KCRag Forum

beautyfromashes wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 10:08 am These garages should be open all the time, not just during the weekend. We need people making daily trips to shop, workout, get groceries, eat, fix a phone, etc, not just a weekend entertainment district.

Making the garages open outside of business hours during the week would be a start.

Do you really want people from car dependent areas to come into the center city just to buy groceries or for other short necessities trips? It seems to me like that would shoot up traffic and parking demand.

I imagine most W&R employees reside in JOCO and would rather stay there. It appears management must be promising easy free parking for every employee. Even better than now since it will be covered. These parking podiums may be the onerous price to be paid to get suburban employers to move downtown. At least until the metro has some transit system that could get suburban dwellers DT.

I would say that’s probably why they stayed in Kansas last time around. Almost all of their employees at the time had little desire to work downtown.
WR knows their employees and who they are tying to recruit. They know that today’s younger employees and recruits want to live downtown and that will only increase over the period of their next lease. Even the employees who likely drove a stay in OP previously are now empty nesters looking to move downtown.

moderne wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 12:07 pm I imagine most W&R employees reside in JOCO and would rather stay there. It appears management must be promising easy free parking for every employee. Even better than now since it will be covered. These parking podiums may be the onerous price to be paid to get suburban employers to move downtown. At least until the metro has some transit system that could get suburban dwellers DT.

Out of nearly 1000 employees, I feel a few hundred will be looking to move downtown.

And did I miss something, the city isn’t paying for the garage? I’m always shocked some people think the city and state write big ass checks.

normalthings wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 1:32 pm Do you really want people from car dependent areas to come into the center city just to buy groceries or for other short necessities trips? It seems to me like that would shoot up traffic and parking demand.

I want as much foot traffic DT as possible so, yes, I want people making DT part of their everyday lives.

moderne wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 12:07 pm I imagine most W&R employees reside in JOCO and would rather stay there. It appears management must be promising easy free parking for every employee. Even better than now since it will be covered. These parking podiums may be the onerous price to be paid to get suburban employers to move downtown. At least until the metro has some transit system that could get suburban dwellers DT.

And even if KC had a wonderful regional high speed mass transit system in place, it would do little to offset the parking demand for a company like this. The general demographic of their average employee is going to drive no matter what. Even in a city like DC, a highly paid white collar firm will not have as high of transit use compared to other office buildings. If the streetcar went to the plaza, you might get a couple there, but not enough to really change the design.

The city just needs to make sure they are getting a public garage for evenings and weekends out of the deal so there is no need to put up a garage elsewhere while this one sits empty.

It's still worth it to bring this company downtown. Some will buy urban homes or younger employees will live in downtown apartments, they will spend a lot of money at restaurants and hotels entertaining and KC just needs some private corporations downtown.

GRID wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 2:54 pm
It's still worth it to bring this company downtown. Some will buy urban homes or younger employees will live in downtown apartments, they will spend a lot of money at restaurants and hotels entertaining and KC just needs some private corporations downtown.

It's absolutely worth getting this company downtown. The downtown renaissance has been great but it has lacked job growth (there seems to be major subtractions every time we get an addition). WR would be huge in fixing this but, frankly, I think the Council and School District could still very well manage to screw this up aided and abetted by the KC Star. People talking like this is a done deal but from what I've read it's anything but a done deal.

That said, part of the parking issue is because it's such a tight space. Grand has 2 full city blocks available for such a development and either one would have allowed a garage to be spread out over a broader area with room for retail at the ground level.

I wouldn't give up Grand for this development though.

I wish I understood more why they couldn't get financing to do w+r plus spec. I think that would go a long ways towards the frustrations here.

The project is fine though, as long as they address the street level concerns. Long past so that we come up with a master parking plan for downtown development so we stop overbuilding parking so much. Not sure this will be the development that does it though

We absolutely need companies like W&R to come downtown. Having them there would be a sign to other companies that downtown is the place to be now. Maybe not as big as W&R, but attracting smaller companies is important too because they fill smaller, unfilled spaces in office buildings. They also drive rents up so that developers feel safe building spec buildings.

