Parking Plans Problematic for Business Owners

The planning to revitalize the Parkview Gardens area has been under consideration for months. Meetings have been held; plans revised and then revised again.

The draft plan is nearly complete. It will be before the University City Plan Commission Wednesday. The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. in the fifth-floor council chambers at .

There is a public comment period scheduled during the meeting but some of the stakeholders are feeling as though their voices haven't been heard throughout the planning process.

Several business owners in the Loop plan to attend Wednesday's meeting to speak out against changes in the plan which they believe will hurt their businesses. At the heart of their complaint is a phrase in the plan regarding shared parking. More specifically, the parking in question is the free public lot behind .

The retailers and restaurant owners believe the use of the following sentence in the plan will allow for changes to the lot in the future without the imput of the business owners. The sentence reads:

We strongly urge a restructuring of the existing parking code to maximize the sustainability of the future plan. Simply taking a position of "the existing conditions work now, so we will allow the same ratios to continue in the future" is not enough. Such a position will fail to fully leverage future investment in the area. Code adjustments will send signals to the development and financial communities that the TOD philosophy, if adopted, cand and will translate into economic opportunity for them and their future clients/tenants.

The owners believe the statement allows the city to allow the lot to be developed, losing the 400 free spaces of parking for Delmar Loop businesses. The Special Business District is requesting the phrase regarding the lot and all photos that go along with it be stricken from the plan.

A structured parking lot on the site would impact business, owners fear. They say that the lot across from the is rarely used and that women patrons in particular will stay away from parking garages at night.

A unique aspect to the Loop has been the availability of free parking, owners argued.

The Loop Special Business District sent a letter to the Plan Commission to address its concerns with any plans to change the north surface parking lot to anything but surface parking.

The District's objections are as follows:

• The lack of available large scale surface parking was a major factor in the demise of The Loop as a viable retail and commercial center following World War II.
• The creation of the North Surface Parking Lot by the Land Clearance Authority in the mid-1960's (and later expanded by the City Administration) provided the essential missing piece of development infrastructure that set the stage for almost four decades of new investment, and the hard work and vision which brought about revitalization of the entire Loop area.
• Garage parking spaces are seldom an adequate replacement for lost surface parking spaces. Additionally, structured parking will come at a cost—all spaces, both surface adn garage, will likely attract a "parking charge" in order to pay for the new structured parking.
• Past and present experience indicates that most people in our region prefer to use surface parking and are less likely to patronize a business district if it is perceived that surface parking is inadequate or that they may be required to use a parking garage that they perceive as less convenient and less secure than a well-lighted surface parking lot.
• No amount of capital and/or retail demand can make up for a real or perceived shortage of surface parking. Examples of this dynamic exist throughout the region and in The Loop. The revitalization of the eastern part of The Loop is now accelerated because of Joe Edwards' investment in 300-plus new surface parking spaces.
• The Loop should not be handicapped by structured parking in its competition with other retail, restaurant and entertainment regions within this region.
• While the North Surface Lot obviously serves these areas with immediate adjacency, it also acts as a secondary parking location or "home base" when other smaller surface lots are unavailable or deemed less convenient or less safe.
• If the City is interested in creating additional commercial/retail activity in The Loop, it should consider increasing the size of the North Surface Parking Lot rather than shrinking the surface parking infrastructure that is the envy of every other commercial district in the region and is essential to the survival of existing commercial/retail activity in the entire Looop area.
• The vibrancy of The Loop is relatively new and still-fragile economic phenomeenon. Because of someone's haste to accommodate developers who covet easy-to-develop, already assembled, large tracts of urban land; and/or consultants that advocate unproven and experimental development strategies, we are now being asked to take on unacceptable risk in exchange for the hypothetical benefit of denser commercial/retail/residential development promised by consultants with no skin in the game.

A History of the Plan

The City of University City, Missouri has been awarded a $315,687 grant for “Parkview Gardens: A Sustainable and Accessible Neighborhood” to create a redevelopment and sustainability plan for the Parkview Gardens area of the City that will be leveraged with $317,813 in local cash and in-kind contributions.

This project will expand upon recent planning efforts in the Parkview Gardens area. The City and area stakeholders recognized that Parkview Gardens was in need of fundamental revitalization, so in February 2009 the City initiated a partnership with in St. Louis and the Parkview Gardens Association to undertake a long-range design and implementation plan for the three municipal parks in the Parkview Gardens neighborhood.

The Parkview Gardens Association is comprised of landlords, business owners and residents of the area. It has been working to maintain and enhance the neighborhood for more than 28 years and has bought and renovated over 20 buildings in the area. A special tax on local property owners and businesses, administered by two Special Business Districts, pays for these neighborhood improvements.

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