building, complete with rooftop foliage (and, yes, parking spaces for tenants). What's most interesting is that the developers decided not to raze the garage but merely to renovate it:
"It has very good bones," says [Dan Hollander, managing partner of DHA Capital] of the garage. "There are over 10-foot ceilings, good columns and the property is 67 feet wide — that's what really attracted us to it."
There's a growing belief among architects and designers that all urban parking garages should be built with these "good bones," which will allow them to be re-purposed in the future. For a variety of reasons, from higher gas prices to greater densification to better transit options, city residents will continue to drive fewer cars. As a result, we'll eventually require fewer parking lots. The ability to adapt a structure rather than tear it down will save developers time, money, and material waste.
"As the auto culture wanes we're going to have a lot of demolition to do, which is unfortunate," says Tom Fisher, dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. "If we're going to build these [garages] let's design them in a way that they can have alternative uses in the future. With just a few tweaks that's really possible."...
Carless cities and sky cycles
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