Winnipeg Free Press
Sunday May 8 2005
By Mary Agnes Welch
JOHN McNairnay, the city's downtown planning boss, tells a story many Winnipeggers have heard dozens of times. His brother, who works for the federal government, spent some time recently in Winnipeg, staying at a downtown high-rise hotel.
"Looking out the window, he said it looked as though something was missing," said McNairnay, "As though downtown had seen some sort of disaster, like an earthquake, and had cleaned up the mess but hadn't yet rebuilt."
The culprit? The plethora of surface parking lots, plot after plot of vacant land that makes for unpleasant walks and a gap-toothed skyline, especially in the blocks between Portage Avenue and Broadway.
Tourists like McNairnay's brother who stay at the Hotel Fort Garry, for instance, must walk past no fewer than a dozen surface lots before they reach Portage Avenue -- more if they venture into the Exchange District, the city's tourist jewel.
That points to a serious development issue that often gets overshadowed by more mundane complaints about parking tickets and confusing parkades. There are roughly 200 large surface lots in Winnipeg's downtown and countless smaller ones. Some urban planners say the barren asphalt parking lots with the ramshackle fences are dead zones, the antithesis of the sidewalk cafés, boutiques and galleries that lure people downtown.
It's tough to make an accurate comparison, but it's generally agreed that Winnipeg's downtown has more surface lots than almost any other Canadian city. In Edmonton, whose downtown has recently recovered after years in the doldrums, several Impark lots are about to be gobbled up for condo highrises. In Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto, land values are so high that there are very few surface lots. Instead, it makes economic sense to build parkades.
"I think certainly a sign of a real vibrant downtown is where land is at such a premium that it doesn't make sense to stick cars on the surface," said McNairnay.
Surface parking lots have long been seen as a symptom of Winnipeg's stagnant downtown. But prominent Winnipeg architect Steve Cohlmeyer has another, more ominous theory.
He argues that surface lots aren't a symptom, but one of the causes.
And he says the city is at a critical juncture. Unless it takes action against surface parking lots, the downtown's fragile renaissance will stall. "I think surface parking is destructive to the psyche of the city," said Cohlmeyer. "A good downtown tells the world who you are. It tells you who you are. The quality of the image we give the rest of the world is poor, and the single biggest villain is surface parking."
But downtown's surface lots are in limbo, says Cohlmeyer. Parking rates have gone up in the last few years, which has artificially inflated the value of the lots, making it unlikely the owners will turn the lots into buildings.
A stall in a surface lot now runs between $95 and $140 month. That is relatively high compared to other cities. In Edmonton and Saskatoon, the monthly rate rarely tops $100. In Vancouver's business district, an indoor parkade spot goes for not much more than $150.
That means that in Winnipeg, it is more lucrative to hang on to the lot rather than redevelop it, says Cohlmeyer. It's tough to make a compelling business case that favours building a condo complex or office tower on a surface parking lot that already reaps a decent profit.
Cohlmeyer has a client who made a very reasonable offer to buy a lot in the Exchange District. The offer was turned down because the owner knew he could make more from parking fees.
It could be years before market forces gobble up surface parking lots and spit out buildings. In the meantime, Cohlmeyer says, the city should take bold action by calculating the hidden cost of surface lots and taxing them accordingly.
If an owner sits on vacant land that is serviced by roads and water and sewer pipes, that costs the city money in lost taxes it would otherwise reap from a condo project or a six-storey office tower.
For instance, the surface lot at Hargrave Street and York Avenue pays only $8,209 in city property taxes, with another $12,276 going to the school board. Across the street, the Holiday Towers apartment building nets the city 13 times as much -- a whopping $106,203. It also pays about $124,000 in school taxes.
"We are subsidizing surface lots in an invisible way through lost revenues," said Cohlmeyer. There's another hidden cost -- developers who might have built downtown move to the suburbs instead, where land is cheaper but where the city must extend services -- repaving roads, building sewer and water lines, mowing grass, adding fire halls. Again, that costs the taxpayer money.
