Dear Washington
- Posted by ryan on May 28th, 2008 filed in Cities
Can we please change this?:
Fresh on the heels of the Mayor’s announcement that the Hill East redevelopment will soon get underway, Douglas Development is hatching its own project on Pennsylvania Avenue. Douglas, owner of the old Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) site on the corner of 15th and Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, has plans for a two-story office and retail project. But while the Mayor seems willing to take on neighborhood anti-development forces around the corner, Douglas plans to demolish the fast food restaurant and parking lot in a low-density nod to local tastes. Zoning of the site allows the company to build up to four stories, but the developer’s feasibility study suggests a two-story structure that blends into the neighborhood in a curb to curb structure that eliminates the parking lot.
The catch? The maximum g.s.f. for the site is 10,915 s.f., and the developer is required to provide 28 parking spaces. The proposed building, designed by Bethesda-based GTM Architects, is, according to the developer’s study, 13,499 s.f., with no parking. So it seems that Douglas needs the neighbors on its side in order to get past the ANC and the Board of Zoning.
Emphasis mine. It should be painfully obvious to everyone in the city at this point that the last thing a development needs to be successful is parking (even if that development happens to be a massive baseball stadium that routinely seats thousands of suburbanites). It’s absurd that developers need permission to build without parking. Please rectify.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Um, call me retarded, but they’re required to provide parking spaces because they’re a commercial venture. Otherwise, their customers start taking up the RESIDENTIAL parking that the neighbors guard like dwarf does his hoard of mithril. Nothing to do with “success” and everything to do with neighborhood politics.
There. Doesn’t calling me “retarded” make you feel better?
May 28th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
This is hilarious. I live nearby this site. It’s less than a block from the Potomac Ave Metro. The current site (the boarded up KFC) doesn’t even have 28 parking spaces! From a little aerial photo research, I count 12!
So, in effect, you could bulldoze the whole thing and put nothing but surface parking there and still not have room for 28 spaces. If you do underground parking (at tremendous cost), you’d need two levels for a two story building. That is a block away from Metro.
Personally, I think they should be able to build 4 stories with zero on-site parking.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I am totally with you on this. Maybe if a site has a certain footprint Then it should be required to have some sort of parking management plan — but for something of this size it is ridiculous to require parking.
(and I would say, yes, make it 4 floors, but I want those two extra floors of demand to get filled in Anacostia first…)
(actually wait I take that back I support extra density, especially on corners)
May 29th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Ok, this has really been bugging me.
So, for a proposed building of 13,500 square feet (office and retail), the zoning code calls for 28 parking spaces on site. That seems egregious just off the bat, but it gets worse when you do a few calculations:
Assuming that a parking space takes up, on average, 450 square feet (including the space itself and an average for the common circulation area), that means that (450*28) the code requires 12,600 sf of parking for a 13,500 sf building (and one where the max gsf allowed was to be only 11,000 sf!
May 29th, 2008 at 11:17 am
28 spaces one block from a Metro station and directly on the busiest bus route in the City?!?!?
Unfortunately, DC’s parking code resembles something an exurban Long Island town would have crafted circa 1959. Also, unfortunately, the “ruling class” in that neighborhood will insist on the maximum number of parking spaces. They are completely focused on parking, parking and more parking despite living in a walkable neighborhood that is well-served by transit.
May 30th, 2008 at 8:59 am
The codes should be revised to require fewer and fewer spaces the closer the site is to mass transit. 1 block from a Metro station = zero spaces, 2 blocks = 2 spaces, etc. Maybe a slightly higher space rate for distance from bus stops.
If you are 28 blocks from a Metro stop, yeah, you gotta build 28 spaces.
-ji