The City of Victoria owns or operates five parkades. I do not know what the ownership status of the one in the building with the downtown public library and I think there is a strong need for the City to own the Centennial Square parkade but there are three more that are stand alone parking structures.
- View Street Parkade
- Johnson Street Parkade
- Yates Street Parkade
The City could sell the three stand alone parkades and reap a multitude of benefits
- The City would free up money tied up in the land which could be used to pay down some of the infrastructure debt of the City
- The City would get property taxes from these properties
- The City would reduce the size of the permanent staff - there various long term subtle benefits in doing this
- Properties that currently some of the worst eyesores in the City could be redeveloped.
- The pricing for parking Downtown will better reflect the market value of the parking
When you look around town, the three stand alone City owned parkades are some of the worst eyesores going. The Yates Street parkade is a completely out of keeping with Old Town. The parkade reduces the heritage nature of quick a significant part of the core of the centre of town.
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Johnson Street between Douglas and Blanshard is one the deadest streets in Downtown and a large reason for this is the parkade mid street which is the largest one the City owns. The parkade is not the only, the backside of the movie theater adds an even more imposing monolith on the south side of the street. The redevelopment of this site would build a better connection between Old Town through to areas near Harris Green.
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The City of Victoria also owns a number of surface parking lots of which only one strikes me as one that could be sold - 820 Courtney Street. This property is in the range of 10,000 square feet and could support a four to five story office building on it and bring in around $300,000 in property taxes, significantly more than is collected in parking fees from the site.
I really can not see many down sides to the City selling the parkades and significant numbers of benefits if it were to happen.
3 comments:
Good idea, a little common sense for the cash cow that irritates downtown shoppers and tourist get rid of the conflict of interest and try selling the city instead of irritating everyone to pad your silo empires. rak
You are asking the downtown core to reduce off-street parking by over 1100 spaces. These parking spaces help keep parking pricing lower for shoppers and users of the downtown. May not be wise to eliminate that many spaces long-term spaces. Many folks use those parkades for over 2 hours. If the City sold them are we telling people to not drive downtown at all? There also seem to be many sites available for Class A building that are just either not selling or not being built on. Is there a need for 3 or 4 more Class A buildings? Oh and the City does not own the parking lot on the corner of Courtney and Blanshard.
If one requires parking to be available under any new buildings at the parkade locations there would not be a full loss of the parking spaces.
Yes, there are locations available for new buildings in the City, but not in the core of downtown. If there is no interest there would be no change.
As to the parking lot at 820 Courtney Street, I assumed the City owns it because it is on their website as one of their surface parking lots. Why would the City be managing it if they do not own it?
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