x99

It's disappointing that our mayor cast the deciding vote against instructing the parking department--err, "Mobile GR"--to put serious effort into downtown parking based on some obtuse fear the vote in favor would show the city "is not taking the parking issue seriously." You couldn't conjure up a more bizarre justification if you tried. I think Dave Shaffer made his point. The sad thing is that commissioner and mayor positions are elected. At what point does the business community finally say that it has had enough of this and put some money into backing candidates that will stop jeopardizing future growth in the name of the fat bike? I've heard it from fairly reliable sources that the sense of the parking department is that the city really does not want more parking... They get a lot of push back to find "alternatives" to expanding the existing system. Recall, if you will, that Commissioner Joe Jones actually ran on a platform saying he wanted more surface lots downtown and less public parking ramps. "I'm not in favor of downtown businesses re-locating due to parking shortages, and yet I'm not a fan of building new public parking structures. Therefore, I believe we should continue to promote surface parking lots downtown to meet the parking demand." So this does not really surprise me all that much.

Rather disingenuous. It is not the length of the walk, but rather the comparison of walking across a single indoor building with vast amounts of shopping inside of it to walking across an outdoor urban area. It's also about .35 to .45 miles to the actual CBD. The corner of Monroe Ctr. and Division is not CBD. To make it fair, rip out all of the mall parking except for the west edge spaces by Macy's. Now try to lease the former east edge Sears space. Under that scenario, the east edge of the shopping mall becomes an-leasable ghost town. This does nothing to deal with CBD's problems. And these comparisons to a first tier city like New York or Chicago are completely pointless. For all practical purposes, this would be nothing more than an overpriced DASH lot. An expansion of the current County ramp would be money well spent. A ramp out by the library is just stupid unless it can be priced around $100 a month. Which it can't be, because the construction cost estimates are shockingly high.

And who is a ramp in this location supposed to serve? It does exactly nothing to relieve stress on CBD. The talk of the ramp next to the County building on Ionia is far more interesting. But, then there's this: "there have been no formal discussions between the municipalities as of yet." So that's about par for the course. A year or two into this parking fiasco, and the city still clearly does not really care about CBD all that much. Recall that this is the same group of clowns whose last brilliant idea was trying to restrict how much parking you could build in a new project.

"Side brick" was never supposed to look good. Someone else was always supposed to put a building there which would cover it up. But that project in Detroit does at least show what is possible. If the brick is a standard size and patters, it won't be too hard. A full parapet restoration would really be something though. Then they and the city would really have a winner on their hands.

Looking at photos of that project, I am going to go with "unlikely". The one in Huntington has pretty nice human scaled architecture with lots of details and features to it. I would give that one a fairly solid New Urbanist stamp of approval. The design of this falls a bit short of the mark to my eyes, which are getting really tired of urban architecture that often falls short of even half decent suburban strip malls. I'm still hoping they clean this up and make it more inviting.

Each time I drive past this thing on the highway I still think how lucky we got to have someone spend the extra money to build something like this. I know, I know, it is not everyone's cup of tea. But at least it is something.

The cosmetic work required on 50 Monroe is almost mind numbing. It isn't just a matter of putting brick back. It's quite possibly a matter of having to have custom fired brick made specifically for the project, and reproducing a lot of stonework to get it right. To get it really right and make the buildings as attractive as they were requires a whole cornice reconstruction (which won't happen). Good luck to them. I have to chalk this one up to a "thanks for being good to us Grand Rapids--we love you!" sort of show off project. From a financial perspective, it just seems completely insane. If I were Sam Cummings, and I were this far into it anyway, I would personally pony up the extra cash to put the cornice back on top and rename the thing the Cummings Building, carved into a huge limestone panel for posterity. At least then I'd feel pretty good about the outlay. I suspect it was not for no reason that the buildings with insanely expensive facades typically had the owner's name chiseled into them. 110 years later these guys are dead and gone, but their names live on, chiseled into the city they helped to build. Beats a new poolhouse, in my estimation at least. Smartest thing Frank McKay ever did was buy a big skyscraper and rename it after himself.

Just go back a bit and see what I posted about this outfit in, I think, the Kent County building thread. The principals are by all accounts I could find a bunch of mortgage brokers who collectively appear to have zero or near zero experience (at least, none publicly mentioned) in LIHTC or other projects. So, yeah, we'll see how this one goes. The amount of credit requests is astonishing for a firm with what appears to be comparatively little to no experience compared to others in the LIHTC sphere. Hopefully they will correct the public record and highlight just how it is that they or someone else on their team has the experience and acumen to pull this off. As I have mentioned before, we have a number of highly experienced low income developers in town from ICCF to Dwelling Place. If this were such a great idea, I have to believe one of them would have tried to pull it off. There is a limited pool of LIHTC funds, and it would be a shame to see them misused or poured into a boondoggle. It's unlikely, but perhaps Dwelling Place and others just didn't have the vision to see how this could be a great idea.

Crane is topping off just now. The cab is being mounted on the pivot right now, and will go up next. So if you see it heading home tonight, it will be at full height. Yeah. I've got nine or ten cranes I can see right now from my window. Lotsa cranes.

