Quote:
Originally Posted by smArTaLlone
We will definitely have to agree to disagree. I think you make some good points but aside from your own personal preference for one store over another, I am more convinced than ever that a mega store is absolutely wrong for Underground. It would require people to drive from miles around just to sustain it thus the need for a huge amount of parking and making it more susceptible to closure.
For decades, downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods have been gutted with projects (both buildings and transportation projects) designed primarily for ease and comfort of visitors; whether they are visitors from another state or from another county in the suburbs and it has come to the detriment of livability within the neighborhood itself. It speaks volumes that as you and others have described those parking decks are so full yet Underground itself has for years been a colossal failure as a retail establishment. This cannot continue if it is to ever become the kind of place where people want to live and work.
I agree with you that what you have described is the reality. But it doesn't have to remain that way. We will get the kind of city that we plan and design for the city to be. If we keep making these same mistakes then we will keep getting the same results downtown. Some of us simply believe that we have got to start building a city and specifically downtown as Street Advocate put it for its residents.
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smArTaLlone help me understand your logic:
*Can we both agree there is only 1 mega store (grocery) involved in this development?
*We can agree per WRS's site plan the grocery store is 80K sq. Per code, WRS needs to build 5 parking spaces for every 1K sq of retail
*Therefore, the grocery store requires 400 parking spaces. Or <12% of the total 3500 parking spaces in the proposed development.
So you are saying these
400 parking spaces are so egregious and anti-urban that you would like the projected terminated along with the additional 175K sq of retail, 320 hotel rooms and 1000 residential units because of 400 f'en parking spaces? Honestly, this is one of the most absurd things I have ever read here. My apologies in advance if this sounds like an attack, but this blows my mind...
I asked shivtim this question and he/she for whatever reason chose not to answer it. Related Group is building a 77K sq grocery store in Midtown. Did you not support that project as well? If you did, help me understand why it is OK for Midtown to have a "mega store", but not Downtown?