I have written quite a bit about the numerous changes coming out of the pandemic with regards to how users are thinking about office space. Below my comments is a fine article from Fast Company, including this stat: There are 325 million people in the US and 500 million parking spaces.
One change that office building owners are having to think about is how flexible work is affecting their parking lots AND how that changes our negotiation tactics as brokers. We are now spending a lot more time on this topic for both the tenant and the landlord. Why?
First, an immediate change is that owners are having to upgrade the parking systems that allow cars into their parking garages. These systems now have to accommodate users who have, say, 100 employees but only plan for 25 to be in the office at any given time. This change is something we are negotiating every week now.
A second and bigger issue is also arising — downsizing parking garages. I have written about this before (for a previous narrative on this topic click here) but that was written for 20-30 years down the road when autonomous cars are the norm.
Today, owners are finding they may have lots of extra parking. Here is a great study by Deloitte on this topic if you want a deep dive.
To summarize:
–Office building parking is changing.
–Building owners must update their parking garages to add more flexibility for their tenants.
–Designing parking now requires an extra step…what could this be in the future? Here are some additional cool ideas:
1. Using smart technology to allow vehicles to automatically find and reserve parking spaces.
2. Automated parking systems use robotic arms to move cars from their entry points to the parking spot.
3. Create multi-level parking garages, allowing for more cars to be stored in a smaller area.
4. Some parking lots could include electric vehicle charging stations, bike racks, or other amenities that can make the experience of parking more enjoyable.
More to come on this topic.
Craig
602.954.3762
Parking takes up an extraordinary amount of space in cities. These projects are making it easier to convert it to something more useful than car storage.
[Image: courtesy Gensler]
BY ADELE PETERS 5 MINUTE READ
01-14-19 WORLD CHANGING IDEAS
At a 13-story office tower under construction in Hollywood that will soon serve as the headquarters of Netflix, two floors of parking are designed for a different future: As the need for parking dwindles, that parking space can be easily converted into new office space.
84.51 Centre [Photo: courtesy Gensler]Some cities are eliminating requirements to have a minimum number of parking spaces in new buildings, and some buildings, like a high-rise in Oslo, include space for parking bikes, but virtually no room for cars. Other buildings, built in areas where developers believe there’s a need for parking now, are designed for future conversion–with building owners deciding that the extra cost is worth it for the potential of extra income in the future. At the Cincinnati headquarters of the data analytics and marketing company 84.51, also designed by Gensler, three floors of indoor parking were designed to convert into office space in the future. (The office can already easily be reached without a car.
84.51 Centre [Photo: courtesy Gensler]Retrofitting existing parking garages can be more difficult–they’re not designed for human habitation, and typically have low ceilings, sloped floors, and, in areas like California, aren’t built to the same seismic standards as an office or apartment building. They also can’t handle the same loads. “Being able to say I’m just going to convert this parking garage into apartments is often not really the way to go because it’s structurally not really possible,” says Marcus Martinez, a founder of the Houston-based design firm UltraBarrio, who started studying the potential future of parking garages when he was an urbanism student at MIT and collaborating with others looking at the impact of autonomous cars. “We have to really rethink the DNA of the garage altogether.”
[Image: courtesy UltraBarrio]In a concept called Parked to Place, Ultrabarrio created garages that could transition to other uses. Colocating a parking garage and public transit could help drivers transition to a different commute.
But conversion of old garages is possible in some cases–or at a certain cost–as the projects in London and Wichita show. In the Chicago area, a former parking garage at Northwestern University is now an on-campus startup incubator called, predictably, The Garage. Some former garages could be reused as affordable housing or shelters; after creating a concept called the Mod that looked at ways to retrofit old garages with pod-like housing (like in the picture on the top of this article), Gensler is now in discussions with cities such as Los Angeles about the potential of the concept as a solution.
The Garage [Photo: courtesy Gensler]
“If the city and county took their parking structures and retrofit them into homeless structures where we have these pods–inexpensive living units that plug into these parking structures–it could solve some of our homeless problem,” says Cohen.
The Mod [Image: courtesy Gensler]
Underground garages pose greater challenges, since they typically don’t have windows, but also have the potential for reuse. “I actually think that’s interesting–what are all the other things that you can do in these leftover spaces that are less ideal for people?” says Hall. The spaces could potentially be used for urban agriculture, or storage, or data centers.
84.51 Centre [Photo: courtesy Gensler]
As parking shrinks–in lots, garages, and on streets–neighborhoods will change. Some of the space could go to housing. Cities often build about 1.6 parking spaces per new unit of housing; in a parking garage or lot, a single space can use 450 square feet, if you consider the space also needed for cars to move. “Four hundred and 50 square feet is the size of a one bedroom,” says Hall. “In a place like the Bay Area, where we have a housing crisis and every square foot is so valuable and we are literally fighting for every square foot for housing, to require that developers be building parking at these ratios is really limiting the housing supply, especially in areas that are really well served by transit.” (Though San Francisco recently eliminated its parking requirements, many other Bay Area communities still have them.)
Street parking could become a combination of drop-off and pickup zones and green space, or could transform into protected bike lanes. That could change cities further; the majority of less frequent bike riders say that they’d be more likely to commute by bike if they felt safer. Sidewalks could also widen.
“When you look at the best cities in the world, they’re the walkable cities,” says Cohen. “Especially in the U.S., our cities have to start thinking about our streets as people places. And I think cities now can use this as the nexus, as the reason why to take the city streets back for people [from] the automobile. Just think about that real estate that we can take back for parks, for amenities, for people space, space for development.”