It was almost interesting until I saw Progressive AE's name attached to it. I just have a hard time getting excited about anything they have ever laid a hand on. I would hope we could at least get some sort of architectural competition for something of this scale and magnitude, if it ever gets off the starting line.

They have to, in order to keep customers. Now that Amazon is charging sales tax, which placed it at a disadvantage versus smaller online retailers, it has to try to crush everyone else with next day delivery. As for Grand Rapids landing a major corporate headquarters, I'm torn. First, I'm at the point where I don't want to see another soul in downtown unless/until the city stops intentionally snarling up traffic and plugging up all of the ramps. I'm not convinced the geniuses in city hall could properly handle any sort of major influx to the area. Secondly, I don't want to see a bunch of incentives thrown at someone to try to convince them to locate here. This just imposes a mountain of costs on the rest of us as city leaders run to give away the farm to their shiny new MegaCo. Now, if MegaCo comes in and says, "We'll pay our own way for infrastructure, roads, ramps, taxes, and impose discipline and proper retail/office management on your city hall", I'm all in. But that's just not the way these things work. It's a race to the bottom to maximize profits, not to act as good corporate citizens helping to maintain the social contract. I will say I'm glad to see Right Place was involved. I have a hard time Birgit Klohs would have been so stupid as to allow the city to sell its soul to Jeff Bezos.

Skipping the residential is a good call. The design of it to me did not complement the building well. Unless all of the transom windows still have glass in place, I would go with awnings. Historically, though, that is inaccurate. You can tell from the prism/reeded glass in the transoms. Those were designed to refract light into the interior of the building. Ideally, if some/all are still in place, you could restore them. Pristine Glass Co. should be able to do it.

They are. I mentioned this before. It's the most significant flaw on the entire project, and it's a major one. I am still hoping they fix it by having a piece of trim crafted which can be glued or screwed in place from inside the building. The trim piece should continue the white window surround over the top. The way it looks now, at least to my eyes, is bad enough to seriously damage the aesthetics of the entire project. It looks awful.

Unfortunately, the economic incentives that are often offered in this race to the bottom are not "revenue neutral". There is often an actual outflow of real money which is used as an inducement. That money often takes years to recover, and often never is. Companies have been known to close up shop or move elsewhere before the fully amortized costs of attracting the company have been recovered. Perhaps it should come as no shock that a large company did poorly in a place that acted so foolishly. If Amazon is smart, they would evaluate which municipalities are willing to offer a completely insane level of incentives, and run the other direction. Odds are, Amazon has a better internal calculator of the cost to "acquire" them than the cities attempting to attract them do. If someone is foolish enough to sell their soul and financial future to you just to get you to buy their product, is it really a product you should want to buy?

It got one. Silverline, remember? Silverline just spawned a new Dollar Tree as part of the economic inferno it is unleashing. I think what Wealthy really needs to give it a kick in the pants is a new bus line. Maybe that will get Mom back into her Golden Grill. Or why not just open a business called Mom's Golden Grillz that sells dental appliances? Then all you need to do is spray paint a "Z" on the sign and BOOM you're in business. I hate waiting for Friday to end.

"The 28 West project is critical to the future success of the City of Wyoming," said Megan Sall, Assistant City Manager for the City of Wyoming. ... and so when it stays a flea market? Then what? Here's hoping something comes of this. I never could figure out why they shuttered and then tore down a perfectly good movie theater... because you know what would be great here? A movie theater.

Landed in my email box and haven't gotten to posting it here. Campaign is being led by the city to get Wood TV studios and a bunch of other modernish buildings in Heritage Hill listed as contributing historic structures... Basically almost everything before 1970 becomes untouchable. Dumb.

There's a certain irony in the excitement that this big "reveal" of this building is generating, in light of the new construction currently going up that looks even worse than the facade that was smeared over these buildings. It's almost like someone is building a brand new ornate, classically styled building and PEOPLE LOVE IT. Perhaps a few architects could draw a lesson from this. For that matter, even HPC ought to take a lesson from this.

The painted concrete does look a lot better than the bare concrete walls. Someone should tell the GRAM.

Something tells me flights on the "bring your own seat cushion" airline known as Allegiant don't count.

Buried treasure? They are wrecking a beautiful modern design so it will look old.

So they have poured an incredible amount of concrete on site, but no pile driving. Is it short enough that the whole thing is just going on huge footings? I seem to recall weeks or months of pile driving happening at one of the last taller buildings that went up. Nothing here so far.

I expect that what was approved is basically what will be built. Not "iconic" in any traditional sense. Almost no one builds "iconic" mid-rise skyscrapers anymore for some reason. I like to think of them as vertical trailer parks. You get the same exact thing stacked up floor, after floor, after floor, after floor. While the building does go vertical, the designs often squander the opportunity to present a vertical design, which results in mediocre crap. This will be more of the same. Not Michigan Street level awful, but nothing great.

Like, whoa, man.... Seriously though, it is astonishing to see how much the west side has changed as a result of the project. They really did a fantastic job on New Holland.

That, or someone didn't like them opening up a corner of the building.