Quote:
Originally Posted by austlar1
In case nobody noticed, every downtown office building that has gone up in Austin in the past 15 years is built on top of a significant parking podium. I am not sure how this came to be, but I don't know a lot about parking requirements and development codes downtown. All of the tall buildings that went up in the late 1980s were built in a traditional manner with no parking podiums at the base. I guess some of them have parking structures attached, but not all of them do. What happened downtown to require these ugly podiums to be built?
|
This Feb. 2013
article from the Austin Business Journal addresses your question.
Quote:
“If you build a big office building, you’re not going to be able to lease space in it without a competitive amount of parking,” [Perry Lorenz] said.
But exactly how much parking qualifies as competitive does change.
When the first round of big buildings went up in Austin, Lorenz said, it was common for developers to only build about one parking spot for every 900 square feet of space.
That changed in the late 1990s and early 2000s when buildings such as 300 West Sixth and the Frost Bank Tower went up. Those included almost suburban amounts of parking — about one spot for every 250 square feet, Lorenz said.
“People fled to those buildings,” he said. “Those new buildings came along, and they just murdered everyone because they had more parking.”
Developers downtown now are building more than the city’s current minimum requirements — about one space per bedroom and one space per 1,375 square feet — just to be safe.
The average today is about one space per each 350 square feet, said Chris Bradford, a development lawyer with Coats Rose and recent appointee to the city’s land code redevelopment committee.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by ahealy
I'm not sure if it's a CODEnext thing or City Council, but it's time to seriously re-write parking requirements for new office projects.!
|
According to that article, the city is only requiring one parking space per 1,375 sq ft of office space, but the developers are providing one space per 350 sq ft. The city could further reduce the parking requirements, but that won't prevent a developer from building more parking spaces than the city would otherwise require.