Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
Yeah, they overstepped on this one. What works with apartments (>95% of the completed new greater-Downtown inventory in this decade) doesn't work the same with condos. Condo buyers tend to be older and richer, and are more likely to have cars.
They went aggressive with unit count on a pretty small and odd-shaped site of 8,365 square feet. My guesstimate is that a more traditional ratio like 0.7 spaces per unit would have meant going absurdly deep at massive cost PLUS a mechanical system. More realistically the option was a much shorter tower with fewer units. So they went big on units and might have to sell them for a little under what they expected.
Meanwhile [b}I'm glad we we don't mandate this stuff...would hate to live in a city where a condo buyer is REQUIRED to buy a parking space[/b]. In fact I had to buy one with mine a decade ago.
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I don't know anywhere where the government mandates bundled parking and living space but it used to be the norm, and so far as I know still is except in the greenest of American cities (mostly on the left coast and NY) that developers routinely sell deeded parking with units.
In 2006 San Francisco became among the first cities to ban this practice and to mandate the separate marketing of parking and residential units. At the same time, it set a maximum limit in the downtown area of .75 parking spaces per unit in new residential buildings and eliminated minimums as well.
The result is that for over a decade now if you want to buy a new high rise condo in the city, you will have to lease a parking space IF ONE IS AVAILABLE and your car will likely be parked not by you but by a valet, in some of the newest buildings in mechanical parking stackers like those New York has had for some time:
http://www.solidparking.com
Incidentally, as far back as the 1980s I did a "back of the envelope" calculation, comparing selling prices of my building (which does not have deeded parking but does have more than one space per unit and has CC&Rs that require the owner of each unit to be able to lease a space at a discounted rate--to the local area mean) to a similar one up the street that does have deeded parking. The difference worked out to roughly $100,000 for a one bedroom unit--that is, a unit with deeded parking sold for $100,000 more than one without deeded parking indicating that a parking space was worth $100,000. And that was decades ago although I've recently seen other people asserting the figure is still similar.
Finally, because we have the room and we also have a fair number of people in the building (including me) who do not have their own cars there, a number of ZipCars are parked in our garage so that it's just as convenient to rent a ZipCar when a resident occasionally needs a car as it would be to have one's own.