Quote Originally Posted by Jason View Post
I'm talking about ballpark sizes of garages for offices.

If you want to get more specific you can.

The Penobscot Building is 776,000 square feet. If you go with 300 square feet per worker [[including that worker's share of the communal spaces), then the Penobscot Building can hold about 2600 office workers. The Compuware garage is 2200 parking spots. Even if I'm way off and the Penobscot Building only needs half as many parking spots as I estimated, that's still a lot of parking.

My point was though, was that there's nowhere near enough parking directly in the financial district for all the buildings there, but the buildings are all generally doing ok. Someone else said that a lot of the buildings actually do have their own spaces, which is true, but they don't have anywhere near enough spaces for all of the workers, and most people have to walk a few blocks. If the parking was the deal breaker this guy is making it out to be, those other buildings would all be failing, but they're not.

The Penobscot bldg would not have sold for 5$ a sq ft if things were OK. If real estate values were normally healthy, a multistory parking integrated to a development would be a given. For a lot of reasons, some owners and potential investors are not putting the value of buildings front and forward but rather lamely give priority to fast buck turnaround on parking structures. This is a universal problem in North American cities that needs to be addressed. But in Detroit where the automobile is king, and where transit is even less evident than in L.A. or Houston; the problem is exacerbated and land values plummet because of this insistence on fast in and outs to the suburbs.