KCRag Forum

These design documents don't do a great job of displaying the ramping in the garage. It appears to me that adding retail in the space you suggest would require removing the ramp in the garage. The garage is so compressed that it appears there are no logical additional spaces to add retail. It appears to me that Burns and Mac planned to add art or such on the wall facing Walnut to help offset this issue.

Why do they need two entrances to the parking garage?

normalthings wrote: ↑Thu Sep 06, 2018 7:27 pm These design documents don't do a great job of displaying the ramping in the garage. It appears to me that adding retail in the space you suggest would require removing the ramp in the garage. The garage is so compressed that it appears there are no logical additional spaces to add retail. It appears to me that Burns and Mac planned to add art or such on the wall facing Walnut to help offset this issue.

You wouldn't have a super voluminous space for sure. It'd likely have to have low/exposed ceilings. Their ramp percentages for the garage are what's "comfortable" when parking, not the maximum percent. So you could increase the initial ramp & landing by 1% to give you an additional few feet of head-height.

What Burns & Mac is proposing is nice aesthetically; but I'd argue you'll still have a similar effect to walking past San Francisco tower @ Crown Center. Pleasantly but dead space.

beautyfromashes wrote: ↑Thu Sep 06, 2018 7:29 pm Why do they need two entrances to the parking garage?

The two portions of garage don't actually connect. Walnut entrance goes below grade, the other above grade.

horizons82 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 06, 2018 8:24 pm The two portions of garage don't actually connect. Walnut entrance goes below grade, the other above grade.

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they not make one garage that goes both down to below grade and up for above grade portion?

Looks like they optimized the garage just about as much as they can. I'm not really going to complain. It appears like they are taking steps to reduce the anti pedestrian effects of the garage. I prefer their compressed and optimized garage over a more spread out garage with an extra store front.

beautyfromashes wrote: ↑Thu Sep 06, 2018 8:36 pm That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they not make one garage that goes both down to below grade and up for above grade portion?

Money. When we want more housing to be affordable this comes with trade offs.

I'd like a little more street activity on the ground floor but this isn't a hill I'm dying on.

Not every building has to have retail, it would be great, but this fits in the neighborhood.
All of the short, older buildings in the Crossroads have storefronts.
I don't see why every taller, new construction project should have to have multiple storefronts.
I hope this gets started soon.

anonkcmo wrote: ↑Fri Sep 07, 2018 2:28 pm Not every building has to have retail, it would be great, but this fits in the neighborhood.
All of the short, older buildings in the Crossroads have storefronts.
I don't see why every taller, new construction project should have to have multiple storefronts.
I hope this gets started soon.

It's the transparency of the ground floor we'd like, not necessarily additional retail (though I think that'd be nice too). A solid wall along Walnut does not incentivize people to walk through the area.

They could get around it with solid landscaping, but I'd like to see them have another go at the design.

anonkcmo wrote: ↑Fri Sep 07, 2018 2:28 pm Not every building has to have retail, it would be great, but this fits in the neighborhood.
All of the short, older buildings in the Crossroads have storefronts.
I don't see why every taller, new construction project should have to have multiple storefronts.
I hope this gets started soon.

This is right in the middle of a commercial district, surrounded by commercial buildings, a few hundred feet from the closest thing the city has to a mass transit line. If the city weren't (almost) always one step behind on things, there would be clear zoning guidelines establishing a minimum level of commercial space for each project so that city planning officials wouldn't have to make decisions on an ad hoc basis. It's fine to have single-use residential in peripheral areas which have no potential to draw crowds, but the flip side of that is that projects in locations like this need to make good use of their ground floor. The project at 20th and Broadway has the same problems as this one. You keep building stuff like that, and you're failing to build upon the characteristics that drew people to the neighborhood in the first place.

I think the only way they could fit retail in the space would be to lower the entrance below street level

kas1 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 08, 2018 6:29 am
You keep building stuff like that, and you're failing to build upon the characteristics that drew people to the neighborhood in the first place.

What period are you talking about?

It was an industrial district edged by single family homes
Then it was an industrial district with lots of parking
Then it was a post-industrial district with lots of parking
Then it turned into a artsy post-industrial residential district with lots of parking
that’s now turning into a multiple use district with lots of parking

At nearly every stage most projects are single use buildings.

It’s only in the last 3 years or so that mixed use is common.

You keep building stuff like that, and you're failing to build upon the characteristics that drew people to the neighborhood in the first place.

This neighborhood became complete the day that I first visited/moved in. All changes before I arrived built it’s histroic character. All changes after are attempts by greedy developers to ruin the historic neighborhood.
#Make Surface Lots Great Again

This development isn’t all that bad. I feel like they did a pretty good job with this one. They added a rooftop bar and a street level shop. The garage is relatively compact and not oversized. Plus, they are maintaining the alley! It appears to me like they are attempting to add some sort of art or 3D facade to Walnut and that the Alley is the only completely blank wall of this development. I don’t know how they could add retail in the highlighted space without making the garage wider or longer and thus taking out the alley or a surrounding building. They could put in a half sub level retail space like they do in Saigon, but those types of spaces aren’t super popular here.

NOT RETAIL. Walkability, pedestrian oriented. NOT BLANK WALLS.

grovester wrote: ↑Sat Sep 08, 2018 7:57 pm NOT RETAIL. Walkability, pedestrian oriented. NOT BLANK WALLS.

if every block had three retail shops on it that would be more than 500 stores just in the crossroads. That’s not a very large percentage of the space either.

You would quickly find that most storefronts would be empty most of the time.

At the very least they should put residences at ground level. The garage could go up another half level in exchange. There’s projects doing this downtown.

All urban areas intending to expand urbanity should target as much contiguous pedestrian scale experience as possible, no blank walls as much as possible. It doesn't have to be storefronts initially but developers can still target storefront space that is first used for storage, lounge, exercise room, conference room, etc. that eventually adapts to retail when conditions are right, even if 20+ years later.

Need to think decades out when factoring development impact to future urbanity. And developers need to factor integration into buildings next door, not create isolated islands. Not doing so is lost opportunity to expand/improve thoughtful pedestrian experience. Unfortunately there are a few too many suburban minded developers who don't think in urban context - by not creating contiguous pedestrian experiences factoring what's around, instead thinking about just the project as an island in itself.

normalthings wrote: ↑Thu Sep 06, 2018 7:27 pm These design documents don't do a great job of displaying the ramping in the garage. It appears to me that adding retail in the space you suggest would require removing the ramp in the garage. The garage is so compressed that it appears there are no logical additional spaces to add retail. It appears to me that Burns and Mac planned to add art or such on the wall facing Walnut to help offset this issue.

ART DOES NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM.

DaveKCMO wrote: ↑Wed Sep 12, 2018 6:53 am

normalthings wrote: ↑Thu Sep 06, 2018 7:27 pm These design documents don't do a great job of displaying the ramping in the garage. It appears to me that adding retail in the space you suggest would require removing the ramp in the garage. The garage is so compressed that it appears there are no logical additional spaces to add retail. It appears to me that Burns and Mac planned to add art or such on the wall facing Walnut to help offset this issue.

ART DOES NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM.

Awnings for shade would do a lot more than art.

Approved by PortKC.