We dont live in Manhattan, or the Loop in Chicago. This is Minneapolis. We do not have the mass transit infrastructure to allow people to completely ditch their cars. If I want to live downtown and have two cars, that is my business. Not yours. And if someone wants to develop a property that accomodates me and be profitable, they should be able to. I would LOVE to not have to own a car and all the expenses that go along with it. But that is not feasible right now. And us living downtown, we would actually use our cars MUCH less. So it is a gain for us as well. Just because you dont like people using cars, doesnt mean everyone else should just toss in their keys. Dont pretend Minneapolis is something that it isnt.
Let me get this straight:
We (as a city) should encourage developers to build "as much parking as they want" because the city doesn't have the best mass transit system INSTEAD of demanding better transit and building a denser, less car dependent core? Is that the argument?
If the answer is "yes" and the proposed "solution" is to build the parking so that it can be converted to dwelling units let me preempt that argument straight away.
1. Parking ramps typically have very low floor to floor heights that are built to minimum clearances (8' 2" for an ADA van) and 7' 0" clear typical. Accounting for plumbing elbows, beams, dropped capitols for columns, etc. We are talking about 10' floor-to-floor in the case of an 8' 2" clear ramp and +/- 9' 0" floor-to-floor for a 7' 0" ramp . After a 1' 0" structural slab, we would have +/- 8' 0" to BOTTOM of exposed slab. Now, if you want to finish that underside of concrete slab, you have additional depth for framing and gyp board. Let's call it 1" so we are now down to 7' 11" clear. These floors are sloped to drain (snow/rain get on cars, that moisture has to go somewhere) - in a post-tensioned system, the slab itself is sloped, in a precast concrete condition, there is generally a poured topping ABOVE THE SLAB that is sloped to drains, so a "flat" floor doesn't really exist. In either of these scenarios, an additional topping would be required to "flatten" the floor AND, control sound transfer between floors - this is generally accomplished with a 1" - 2" topping that has sound deadening material in it. This additional topping would further decrease the ceiling height so we are down to +/-7' 9" clear floor to ceiling AT THE SLAB, reduce that another 8" - 12" at a dropped capitol in a PT system for a clear height of 6' 9". A "luxury unit" doesn't have 6' 9" ceilings.
2. A double-loaded, single drive aisle parking deck is generally *about* 60' wide (18' stall, 22' drive aisle, 18' stall + 1 tolerance each side). In many cases, there are two drive aisles and everything doubles to 120'. This is the dimension that usually drives "the box" that we see in a project with underground parking in the city. In the first scenario, putting aside the floor-to-floor problems that I've already outlined, it would be *possible* to convert one double-loaded, single drive aisle ramp into housing - IF, the units were roughly laid out ahead of time to establish column locations that work. If not - good luck designing usable units with columns all over the place. In a two drive aisle, double-loaded ramp, we are talking about a 120' overall dimension. You are going to have a massive amount of unused space in the middle as a typical dwelling unit is roughly 30' deep. 30' units at both "sides" = 60' deep, what happens to the other 60' of built parking ramp buried in the interior of a building with no access to light? Maybe you could keep that as parking but you'd have to design the ramps accordingly.
3. The ramps to each level are impossible to convert to dwelling units, you'd have to demo those and construct a new floor.
I'd love to say that developers would be willing to incur the costs to build higher floor-to-floor parking ramps and do all of the additional design work to "possibly" convert parking ramps to dwelling units someday to it would be BEYOND naive to think that they actually would. Putting aside the disposition of developers, what bank is going to lend money to such an endeavor?
Like I've said a million times on these boards, I'm nobody special; I'm just a guy with an opinion. I'm willing to listen to a refutation of what I've just written...
. And I think its good to point out that many people ( myself included) live downtown and choose not to have a car. I have a lot of concern/emotion for the Hennepin /Washington intersection. It's a very important area to improve the urbanism of our downtown. We should really do it right here.