Say all that to Joe Diner, the colourful president of the commercial real estate firm JJ Barnicke, and get ready to duck.
"People who say there is too much parking downtown do not know their ass from a parking lot. You cannot have too much parking downtown," he said. "Am I understating this?"
Instead of trying to drag development onto existing surface lots, Diner recommends the radical reverse approach. He says a plethora of parking is the key to a vibrant downtown, and the city should even sacrifice some of the old, derelict buildings that are probably beyond redemption.
Preservationists will balk, but Diner said the best way to lure people away from the malls and into the downtown is to choose the vacant buildings that are really worth saving and turn the rest into parking lots, at least until it becomes economical to build something on the land.
"What's pretty isn't necessarily good, and what's old isn't necessarily good," said Diner. "Many things that are old are functionally and economically obsolete and do not merit salvaging."
Diner points to Galveston, Texas, now a thriving tourist town on the Gulf of Mexico that recovered from a downtown left derelict in the 1960s when the cotton trade moved to other ports.
"Some smart son-of-a-gun realized that if they selectively bulldozed high ratios of the downtown and turned it into surface parking lots, including many buildings along the waterfront, that would lay the foundation for the commercial success for the tenants in other buildings," said Diner.
They saved enough buildings to create a critical mass of cafes and shops, and made parking close-by and hassle-free, he said. Diner also disputes the notion that the downtown is swimming in parking. If there was a real surplus, you wouldn't have to pay $100 month for a stall. The bill would be more like $50 or $60.
Instead, he echoes the feeling of David Hill, the city's parking boss, when he says there is probably just the right amount of parking downtown right now.
But Diner sees a parking crunch looming, now that the downtown has begun to bloom. Four condo projects on Waterfront Drive will eat up a bunch of gravel lots in the East Exchange. The Manitoba Hydro building will bring another 2,000 commuters into the downtown, most scrambling for parking. And condos planned for the top of Portage Place could also put the squeeze on stalls.
"The guys who own parking are grinning like fools," said Diner.
Developer Arni Thorsteinson, president of Shelter Canadian Properties Ltd., owns about a dozen downtown Impark lots. He said it could be years before property prices reach that magic trigger point that prompts lot owners to build.
Rents in the downtown now run between $15 and $17 per square foot. Thorsteinson doesn't think it will make sense to build a parkade, condo tower or office building until rents reach about the $22 or $23 mark.
It costs about $2,000 per parking space to build a surface lot, which needs asphalt, signage, lighting and fencing. It's 10 times that price to build a parkade -- more the higher you build. In most cases, parking rates would have to top $200 per month to prompt a landowner to invest in a parkade.
Cohlmeyer says what he believes is the surfeit of surface lots can be traced to the 1960s, when city planners sought to encourage downtown development by altering zoning bylaws to allow taller buildings on many plots of land.
That boosted land values and spawned the development of many high-rises, such as the Sheraton Hotel and other buildings around the Convention Centre. The problem, Cohlmeyer says, is that city planners forgot to account for parking. More development requires more parking, and land was still cheap enough to merit tearing down a building for a surface lot, which is what happened.
There were few zoning rules to prohibit land-owners from creating surface lots -- no public hearings before councillors, no "conditional use" applications.
That changed last summer when the city rewrote its downtown zoning bylaw to strike a long-standing demand that most downtown developments include parking. That means if someone wants to build an office tower, one question the city won't ask is: "Do you have the required one parking stall per 2,150 square foot of floorspace?"
The new rules also make surface lots a "conditional use," meaning a public hearing is needed if a parcel is to become a lot.
Cohlmeyer called that "absolutely the right decision," perhaps the first step toward what he hopes will be a much more proactive battle against the acres and acres of underused land in the downtown.
maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca