Angostura

LOL at "heavy pedestrian activity".

I would gladly trade an 80-ft height restriction and/or 6.0 FAR cap outside the CBD for elimination of setbacks and parking minimums citywide (or even just ITL).

Multiple small buildings. Shared structured parking. I wish more of our development could look like this without it all being done by a single developer. (Unfortunately our development rules make that all but impossible.)

It wouldn't be a huge step. There's already one block that's closed to traffic, and all through the CBD it's essentially local access only. Trying to drive down long stretches of Main is a mistake most people only make once.

If this is going to be an innovation corridor, I'd like to see if developed in a more fine-grained manner, rather than one company having 5M s.f. of space.

Pouring the slab this morning.

Would love for Braun to go vertical with the parking here, and use the extra spaces to develop the parking lot south of Torchy's.

Ascension OUT, Common Bond IN @ Waterworks.

Hopdoddy will be just across the patio.

I think this is probably true. I don't want additional requirements. I just want the current ones lifted. Zero minimums doesn't mean zero parking. Even in the CBD/Midtown, where parking minimums are zero, there's still parking. I'd just like to see it (a) decoupled from individual developments, and (b) priced at something close to the cost of providing it. This would allow small-scale development (standalone stores, restaurants, etc. vs strip centers) to occur, and would provide an environment for centralized parking structures to be built (which starts to make sense at land values not much different from where they are now in the Heights). Any externalities can easily be dealt with by pricing on-street parking more rationally.

Whether residents like it or not, what we're doing now if financially untenable in the long run. A s.f. of land in the Heights with two-stories worth of building on it might be taxed at a valuation $400 or more. That same s.f. of land dedicated to parking is taxed at a valuation of $60, but still requires the same about of infrastructure (water & sewer pipes, drainage, streets and sidewalks) to support it. Low-density development doesn't generate enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure it takes to support it, let alone the other costs of running a city. A lot of towns and cities are starting to find this out the hard way.

How about we make everyone bear their own costs, businesses and residents alike? I understand what the intentions were behind parking minimums, and the fact that they're almost universal in this country shows they must be popular, but there have been some serious unintended consequences. Back when "excessive" street parking was first becoming an issue, we had two choices: increase the price of on-street parking to discourage its use or subsidize off-street parking by requiring businesses to include it. We chose the latter. As a result, development got a lot less dense and less walkable, so a higher and higher proportion of patrons arrive by car. We're now in a situation where SO MANY people arrive by car that even with outrageous parking minimums (like 14 spaces per 1000 s.f. for a bar), there's still a lot overflow parking on neighborhood streets. Eventually we need to realize that the remedy is causing the disease.

You can do 25% of your requirement offsite, provided it's for your exclusive use, and provided it's within 500-ft. If you have full-time valet, it can be up to 75%, but still has to be exclusive during the hours you're open. I'm not sure what the standard for "clogged" is. If it's that cars can't get through, then parking should be restricted to one side of the street, or the street should be converted to one-way traffic. If a street can't function when more or less 100% of the legal parking is occupied, then it's a design issue. But in general, if you price a good at less than its value, it will tend to be over-consumed. Just having a "free" valet-only lot will tend to push a lot of restaurant parking onto adjacent streets where it's actually free. Price on-street parking correctly and the problem goes away.

Catty corner from this site. This is the SW corner of 11th and Rutland. Looks like the little bungalow on the site will be demo'd for parking.

No parking minimums doesn't mean no parking. There are no parking minimums in the CBD, but there seems to be plenty of parking. It's just not free. Same with most of midtown. What parking minimums do is require EACH development to provide parking, so there's no incentive to have centralized, shared parking facilities. Would it be so terrible if there were a parking structure or two on Washington, or White Oak, or 19th that allowed all the surface lots to be developed into useful places? It also makes small-scale development really expensive. If you do a 5000 s.f. standalone restaurant, you need another 15,000 s.f. of land for the 50 parking spaces the regs require. But if you add a dry cleaner and a check cashing place to the same building, now you're a "neighborhood shopping center", and you only need 5 spaces per 1000 s.f., so you can build 10,000 s.f. with the same number of spaces. This is why we see so many restaurants in strip centers. If you de-couple development from parking and price on-street parking correctly, the market will sort it out pretty quickly. Cute.

