Re: underground parking- insights from ski country
From: mark a demaio (mdemaiojuno.com)
Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2002 12:53:01 -0700 (MST)
As county engineer in Alpine County, CA, home of 1200 people (12000
people on busy ski weekends) and 2 ski areas and 30' of annual snowfall ,
there are some disturbing trends we're trying to change in the way the
areas just outside the centrally controlled ski area villages area being
developed and area-ly limitited. typically when the master resort
developer sells smallish subdivision lots to condo/townhouse developer's
they loose control over determining how access is gained to the parking.
developer's often come to us with low initial cost build out proposals
that include long shared driveways (some with snow melt which tends to
fail over time)which must be plowed and/or snow moved elsewhere. we're
trying to avert these long driveways by having the developer's provide
short drives to parking garages, but underground parking is costly. and
flatland developer's often come to us first with thier conceptual plans
half completed, and have a tough time redisigning for reality of the
mountain environment. a recent subdivision has employee units (small 2br)
with monthly maintenance fees of over $400, a sinificant portion of which
goes to accomodate snow melt. if you were to amortize the snow melt/ snow
removal function into the initial cost, and increased density, could you
afford the underground parking? also, larger underground structures are
cheaper to build per unit parking than smaller ones. when done well,
there are examples of ski development companies that basically build a
new urbanism type development/village on top of a very large parking
garage (squaw valley, california's parking lot development by intrawest).
this works particularly well in areas where the high land
costs/desireability helps the parking garages pencil out. an interesting
point is that resident/developers and owner/developers have a better
ability to figure these post completion costs into thier long term bottom
line.

with the villages not completed yet, these suburban type projects tend to
provide the limits within which a village type pedestrian oriented
atmoshere so desireable in resort hubs can be built out

one of the things we're working on at the county level is a CDBG planning
grant which will identify ski area employees as an eligible population
for low to mod income housing, and hopefully pull in a community type
consultant experinced in coop formation to help form a group. whether it
becomes cohousing or something more along the lines of a coop- who knows.
it would be interesting to know how to overcome the issues that led to
aspen's common ground converting their common space(i think) and
abandoning the coho concept. based on where this group finds land
(probably not too close to the village), it will be interesting to see
whether they can afford or not afford to have underground parking. some
of this discussion of  underground parking convertability on the list is
interesting in that if a group could reduce vehicle ownership, could the
potential future value of the underground spaces (and alternative uses to
parking) help justify the initial cost? could a competitive no car fee
reduction also work?



Mark DeMaio, PE, Concord (CA) Oasis Ecohousing
Seeking future owners for a new straw bale flexible floor plan home.
Interested and working on multi-place based ecoresort community concepts,
and growing the cohousing movement from alternative directions/ models
(ask me!)
925-687-2560(message), 530-694-9501(weekday eves), concord [at] ecohousing.org
websites under construction: www.ecohousing.org 
http://communities.msn.com/ecohouse
newspaper article(s):
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/12/29/HO110081.DTL

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