This tongue-in-cheek Stranger Article from Dominic Holden about the city’s vanishing parking lots is hillarious. But this fact is pretty interesting:
All across Seattle, cherished opens spaces offer residents a bucolic respite—places where hearts, minds, and spirits can soar. But Seattle’s parking lots are threatened. Seattle—formerly home to several square miles of pristine asphalt—has been losing its parking lots at an alarming rate. Bryan Stevens, spokesman for the city’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD), says that in 2006, Seattle was home to approximately 670 pay parking lots. But in 2007, only 530 were left. At this rate of eradication, every pay lot in Seattle will be gone within four years.
The last line depends on whether the trend is the absolute shrink (140 lots per year) or a percentage shrink (20% per year), because with the later will have parking lots forever, just very few. Anyway enough nerdness.
Well, on the bright side, when we got rid of those horrible bars and their horrible clients on Pine by the fabulous press condos, we gained a new parking lot! Yay!
:(
I was just thinking, some one shoudl do this for bellevue
Ummm, and how many of those surface parking lots were replaced by 3 – 4 levels of underground parking, under one of those condo or mixed-use buildings?
We may be losing surface parking lots, but we’re still gaining parking spaces.
True, the building our business is in on Capitol Hill used to be a parking lot. Now they have 4 levels of underground parking each with nearly 20 spaces per level. These new parking spaces are not public spaces like the surface lots they replaced which means less public parking.
At least the land is being used for something better than just parking.
If we can just put an end to these condo towers where the bottom 5 or 10 floors are for parking…and make them more interactive with the street, I’ll be happy.
I agree completely. Above-ground parking should be strongly discouraged.
Buried in this well-written piece is this little gem:
An eight-story hotel has been approved for this spot by the DPD—a major conflict of interest. The city department derives 80 percent of its $61.7 million annual budget from application fees paid by the same developers who are gobbling up Seattle’s precious parking lots. There is money to be made allowing more invasive buildings into our pristine urban areas…
I wonder if those figures are correct…?
I bet they are doing years with a high-volume of applications. On down years, I bet it is much less.
Oh no! Look’s like we’ll have to re-write “Big Yellow Taxi” that was originally written by Joni Mitchell:
they paved paradise
put up a parking lot
with a pink hotel, a boutique
and a swinging hot spot
don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
’til it’s gone
they paved paradise
put up a parking lot
they took all the trees,
put ’em in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see ’em
…