Sola on 20th is about that size.

Ever wonder why that land, which seems to generate next to zero revenue, but carries a $10,000 tax bill, hasn't been developed? Let's assume the planning commission grants a variance to match the building line of their neighbors, a BIG "if". If someone wanted to build, say, a furniture store, they would have to find space to park 12 cars. For a clothing boutique or wine store (we can have those now): 24 cars. How about a barber shop? 48 cars. God forbid they try and build a restaurant (60 cars) or a bar (84 cars). We've essentially made it illegal to redevelop that plot of land, meaning it will remain a scrap yard until we change the regulations that keep it that way.

If by shopping mall you mean a narrow pedestrian corridor with shops on both sides, then I suppose you might be right. Except for the roof, the design conformity, and the lack of an ocean of parking surrounding it. But if shopping malls mostly looked like this: or this: ...people would probably think they're pretty great.

That's exactly right. (Availability of financing for mega-projects over the last 70 years or so is also a factor, though.) A lot of great neighborhoods in the US would be illegal to build today.

That density is a pre-requisite for walkable is not a controversial statement. Neither is the fact that parking minimums and setbacks are a hindrance to density. I don't think cars are bad, but when you design the built environment around cars rather than around people, cities tend to be the worse for it. If you design places for people (mostly narrow streets within neighborhoods, linked by larger arterials, roads and freeways), you will naturally get less traffic (since things are closer together, people don't have to drive as far to get to them, and a higher percentage of trips are taken on foot). Here's a map of the old section of 19th St. The red and yellow areas dedicated to cars, the blue areas to people. Even in the most walkable part of the neighborhood, half the area is dedicated to cars and car storage. Zoom out, and it gets a lot worse. Imagine how much more places there would be to walk to if we used some of that car space to build actual places for people. As to why so many of these "new urbanist" developments look articial: it's because they are. Authentically urban places were built incrementally, on small plots (25 to 50-ft frontage), with zero lateral or front setbacks. So you would get blockfaces that look like this, where every ten steps or so, you've got something new and different to see. It's fun and interesting to walk along a block like that. Our current development rules (specifically lateral setbacks and parking minimums) make it next to impossible to build like that anymore. Instead, it makes sense to develop large plots of land, centralize the parking, and build a small number of huge structures so you don't need to have setbacks between individual tenants. So what could we do to create an organic, "old-urbanist"-feeling area? Change the rules to let small-scale development happen once again. Here's one idea: Close 19th St to car traffic from Yale to Ashland. Build a parking garage in place of that surface lot next to Sand Dollar. Sell the land currently occupied by the roadway on 19th, the middle 50 feet of the 80-ft right-of-way, in small plots (25, 33 and 50-ft frontage) with zero setbacks, zero parking minimums, and, say, a 50-ft height restriction. People could build shops, restaurants, townhouses, small-scale multi-family buildings, or flats-over-retail. Whatever. The land sale alone would fetch at least $6M for the city, not to mention the additional sales and property taxes. And we'd have an amazing pedestrian amenity that would be packed every weekend because there's nothing else in the city quite like it.

Placement of the building is important for the streetscape, but as long as we have parking minimums, we'll never get the kind of density needed to have any meaningful walkability. You can't have walkability without density, and you can have density if your city's layout dedicates 25% of land area to automobile right-of-way, and half of what's left to off-street parking. Even 19th St, cited in another comment, has about ~50% of the land area dedicated to cars. Only the north face of 19th between Ashland and Rutland is predominantly street-facing. (It would be illegal to be a similar development today.) Between Rutland and Yale, about half the frontage is parking.

The Sunny Food Store was the first off-premise beer/wine licensee in the formerly dry Heights, but the first new establishment to open with an off-premise license if finally set to open: Italian-America Grocery Store, next to Gelazzi. TABC permits were issued all the way back in April of last year. Congrats to owners on the opening.

It's the back windows that face downtown. The garage fronts Oxford, the hotel fronts Columbia.

It's terrible, so my money's on yes.

They have the sitework and foundation permits, but the permits for the actual construction haven't been re-submitted yet. I wonder if the entire garage structure is covered by the foundation permit.