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by Joe Sullivan

Downtown Knoxville has 16,423 parking spaces, according to a just completed survey by the Metropolitan Planing Commission. That sounds like a lot. Yet MPC projects a need for about 20,000 spaces if all of downtown's existing building stock were fully occupied.

That's a fairly big if at the moment, since a number of buildings remain vacant or nearly so, especially on the 400 block of Gay Street that was once the city's retail hub. Yet downtown redevelopment is clearly gaining momentum. The 100 block of Gay Street will soon be teeming with close to 200 new residential units. Office and residential renovation of two of the former retail "big boxes" on the east side of the 400 block is nearing completion, and much of the vacant space on the west side of Gay Street is being spoken for by the relocation to downtown of Plasti-Line's corporate headquarters and the offices of the newly formed Knoxville/Knox County Tourism and Sports Corp. Market Square redevelopment is underway, backed by nearly $20 million in city funding. And all that is even before getting to the needs of the city's new convention center and, more problematically, the proposed Universe Knoxville space attraction.

So the 3,500 parking-space shortfall projected by the MPC is anything but academic and clearly needs to be addressed. Moreover, the quick fix, ad hoc, approach that has tended to characterize the provision of more parking in the city doesn't get it. What's called for is a comprehensive assessment of downtown parking needs and means of satisfying them, undertaken in the context of how parking fits into the overall fabric of urban design and development.

"Getting it right on parking has more impact on the economic future of downtown than just about anything," asserts the CEO of the Public Building Authority, Dale Smith, drawing also upon his prior development experience in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Commendably, the Central Business Improvement District, in conjunction with the Downtown Knoxville Task Force, an arm of the Nine Counties/One Vision process, is proceeding in a way that seems well calculated to get it right. Fortified with some $200,000 garnered from both the public and private sectors,the CBID/9C/1V tandem is close to selecting a parking consultant that will make its assessments under the aegis of 9C/1V's Urban Design Subcommittee that is cochaired by the dean of UT's School of Architecture, Marleen Davis, and architect Frank Sparkman. A set of recommendations is anticipated by the first or second quarter of next year.

A spearhead is Mike Edwards, the new president of the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership, which also oversees the CBID. (The CBID is a quasi-public entity composed of downtown property owners with the authority to make assessments on all of them for downtown improvements.)

"It's become pretty clear to everyone that in order to get tenants and people occupying downtown buildings, particularly historic ones, we're going to have to provide parking," Edwards says. "That can become the difference between someone going to a suburban site or coming downtown." At the same time, he stresses that parking needs can't preempt other land use, heritage, and public funding priorities. "We're not going to be tearing down existing buildings, and there are a limited number of sites that would be conducive to new structures," he posits.

Edwards believes the CBID can be integral to making the study's recommended parking solutions happen without having to turn to the city and its taxpayers for financing. "The CBID has the power to issue debt, and once garage sites and the number of spaces needed have been identified, we can go to property owners who need them and determine what kind of commitments they are prepared to make to support garage financing, be it in the form of leases or outright purchases of space," he says. If these commitments aren't sufficient to amortize the cost of new garages, he suggests that the CBID could turn to special assessments on all downtown property owners to make up the shortfall.

Up to now, private sector garage financing has been a nonstarter in the Knoxville market because the traffic won't bear more than about $80 monthly space rentals, and these don't generate nearly enough cash flow to cover operating and financing costs. Surface parking, by contrast, tends to be a cash cow, but tearing down buildings to make way for more surface parking is not deemed to be an option as a rule. One possible exception: the State Street site that the News-Sentinel is vacating.

This is not to say that the city shouldn't proceed with its provisional commitment to build two new garages to support the Market Square redevelopment plan that Chattanooga-based developer Kinsey Probasco is coordinating. One of these is a 200 to 250 space garage that would be incorporated into a transit center and cinema complex on the 500 block of Gay Street. (A federal grant is anticipated to cover 80 percent of the cost of this $17 million facility.) The other is a $5 million, 350-space garage just to the west of Market Square to support commercial activity on the square as well as 60 residential units on top of the garage. "Free" or validation parking will be needed to make a downtown cinema, restaurants, and retailers competitive with the suburbs. But the sales tax revenue generated has the potential to cover the city's cost of these garages.

Another pressing need, for which the city has also made a commitment, is to provide tenant parking for the residential development burgeoning on the 100 block of Gay Street. The city has already dedicated a 100-space surface lot it owns at the corner of Gay and Summit Hill Avenue to the 99 apartment units in the Sterchi Building that are due to be ready for occupancy in November. To support the 40 prospective units in the Emporium at the corner of Gay and Jackson Avenue, the city is pointing toward introducing diagonal parking on the 100 block and on the Gay Street viaduct over the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks. Diagonal parking would create about 40 more spaces than the parallel parking now in place. It would also reduce Gay Street to two lanes, which would have a traffic calming effect that is welcomed by residential developers.

The diagonal parking solution is at best a temporary one, however. That's because the viaduct will be closed for reconstruction within a year or two. By then, the city will have hopefully moved ahead with its pending Jackson Avenue Redevelopment Plan that would authorize acquisition of a vacant tract at the northwest corner of Gay and Jackson now owned by Norfolk Southern. This tract would accommodate an estimated 200 surface parking spaces or a garage—enough to meet the needs of residential development already underway plus the 65 additional units contemplated for the McClung Warehouse on Jackson.

Proximity is key for residential, restaurant, and retail parking. But it may, or should, be less so where office parking is concerned. This view is shared by the overseer of a half of dozen of downtown's landmark office buildings, Brian Conley. "Foremost among our parking needs is to overcome the mindset of people being averse to walking more than two blocks," Conley opines.