I feel like I missed something. Why is it that off-street parking must be subterranean? Is it more expensive to make the building a floor of two taller and use the first floors for parking? Is this illegal somehow?
This is basically what sjs said, but you're only allowed to build the building so tall (zoning rules often crazily restrictive about this). So if you put your parking above ground, you'd have to have fewer units.
Might be illegal, if there are height restrictions in the zoning code. Also a lot of cities now add in requirements to have street-level retail so that buildings are not featureless walls or concrete parking ramps at street level.
A friend of mine used to be an architect, and I asked him once if it was possible to build a mile-high building. He said that it was technically possible but economically unfeasible because it would be hard to rent all the space. The base of the building (X number of floors) would have to be huge, and most people want to rent suites (office or living space) with windows, leaving the deep interior bare of renters.
Perhaps a ring of stores, with the interior of the first floor or two as a parking garage, which are less desirable anyway?
Many towers have multiple floors (I've seen as many as 10) of parking.
Turning radiuses and building services (elevators, water, sewerage, cooling, electrical) limit the ability to restrict parking to interior cores, though automated parking systems might allow for this.
Utilizing interior cores for warehousing/storage might also make some level of sense. I've also seen numerous buildings with large interior multi-floor (often the full building height) atria -- some quite beautiful in fact.
Yeah, I don't understand this article. My building has a 1 story basement, street level is retail space, the next 6 floors are parking, and above that 24 floors of apartments. You can't easily tell from the outside what is apartments and what is parking without looking close. I also live in Seattle only blocks away from where this guy is talking about.
I was wondering the same thing. The office building I work in has the first four floors devoted to a parking garage, with floors 5 to 10 as office space. Why couldn't the same be done for housing?
Because it's hideous? People walking around don't want to walk past the blank walls or ventilation grates of parking garages. An attractive urban pedestrian environment needs to have something _different_ and _interesting_ every few dozen feet. That's why streets with many narrow storefronts are the most crowded with pedestrians.
You can see the garage entrance to the left, and the garage wraps around behind the main entrance (a five story open air atrium) to the right hand side. It doesn't have to be hideous.
Nobody cares what this building looks like because nobody would walk to or past it because it's in the middle of nowhere and there are literally no sidewalks.
Correlation + causal explanation gives you a pretty strong link, however.
You can also directly compare regions in which monoliths break the flow small/frequent storefronts. The relationship, in my casual observation, holds very strongly.
You can disrupt the pattern by providing street-level temporary equivalents, e.g., street fairs / farmer's markets, and the like.
Not sure whenever it's true, but when I've asked similar question on why our city (a relatively small town in Russia) has problems with parking space but no building designs still include underground parking lots, I was told it's economically infeasible as office and living space costs much more than parking one.