Highlander wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 3:31 pm
That said, part of the parking issue is because it's such a tight space. Grand has 2 full city blocks available for such a development and either one would have allowed a garage to be spread out over a broader area with room for retail at the ground level.

This is not true. There’s no design constraint here. You just can’t use a suburban mindset and have an interior limo drop off when designing it.

Doing some crude math:

By code standards this site has enough clearance for a typical single helix garage. You need roughly 24’-0” for a dual direction drive aisle; roughly 60’-0” total for a double loaded parking row at 90 degree parking. So for a typical single helix garage setup you’d need 120’. You’ve got more than that for garage rising on an East/west axis. If we assume a garage that is single loaded on either end, you’ve got somewhere in the ballpark of 140 feet of length to rise on either double loaded ramp. At code allowed 5% slope, you’ve got 7’-0” of rise on each double load; 14’-0” between each floor. You’d rarely need this kind of clearance floor to floor. But with this kind of clearance, a garage that is entered from the western part of the site gets you the ability to have active frontage along ~3/4 of the ground plane.

Sure, this doesn’t get you multiple garage entrances. You do however have enough site to have a multi exit lane setup, if you truly wanted to. I wouldn’t. Plenty of urban garages function this way just fine, even the KC Live one does and its has far more rush after a concert than a single user office tower like this ever would.

The garage at 47th and Pennsylvania. SE corner. is a great model for what can be done on this site at ground level.

WoodDraw wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 5:48 pm I wish I understood more why they couldn't get financing to do w+r plus spec. I think that would go a long ways towards the frustrations here.

Didn't they previously announce that they were going to include 250K sf of spec space?

im2kull wrote: ↑Sun Dec 15, 2019 1:55 am

WoodDraw wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 5:48 pm I wish I understood more why they couldn't get financing to do w+r plus spec. I think that would go a long ways towards the frustrations here.

Didn't they previously announce that they were going to include 250K sf of spec space?

No speculative space. This is a single tenant office building. The 500-600K SQFT number is office+parking.

Only 2 elevators seems woefully inadequate for a building this height even if it is just 8 inhabited office floors above parking. I worked in a 6 story Corporate Woods bldng with 4 elevators. Office buildings require more elevators than residential due to denser daytime population and peak rush hours.

moderne wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:36 pm Only 2 elevators seems woefully inadequate for a building this height even if it is just 8 inhabited office floors above parking. I worked in a 6 story Corporate Woods bldng with 4 elevators. Office buildings require more elevators than residential due to denser daytime population and peak rush hours.

I agree. Burns Mac is clearly out of their league here and it's showing.

im2kull wrote: ↑Tue Dec 17, 2019 2:50 am

moderne wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:36 pm Only 2 elevators seems woefully inadequate for a building this height even if it is just 8 inhabited office floors above parking. I worked in a 6 story Corporate Woods bldng with 4 elevators. Office buildings require more elevators than residential due to denser daytime population and peak rush hours.

I agree. Burns Mac is clearly out of their league here and it's showing.

It’s bad when your suburban client has to tell you that your designs are too suburban.

moderne wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:36 pm Only 2 elevators seems woefully inadequate for a building this height even if it is just 8 inhabited office floors above parking. I worked in a 6 story Corporate Woods bldng with 4 elevators. Office buildings require more elevators than residential due to denser daytime population and peak rush hours.

Elevator incentives!

Two elevators and a dedicated freight elevator could possibly work, but If no dedicated freight elevator, that would be a nightmare.

I'm in a crown center building. For smaller floor plates (partial block) with 7 usable floors there's three elevators and a freight elevator

At a past job with 5 floors about a block each there were six elevators and a freight elevator.

I would estimate they need at least five elevators and a freight elevator.

Man we are really tearing this building apart! I've never seen elevator criticism on here.

Yes, that is really taking it to a new level.

grovester wrote: ↑Tue Dec 17, 2019 10:12 am Yes, that is really taking it to a new level.

Are we elevating the conversation?