Shorts: getting to the office, and its implications for developers

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1. Jonathan O’Connell asks, “With no office tenants and no financing, is the Southwest Waterfront redevelopment in trouble?”

The trouble they’ve had in raising capital underscores the importance of a good phasing strategy. The Wharf needs to start with a big bang for both top line and bottom line reasons:
– the retail won’t pay out without a critical mass of activity on the site; indeed, the 140K sq. ft. proposed for Phase 1 is at the low end for a viable lifestyle center
– the large amount of underground infrastructure (two levels of parking, new seawall, parks) that must be built before the first building pays out would be cost-prohibitive for a smaller project.

2. Earlier from O’Connell, a sign of how much the local market has embraced urbanism (with almost none of this space receiving local subsidies):

Of the 5.5 million square feet of office space under construction in the region, about 4.6 million of it, or 84 percent isn’t just near a Metro station but within a quarter mile of one, according to data from Jones Lang LaSalle, CoStar Group and Delta Associates.

The trouble is that each one of these buildings feeds off of Metro’s positive externality of greater access, but any one building can only make a relatively small contribution towards that transit infrastructure. Even the BIDs and special taxing authorities set up around most of these WUPs focus primarily on low-cost, high-return placemaking projects rather than the much more expensive, long-term work of buliding value with transit. Meanwhile, buildings that attempt a greater level of infrastructure investment, like those at the Wharf, can’t get the running start that they need. Areas with that transit infrastructure in place thus have an edge over those where it remains (and, given scarce funds, will likely still remain) to be built.

Some have taken this to mean that retrofitting suburbia will be necessarily be too expensive a proposition to be economically feasible. On that point, I only half-agree: there are a few cities, primarily in the Rust Belt, where intact and high-quality urbanism is cheap enough to feasibly redevelop. Yet with a growing population — America’s population will grow by about 140 million between 2000-2050, nearly matching the entire 1950 population of 150 million — that’s now concentrated in an entirely different set of cities, retrofitting may well prove to be the cheaper alternative.

3. Michael Andersen in the Green Lane Project notes that it isn’t just Metro access that moves office space:

Kathy Card, the general manager of two office buildings in DC’s fast-changing Chinatown, said last week that she doesn’t ride a bike herself. But watching traffic at the bikeshare station at 8th and H, she said, has convinced her that some of H Street’s four auto travel lanes and two parking lanes should be repurposed for protected bike lanes. Dedicated bike infrastructure is what’s needed, Card said, to help her buildings appeal to the private-sector firms she’s marketing to. “There’s plenty of ability to put bike lanes in,” Card said last week. “Obviously the demand is there.”

4. So perhaps it’s only appropriate that the latest MoveDC plans, leaked via DCBAC, floats the idea of cycletracks on just about every arterial in the city: Independence, Constitution, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida, Bladensburg, Minnesota, Alabama, N Capitol, S Capitol, U, 9th, 14th, etc. — oh, and a bike bridge to Alexandria, too.

5. A generation ago, Joel Garreau wrote in “Edge City” about how one axiom shaped everything about suburban office parks: four car parking spaces per thousand feet of office. Yet today, both numerator and denominator have changed beyond all recognition: the cars are gone and the offices are smaller. As reported by Laura Kusisto, the conversion of Brooklyn’s vast Watchtower printing plant into loft offices proposes a bike parking ratio of 8.3 bikes per 1000′ of office. The resulting indoor garage will house 5,000 bikes — 15-16X larger than dedicated bike stations in Chicago or Santa Monica, and undoubtedly as a result requiring special accommodations like ramps. It would be interesting to know whether bike parking is a way to soak up the dark space in the middle of the floors (that would be convenient) or if they’re warehoused in a basement.

6. Besides, who ever uses that much car parking at their suburban offices? Even the car lobby (!) would rather have cute farmers markets than parking lots: