Attack of the giant parking garage!

A few weeks back when Sugarhouse revealed their plans to put a mega concrete parking box on a prime piece of the Delaware waterfront, I wondered how Pulitzer-prize finalist and scourge of unimaginative developers Inga Saffron would react.

It turns out, she must have been on her tour of California at the time because she didn’t write about it at the time, waiting, it turns out, to smack the sugar out of the house (and City Hall) with a classic, “this is how it could be” column. Comparing our own waterfront to the revitalized and rehabbed Mission Bay neighborhood in San Francisco, the Inga-nator calls the Sugarhouse plan what it really is:

SugarHouse’s interim casino could just as well be another big-box retailer for all the economic development it will engender. The only spin-off construction Philadelphia can count on is an unfortunate, 10-story parking garage, which SugarHouse promises to build when it expands to a full-size, 3,000-machine operation. That hunk of concrete will be among the most visible landmarks on the waterfront.

Her criticism didn’t quite rise to the level of the her famous tune up of the Symphony House, so I was left a little disappointed. But it’s understandable when you consider that there are only so many synonyms for grotesque that can be used to describe yet another inappropriate parking behemoth. Instead, the Philly-San Fran comparison provides a teachable moment:

Of course, the city could have made all those moves and still produced a lousy neighborhood of lonely, stand-alone towers and garages. But San Francisco was rigorous in sticking to its master plan. It has never granted a variance, Mission Bay project manager Kelly Kahn told me. That’s impressive because when the plan was written in the mid-1990s, the maximum building height was a quaint 160 feet - about 15 stories. You won’t see a single garage in Mission Bay, either. They’re all wrapped by apartments and stores.

Thankfully, there’s an overall trend towards a commitment to modern zoning and planning. As Plan Philly notes, the Zoning Code Commission has finished their assessment of the current zoning code and, not surprising they assess it as not so good:

-The code’s organizational structure needs a complete overhaul.
- Basic regulations governing matters such as parking, signs, and accessory uses should be consolidated into easy-to-use chapters.
- Many uses, terms, and regulations are dated if not antiquated.
- The code needs more tables, graphics, and other ease-of-use features.

And those are among the nicer things they had to say about it.