Wurlitzer Building to be saved, turned into boutique hotel

[Junjie]

Most normal people in metro have cars and should understand what I'm talking about. It should be common sense. Automobiles are a way of life in this area; it's a big part of this area's history as the Motor City. When you add more hotels to downtown without parking, there will be less spots available for the larger volume of traffic. The city zoning department needs to plan ahead for this increase by putting the burden of providing these spots on the new hotels. I don't understand why you don't get this??

What you're running into is a geometric problem, not a policy problem. You're absolutely right that adding more hotels means fewer spots for a larger volume of people. But that's why building/operating good transit will only become more critical if Detroit continues to rebound. There is simply not enough space for each person to drive and park a car at the densities of a major, healthy downtown business district. It's fine to say that Detroit is the Motor City, but it's still a city, and cities operate under certain geometric facts. One of those is that cars take up too much space for a high density downtown business district to rely solely on them.

Right now Detroit can get away with this because it has a relatively unoccupied CBD relative to successful cities. But if redevelopment continues, this will become less and less feasible. Density and automobile reliance are diametrically opposed in a zero-sum game. You cannot have both. Requiring every new or renovated building in downtown Detroit to build additional parking is not physically workable over the long term, and attempting to do so will hold back the city's redevelopment. Parking is going to get scarcer if Detroit does well, and that's a good and manageable problem to have. It means people want to be in your city and businesses want to locate there. The long-term solution is to build transit so that tens of thousands of people from Oakland County or other parts of the city can take the train and leave Dave from Windsor a parking spot.