Quote Originally Posted by BrushStart View Post
What can the city do to either encourage or compel pedestrian-friendly development? The answer to that question may be key to whether light rail is a viewed as a success or failure 10-15 years from now. Developers have an inherent incentive, at least on the surface, to build selfish, insular buildings. By using up excessive amounts of space, they ensure no competition around them. By dedicating a copious amount of space to parking, they ensure that their building is the most accessible to cars. However, these things frustrate the purpose of having a cohesive urban format that makes it easy for people to access things quickly. There is no point to even having a city if it is going to just be a very large suburban office park. You lose all of the benefits of urban design when you do that and your downtown highrises essentially become a token skyline to put on postcards, like you have in Houston.

Developers don't care so much about "competition" in the sense that geographic separation from nearby buildings will not necessarily drive up demand in their buildings. Hell--look at real estate in Manhattan and San Francisco. Developers care about retaining tenants who pay their rent. End of story. In order to retain those tenants, though, it helps if the surrounding environment is attractive to current and prospective tenants.

Developers only build massive parking lots because the zoning regulations REQUIRE them to do so. Do you think anyone in his right mind would voluntarily pony up millions of dollars to build space that doesn't generate any revenue?

It could take 5 or 25 years before Detroit starts seeing its parking lots "filled-in". A lot of it will depend on the economy, the lending environment, occupancy rates in existing buildings, and needless to say, what kind of zoning regulations of the City of Detroit adopts for the Woodward Corridor.