Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
Problem is that retailers want customer parking that actually attracts customers, and they only want to staff one door. If you're leasing space for your laundromat, UPS Store, or dry cleaners, you won't voluntarily choose a place with parking in the back. The person driving down Milwaukee won't think of it as convenient if he can't see a parking space, and the person walking down Milwaukee won't mind walking across 30 feet of parking lot.
Clybourn taught some sobering lessons in the early 90s to those of us who thought it would work to "just put the parking in the back." Those shopping centers didn't lease nearly as well, and one failed completely.
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(Note: this is still the same person behind JV_325i but for some reason I have been unable to enter my account--when I try to sign in the screen goes blank, nothing happens, the ccPxySvc.exe process goes haywire, my CPU usage maxes out, and I have to restart my machine. No idea what is going on. This new name works perfectly, however.)
I'm not going to argue the rationality behind the economics of the situations that cause developers to produce parking schemes such as the one posted by me above. I am, however, going to argue their aesthetic value, namely that they devalue the neighborhood aesthetic significantly. The emotional aspect of the situation is therefore exerting its influence into the economic equation in the opposite direction: some people
do have a problem with walking across 30 feet of parking lot with their laundry, all the while dodging idiotic motorists backing up and maneuvering as they please without the slightest idea of who happens to be walking in their vicinity (these people who do not want to do this include myself). Granted, the counter-productive force of this side of the equation is not nearly enough to shift the economics to an extent such that developers will not desire to place parking in the way as has been done in the afforementioned strip mall. Hence, some type of governmental body over and above the power of the free market must step in to insure that developments like the one above are simply not allowed to produce such iterations of their desired plans. As impractical (and perhaps impossible) as that may be and as much as that means I may be wasting my breath it does
not change how I feel about the matter, and there are plenty of other people that feel the same way that I do. I'm all for being pragmatic about things, but not to such an extent that it consistently influences me to accept things that are antithetical to the way I want things to be.
What if it was simply mandated throughout the entire city that parking must be placed in locations that do not face a street and/or major pedestrian thoroughfare? And what if this mandate was highly publicized and announced to the citizens of Chicago such that people
would know that parking for places that provided off-street parking would be in a location not so obvious as facing the street. And if they didn't know this they could spend five minutes of their time doing the obvious thing of investigating the parking scheme of a business that they planned on patronizing. If this mandate was city-wide, then every potential developer and retailer would be on a level playing field. Would all of the people of Chicago abstain from doing things such as doing their laundry or shopping for stuff at CVS? Certainly not.
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