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Proposed 80-storey building near Lougheed Town Centre passes Burnaby council's 3rd reading
(www.burnabynow.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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I would love to see the occasional development that goes hard against parking. Build it over or across the street from Skytrain, provide 10% or more Modo/Evo spaces and zero or near zero residents parking. Then cut the price of everything by $60/120K given you're not having to build the cost of underground parking into the prices.
But even if you could persuade the appropriate council to do away with their parking minimums AND there was some way to discourage car owners from buying (have a neighbouring building with lots of parking? Sign some sort of contract?) I know people's lives change. Just because you work downtown and can take the Skytrain today, doesn't mean you're not going to be working in White Rock or Maple Ridge next year. Or a bunch of people are going to shrug, lie about car ownership, buy the cheaper unit and plan to park on the street somewhere - then complain about how they don't have parking in their building.
Actually, my GENIUS PLAN is for nobody to "own" any parking in a building. Have all the spaces owned by a parking organization that rents them out on a month-by-month basis. That way you reduce the price of every unit by the $60K that each space costs to build and the family buying a 2-bed who don't need parking don't pay for it and the couple buying a 1-bed who need two spots can get it too. Also there's none of the "I drive a monster truck but my unit came with a 'small car' space" or "I'm disabled but my unit's space is miles from the elevator" issues... you just rent out appropriate spaces to each unit depending on their needs.
But obviously the developer is going to want their money up front for the parking they built so whatever organization owns & manages the parking is going to need DEEP pockets and the return on investment is very very slow.
Parking spots add value to the units. Even if it costs $100k less to build, the value compared to neighboring units, might be more than $100k less. The developers will earn less and be less inclined to build it.
Obviously if they are given no choice they will build what they can, but there are choices about where to build. If they can choose which project to build and one city eliminates parking in the buildings and another doesn't, then they will go with the more profitable option.
The desire to build parking into the building should go with the demand. As more people eliminate cars, because of the good transit and car share options, they will value parking stalls less. Once the value of a parking stall drops below the cost to build it, they will stop building them.
Vancouver's housing market is so tight that the space saved allows more units to be built, so it's almost always profitable to maximize people per area instead of cars per area.
Who the hell is paying more than 100k for a parking spot this close to a transit station? Vancouver's transit plans are some of the grandest on the continent right now (and are mostly on-schedule with minimal budget overruns).
Of all the uses we could allocate surface land toward, can we agree that parking is about the worst? There's no reason for it to see the sun, no reason for it to be seen by people, eyesore that it is.
The Royal Columbian Hospital expansion is 'saving money' by not including adequate parking in its build, and the existing parking around RCH is continually a question: "where can I park", I would regularly read on Reddit. I think we have an example of what 'saving money' looks like.
And we know every penny saved DOES NOT transfer to reduced purchase price, which invariably is set at "whatever the hell we can get people to pay, plus 30%".
To be fair, a hospital might be one of those places where parking is legitimately necessary for accessibility reasons.
People going to the hospital are, on average, more likely to be suffering from some chronic conditions that prevent them from biking/walking effectively.
That's another great point they seemed to not take into account when planning to put absolutely nothing in the potentially-6-floors they could have created under this expansion. We already see that the current care area has no parking for the regular staff there; expand the space and try to fit double the staff and non-emergency patients and their family?
I'm not sure everyone realizes that Maple Ridge and Chilliwack and the North Shore exist; places that will likely always need a car to come from -- either for support staff who don't get paid enough to afford a 1.1m place within the train network, or for incident-related visitors who can't handle a 90-min commute each way to go visit Grandma on the daily.
Absolutely - I think there's some real estate mantra about how land is the only thing they're not making more of. Using 18 sq m of it for possibly storing one vehicle is a heck of a waste. I saw some stat that there's apparently 8 parking spaces per vehicle in the US - they need one at home, one at work, one at every mall that you might want to visit. So that's 144 sq m of asphalt for storing each car.
True re condo prices... it might work if there was competition and sufficient supply... but we all know that's not the case.