2019.05.21 Planning Commission - Laserfiche WebLink

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Preliminary Planned Residential Development Planning Commission Report; 5-21-19 Page 33 (cont.)  While staff finds the provided data justifies the parking request for the Senior building to the north of Old Highway 8, we are not as comfortable that the data fully justifies the request to the south of Old Highway 8. Our main concern has to do with apples to apples comparison. The listed Senior buildings tended to share similar surroundings and factors, and therefore were viewed as analogous examples to the proposed senior building in New Brighton. The listed workforce housing projects, unfortunately, have a substantial differentiator: access to transit. Of the listed similar projects, staff believes the first four (Alberville Meadows, Main Street Village, Bluffs at Nine Mile Creek, and the Landings at Silver Lake) can be viewed as very similar to this proposed facility. The next four examples (Grand Central Flats, Millberry, Union Flats, and Preserve at Shady Oak) either have nearby access to Light Rail or direct access to very frequent bus service. Given that access to transit is a significant factor in how much parking should be required, staff is inclined to ignore the last four examples and only accept the first four as being pertinent to this analysis. The average parking ratio of these analogous projects is 1.87 spaces/unit.  Dominium’s Response to Staff’s Concerns: At the end of the day, Dominium is taking a financial risk that we have occupancy issues due to lack of parking for residents. We think the proposed amount, while on the low-end, is sufficient and will result in households that rent here being one-car households rather than two- car. Further, Dominium utilizes permit parking and will manage available parking accordingly. By not having too much surface parking, it also makes the underground parking more valuable and encourages residents to rent an indoor parking spot. We have a lot of mostly empty surface parking lots. Main Street Village was a market rate deal that was built 15-years ago, market rate tenants have more income and are thus more likely to have two-car households. Albertville Meadows was built 30-years ago. While we understand the City’s concern, we feel this parking amount may be tight today, it will be the right ratio in the long term. Finally, parking is extremely expensive and burdensome to affordable housing, whether land for surface parking or construction costs of underground parking. We would need additional TIF subsidy to get any more parking on this site (or to do less density to build more surface parking). We hope the City and Mayor/Council will consider our experience as well as the financial risk we are taking, as sufficient.