New parking garage next to Comerica Park sought

[Bham1982]

A parking garage and electrical substation. And people actually doubt the place-making promise and economic effects of sports stadia.

[mikeg19]

A parking garage and electrical substation. And people actually doubt the place-making promise and economic effects of sports stadia.

Give credit where credit is due Bham..There are TWO new electrical substations in direct relation to the new stadium.

[CrashDummy]

I believe the second pic is going to be An electrical substation.

There was a thread about this a while back. I believe this was to be a Verizon building.

[canuck]

Retail is a funny thing. Its not valuable until it is. Then it can be really valuable. Requiring retail space on ground level is now I believe somewhat common in major cities. Seems like Portland started this requirement a million years ago, and has found that it changed the character of what would otherwise have been vast plaza of no purpose that are so common in urban America.

Jane Jacobs certain would be please.

I would rather have a bbq Guy working an empty lot than have another City regulation imposing retail and commercial Space on development. Too many rules already...

[Mackinaw]

So surface lot >> garage with multi-use streetfrontage?

And you're worried about what rules we put on the parking mafia?

G-d forbid we try to upgrade our streets while nurturing intractable car-addiction.

[401don]

Nothing wrong with requiring ground floor retail in parking garages but most cities do not have Detroit's problem to nearly the same extent: A growing downtown combined with a lack of transit leads to a huge need for garages, which in turn leads to more retail spaces than the market demands. Combine this with lots of empty storefront retail and you end up with a lot of "Opportunity Detroit" banners.

[mwilbert]

I don't have anything against BBQ guys in empty lots, but if you don't plan for ground level development at the design stage, it is going to be really hard to fix later. There are a lot of other regulations I'd get rid of first.

[emu steve]

Give credit where credit is due Bham..There are TWO new electrical substations in direct relation to the new stadium.

New electrical substations are a good thing: They are evidence of demand for additional electrical capacity.

Curious about the increase demand for electricity.

Is it mostly because of increased demand for electricity at Comerica?

[Bham1982]

So surface lot >> garage with multi-use streetfrontage?

A surface lot, at the least, offers potential for something better. And, in the urban context, surface lots are usually implied temporary uses.

Garages are [[more or less) permanent, and will have increased parking capacity, usually a net negative in the urban context.

I don't care that Illitch is building a garage, it's just that this is the typical "economic development" and "private sector investment" that happens when you put such uses in a city core. Empty/desolate 95% of the time and then massively congested 5% of the time, requiring huge parking load [[because no one in MI wants to walk more than 2 blocks).

[emu steve]

A surface lot, at the least, offers potential for something better. And, in the urban context, surface lots are usually implied temporary uses.

Garages are [[more or less) permanent, and will have increased parking capacity, usually a net negative in the urban context.

I don't care that Illitch is building a garage, it's just that this is the typical "economic development" and "private sector investment" that happens when you put such uses in a city core. Empty/desolate 95% of the time and then massively congested 5% of the time, requiring huge parking load [[because no one in MI wants to walk more than 2 blocks).

I think I kind of agree with some [[?), but not all, of your points.

Yes, a parking garage 'concentrates' parking within a very confined space and frees up that space for other purposes.

In this specific example, one parking garage is designed to replace more than two surface parking lots [[i.e., the surface lot it will sit and the surface lots on which the residentials on Woodward).

I assume almost everyone here believes that having residences in front of Comerica is better than parking spaces.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is also designed to replace some of the other surface lots which are being used for the LC headquarters and the arena, itself.

The only way we can really discuss this fairly would be to use an equation to count the number of surface parking spaces lost from in front of the stadium as well as behind the church subtracted from the number of parking spaces in the new garage.

If the number of new spaces > the number of spaces lost then we can assume that the additional new spaces replace other spaces lost.

[royce]

WTF. Here we are in September and this damn thing still isn't built. The announcement about its construction was made in February. Why is this being drawn out? The casinos built garages with over three times the capacity in a shorter time span. Like I've inferred before, the Illitches seem to have an aversion to building parking garages [[only two built in Foxtown despite their vast array of properties).

[emu steve]

WTF. Here we are in September and this damn thing still isn't built. The announcement about its construction was made in February. Why is this being drawn out? The casinos built garages with over three times the capacity in a shorter time span. Like I've inferred before, the Illitches seem to have an aversion to building parking garages [[only two built in Foxtown despite their vast array of properties).

Waiting for the baseball season to end?

Labor shortage?

[jmarie]

They are working on it. Slowly, perhaps, as they are still just moving dirt around. [[Or they were still at the moving dirt stage a week and a half ago when I was last there.)