On Parking
Give a guest one free drink a year and you’ve got a patron for life. Give him 364 free drinks a year and charge him just once, and he’ll never come back.
- A wise bartender
A note on parking? It must be a slow news month if I’m talking about parking. But for some reason it has consumed my life recently. Maybe yours, too. Currently we are negotiating to buy two entirely different properties, and they both have their own parking issues. And recently I was invited to participate on a ULI Technical Assistance Panel to advise the city of Atlanta on its long-term parking plans (life at Revel isn’t all movie premiers and gallery openings)
I make sexy parking time. Is nice.
I promise this won’t be a commentary on transit v cars v ride-share (trick question: vintage Triumphs) but instead a question both harder and simpler. How much parking does your project actually need? The answer: a lot less than you think.
For us retail people, it is easy to say we need all the parking and point fingers at everyone else: the apartment developers won’t share, the office owners insist on having 12: 1,000, and the industrial guys. . . okay so I don’t actually know any industrial guys, but I bet they’re fascists about parking too.
As for retail parking? It is always the easy scapegoat when a project underperforms. We were asked by the owners of an underperforming luxury retail development to help them re-position and re-lease the project, and time and again we heard from anyone we asked that “the problem was parking.”
The problem wasn’t parking. Don’t get me wrong, the parking was not ideal. It was poorly signed and the validation system was unclear. The municipality let you park your car at the curb for four hours without moving. But even if you solved the parking inefficiencies you wouldn’t have solved the bigger problem: it wasn’t a place that people wanted to visit.
At Revel we aren’t anti-parking by any stretch. We love street parking. We love 20-minute only surface spots. We can’t remember life without ParkMobile. We really love old-timey angled street parking, even though nobody wants to let you do that anymore (boo). We think 1111 Lincoln Road is radical.
We are anti-bad parking. And there is a lot of bad parking out there: too much underutilized, under-shared, hard to navigate, hard to find (signage!), poorly lit, dirty, treeless, oversized parking. Too much free parking with too little paid thought.
Turn-offs include mean people, ugly parking
So to our friends and clients out there, a few friendly words of free parking advice (worth, as my father would tell you, exactly what you paid for it):
To apartment developers and lenders: please share. Hoarding your parking behind a gate behind another gate is driving your costs up and your deal flow down. We know that you have real security concerns, and that online guest reviews will trash you for “unavailable” parking – they do it to retail too – but if you deliver a well-conceived product in a great location, your residents won’t be so bothered. A friend and I bought some apartments in the Old 4th Ward without parking, and not one single resident seems to care.
To office owners: I hate to be the guy to tell you that your parking is ugly. . . but your parking is ugly. Spice it up. Go check out the parking deck at Century Park in LA. It’s lovely. Brightly lit, fully painted, easily navigated. It has its own landscaping! Your patron’s first impression when they come to your building is the parking deck: why do you let them look so bad?
To my fellow retail owners and our tenants: mellow out. If we deliver something authentic, something hospitable, something unique that people want to come to, then they’ll find a way to get there. The Atlanta Beltline draws millions annually: where, exactly, is the parking lot for that again?
Focus on shrinking your lots, on making them human-scale, on creative signage and easy navigation, and don’t forget to actually plan for retail employee parking. And pray that you have too many cars and not enough spaces. As my friend David Levine likes to say, if you don’t have a parking problem then you've got a real problem.
If you want to be a commodity, then provide acres of commoditized parking. If you want to be a destination, then focus on building a great place. Abundant parking doesn’t make bad places better, and limited parking won’t make great places worse.
And to everyone: charge for parking. We’ve been giving our guests free drinks for decades now. They don’t appreciate it, and we’re going broke in the process.
City Guide, Moscow
In September we had the opportunity to spend some time back in the USSR, and it was quite a trip. The retail is a little odd: either European luxury brands or tchotchke shops selling Dallas Cowboys matryoshka dolls (true story). But the people were lovely, the museums enticing, the ruble was cheap and the food and drink was excellent. Some of the highlights:
White Rabbit
The “World’s Fifty Best” restaurant list gets a lot of flack in these woke times, but White Rabbit deserves to be on it (it’s Chef’s Table episode is one of the best). Sit at the bar, ask for Yuri, get the Beluga caviar with “cocolardo” and the rabbit pâté, and enjoy.
Depo
Food hall developers of the world, unite! Moscow is no stranger to the global food hall epidemic, with five and counting. I’m rarely impressed anymore, but Depo was an exception: I’m very jealous I didn’t build it. Over 150,000 sf of F+B and retail in a converted bus barn. It was banging on the afternoon I went, and if social media is to be believed, the evenings are even crazier.
A nice walking tour of the luxury high streets would start at TsUM Department Store, then onto Kuznetsky Most (street), then to Tsverskaya Street, the Garden Ring Road, and ending on Arbat Street. In the middle of all of it is the 120 year old Eliseevsky Market, which is definitely worth a visit. Why don’t we put chandeliers in grocery stores any more?
Hotel Metropol.
There are plenty of new five star hotels in Moscow, from the Four Seasons to the St. Regis to the Ararat Park Hyatt. In the middle of them all is the Belle Epoque gem Hotel Metropol. The bar is open all night, the staff is incredibly helpful, and if you leave your windows open you can wake up to the bells of Saint Basil’s Cathedral.
We are so thankful for the positive feedback these notes get, as well as the requests from new people to be included. If you’d like to subscribe, email info@revelre.co and we’ll be sure to add you to the list.
Cheers,
G