Ken Chao came downtown a few months ago expecting to park in his favorite lot. In its place, he found a new 11-story office building.
“I was surprised,” said Chao, director of pharmacy for King Soopers. “Part of me says, ‘This is growth and development.’ The flip side of growth and development is the inconveniences that we experience because of it.”
As new hotels and high-rise condo developments bloom in downtown Denver, people like Chao may find themselves paying the price, either walking farther for affordable parking or paying higher rates at lots in the city’s core.
And they can expect more of the same as more than 20 projects that have been germinating for decades find the funding to break ground.
Six new buildings have been constructed since 2000, including the new Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center. Fifteen more are in the pipeline.
Once completed, they’ll have gobbled up more than 4,400 parking spaces. Although downtown zoning does not require developers to include parking in their new projects, most provide enough to serve the occupants of their buildings.
A recent inventory of downtown parking quantifies the pressure. It shows a slight increase in the number of spots – from 43,116 in December 2005 to 43,729 in June 2006 – primarily at two places: 18th Street at Champa Street and 21st Street and Glenarm Place.
The survey also documents an increase in the cost – 10.6 percent in average hourly rates and 5.8 percent in daily rates.
Surface parking lots multiplied in the early ’80s, when speculative developers demolished old buildings to make way for shiny new office towers aimed at supporting the high-flying oil industry. Before the bust, downtown land was selling for up to $1,500 a square foot.
When the market crashed, new construction came to an abrupt halt, leaving downtown with an abundance of parking. Twenty years later, downtown Denver has begun to boom again.
The number of people who work downtown hasn’t budged since 1986 – about 110,000, and 45 percent of them commute on mass transit, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership Inc.
The number of people who live downtown has grown from about 6,500 in 1986 to more than 9,000, but most of their homes come with parking spaces.
Tami Door, president and chief executive of the partnership, maintains that downtown still has plenty of parking for office workers and visitors. The loss of surface lots won’t change that, she said.
“I think there’s not enough education about where to park. The issue is location and communication, not quantity.”
The parking lots that are disappearing beneath new construction, however, are centrally located – along 14th Street and near the public buildings that ring Civic Center. And don’t count on new surface lots being built to replace them. A 1995 change to the city’s zoning code prohibits development of new surface parking lots between 14th and 20th streets.
The city doesn’t require new towers like those being built along 14th Street to have parking structures but, says Door, “You would never build retail without making sure you had enough parking.”
Most of the parking in those new buildings will be reserved for condo residents or hotel guests and patrons of the ground-floor shops and restaurants.
Once the city’s new justice center is built on East Colfax Avenue at Elati and Fox streets, another 450 parking spots will disappear.
Developer Buzz Geller once owned some of them but swapped the land beneath them to the city for two city-owned parking lots at Speer Boulevard and Larimer Street. Counting them, he owns 10 lots, the first of which he bought in 1986. He purchased many of them from bankrupt owners, planning to hold them until the market recovered enough that he could develop them.
Now Geller has two projects in the works – a condominium tower and companion retail building on the inherited lots, and a hotel tower on parking lots on Glenarm Place across from the Denver Athletic Club.
Geller also owns a prime lot in the city’s business district at 17th and California streets but said he won’t consider building offices on it until vacancy rates drop to single digits.
That may take a while.
The office market has been improving slowly, but the vacancy rate hovered at 15.7 percent in second-quarter 2006, according to a midyear market review conducted by Cushman & Wakefield of Colorado Inc., down from 17.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005.
“The thing that drives (parking) rates the most is the occupancy rates of the office buildings,” said John Conway, branch manager for Ampco System Parking in Denver. “Parking is a great indicator of the economy.”
Monthly rates for parking started rising about six months ago, Conway said. And as monthly spots fill, they drive up daily rates.
Office workers aren’t the only ones feeling the parking pinch. Consider Don Henderson, an electrician with Choice Electric working on a job at the World Trade Center.
The company pays for him to park his van near the job site, but members of his crew aren’t so lucky. Most park along neighborhood streets where there is no charge and crowd into Henderson’s van to ride to the job.
“A poor, struggling apprentice doesn’t want to pay $10,” Henderson said. “He’ll climb in back.”
Urban planners say development is good for the city’s long-term health. Streetscapes pocked with ugly asphalt lots don’t beckon to pedestrians, nor are they brimming with attractions for shoppers, tourists or residents in search of nightlife.
“You have to ask what kind of downtown we want to have,” said Ken Schroeppel, an urban planner with Matrix Design Group and creator of urban blog DenverInfill.com.
“Do we want to have a mediocre downtown where it’s cheap to park, or do we want to have a great urban center that is packed with things to do?”
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-820-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
Staff writer Tom McGhee contributed to this story.
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