Sound like some of Kane’s North Hills apartment properties are going to start charging tenants $50/month per vehicle for parking. I would think they will start heavily enforce 2 hr parking for the retail and start to issue parking permits for office tenants in surface lots.
This will probably outrage a lot of people as they are used to “free parking” everywhere and we don’t have a public transit system to support car free living, so I am curious how this impacts future development in the area and if the surrounding neighborhood will see increased street parking.
I used to work at Advance Auto and about a year ago they split the employees into two groups, those that could park in the main tower and those that couldn’t, because people complained about having to drive up to the 8th or 9th floor to find parking if you got to the office around 9 am or later (why they didn’t just make it first come first serve and provide an overflow option is beyond me). The option for those that couldn’t park in the tower was a deck further down past the office/assisted living facility buildings. Probably an 8-10 min walk from the tower.
This resulted in a ton of people parking in the residential decks, street parking, the HT deck, etc. (especially when it rained or was hot). After a couple of months, those decks started to get repainted to signify 2 hour retail and residential parking rather than free parking. Felt like it was only a matter of time until more parking changes were implemented in this area.
I don’t know this but is the apartment residents parking separated from the retail in the sense you have to go through a gate. If not that is the solution as most apartment complexes in Charlotte with garages have separate retail parking from the resident parking. If Kane does that people might move out if they dont immediately work there and with plenty of choices around Raleigh these days it would be easy to find a place. Wonder if this is only on new leases?
Unbundling parking from rent rewards tenants that are either car-free or only have one vehicle.
I paid a discounted ($80-$90) per month parking fee for the municipal deck next door to Skyhouse for our vehicle. This rate compares with I think a $125 monthly rate I paid for an employee parking space in a City deck when I had office space on Fayetteville.
But now we have free parking in our current apartment community with its own deck although currently car-free.
Two cars? Twice the expense if unbundled. Seems fair.
With the conversation being about autonomous vehicles and the increasing cost of parking across the city, I believe Kane and other residential developers should consider partnering with Zipcar and or other car-sharing services.
My old place in Boston had two or so Zipcars for people in the complex to rent and use (mainly to go shopping). There were also Zipcar street parking spaces in dense neighborhoods in Downtown.
We need something like that to be replicated here, along with the conversion of most parking spots on high pedestrian trafficked streets into: handicap, delivery, Zipcar, bike-share & scooter-share, and outdoor seating
If Kane thinks he can fix the parking situation with high-tech meter maids, he’s sadly deluded. The problems run deeper.
As North Hills continues to grow, it’s facing some existential questions. Is it an up-market suburban strip mall, a New Urbanist village, or an actual mixed-used satellite city? Kane should pick a vision and stick with it, instead of trying to be everything to everyone and not doing anything particularly well.
The Main Street USA vibe was always tacky, but it’s really at odds with the newer developments. Maybe it’s supposed to remind us of small-town America that no longer exists, but it’s really not consistent with the direction North Hills has been heading. The design standards are all over the place, and the place isn’t remotely coherent for drivers, pedestrians or shoppers. Why does a Chik-Fil-A need five-layer crown molding at the roofline? Why does a movie theater need fake porthole windows on its false second-story massing? So many questions…
And the aesthetic issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Why are there little roads cutting through the entire site, encouraging drivers to look for a handful of “streetside” parking spaces that are always taken instead of pushing them toward the parking garages? Why are garages (mostly) inaccessible from city roads, forcing drivers to circulate through the development just to stow their vehicle? All that surface-level car infrastructure needs to go. It’s a poor use of space and deeply compromises what is otherwise a passable pedestrian experience.
I had brought this issue up in another topic a while back:
I think a decent amount of traffic problems around North Hills stems from this. As you said, just funnel everyone into easily accessible parking decks so they don’t waste time trying to get one of the few streetside parking spots.
I confess that I’m an engineer who’s not bothered much about aesthetics. There’s no consistent aesthetic in DTR, either. As for traffic, the reality is that 98% of the workers and shoppers at NH don’t live within walking distance – and at most the percentage might decline to 90%. GoRaleigh isn’t offering any solution. Neither Kane nor the City developed a master plan for NH, and the incremental development that’s taken place has put the street layout and traffic flow on a trajectory that resembles the spaghetti of Boston’s North End.
Admittedly I don’t know much about aesthetics and that’s not my main concern. The point is that these wildly mismatched styles are a symptom of a site plan that’s changed radically over 20+ years. I’m also not arguing that everything needs to look the same or conform to the same design standards. “Organic” growth and a mix of forms is what makes cities interesting. But this is not that. Competing visions are literally stacked on top of each other, jockeying for attention, in a way that degrades the overall experience. As long as North Hills continues to get built up haphazardly, without a real long-range plan, it will continue to suffer growing pains, parking issues among them.
i lived in hickory hollow after ‘new north hills’ was up and running…i rode my bike there easily, it just a neighborhood jaunt. and if i did drive it was jsut a neighborhood drive. i guess if you were on the lassiter mill side it was roughly the same. i know its worse now traffic wise but what is the average 3 mile drive per time for evening dining or weekend shopping?
There area few in Charlotte. I’d happily build car-free buildings in Chapelboro, if they’d allow anything at all to be built.
The biggest shift that happens with removing parking requirements isn’t that parking vaporizes overnight. It creates a lot more flexibility with how parking is provided: mechanically stacked parking, tandem parking, different paving, shared or off-site parking. It used to be that you’d lay out a site by first seeing how many parking spaces were possible, then working back from that to the size of the building – now, parking doesn’t drive (ha) the pro forma.
Re: paid parking at North Hills, there was a huge ruckus over introducing paid parking in one corner of suburban NoVa a few years back:
Is it just me, or is it strange that this article mainly focuses on people complaining about how hard it is to park near a bar? Making parking more convenient essentially makes it easier for people to drive after drinking, which only increases the risk of drunk driving. Sure, there are responsible folks who have a drink or two and head home, but the real concern is the many others who drink more than that and still want to hop in their SUV and hit the highway.
I didnt get that at all. Sure, it starts at the world of beer, but it moved on to the deterimental effect on community, which socializing with colleagues after work is an example of. So is the loss of the running club.
or a tram… 
