Khorasaurus1

Agree with this. They're probably not wrong about the per space construction costs, but that's an average. Building the ramp in the first place costs a ton, but each additional space costs less than the one before it. And surface parking isn't exactly free, especially when you have to purchase and demo buildings to get it. Why not build 1-2 ramps with 990+ parking spaces and leave the rest of the neighborhood for development?

Hell, I don't think it would be the end of the world to put a parking garage without those things (or even two of them!) at Bond and Fairbanks, in order to free up space for housing and retail along Ottawa, Trowbridge, and Newberry. It's OK to have A Streets and B Streets in a neighborhood. What is not OK is just completely eliminating blocks from the urban fabric with huge surface lots.

Generally, developers build roads, and then either give them to a public entity to maintain (City, Road Commission, etc) or a homeowner's association maintains them as private roads.

As rough as the housing market is, a basement apartment below an Indian restaurant, a cigar bar, and a Coney seems...unappealing.

The Detroit Zoo "charges for parking" by adding a parking fee into their admission price. Parking is free for members IIRC. JBZ could do that.

It's not barrier-free - you can't traverse it in a wheelchair. Strollers are difficult, for that matter.

I assume the thought is they're giving the current overflow parking area "back to the neighborhood" by freeing it up to be used as actual park space. But I don't know why they need additional surface parking in the southwest corner of the site. Why not just make the ramp a couple levels taller and/or a little larger in footprint? (or do a couple levels underground? I know that's expensive, but they're a well-funded organization). They're also doing themselves no favors from a PR standpoint by labelling the existing parking "Future Parking Area." The plan does appear to improve the pedestrian route to the BRT stop, though.

Technically they could barricade the parking lots and forbid Corewell from using them. But there's no way they would actually follow through with that.

GVSU may be under some political pressure to not move up, at least not as far as FBS/MAC. The MAC schools are dealing with declining enrollment (especially Central), and having "top level" football is one of the key selling points. GVSU has other things to "sell" to prospective students (GR, relationships with employers, etc). I could see GVSU moving up to FCS, though. That would allow them to play top tier basketball, which means potentially participating in March Madness, and hosting real regular season games against Michigan and Michigan State . They could split their basketball home games between the Fieldhouse in Allendale and Van Andel, which is a model used by national powers like Villanova and UConn, so it's not weird. Meanwhile, their football team could play a (road) game each year against an FBS team, which will increase their brand without actually having to commit to FBS full time.

The impact on the skyline from the south is dramatic, but honestly it's a little underwhelming from the north. It blends in with the 12 story muddle. From the west it looks really disconnected from the rest of the skyline, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Setting aside Elon Musk taking Idiocracy way too seriously, the birth rate drop is structural and financial. The costs of housing, health care, child care, and college have all increased beyond the rate of inflation. Those factors are reducing the size of families, or discouraging people from having kids all together.

It's collecting its own tax revenue, so it's forgone additional revenue for the city/state, not a payment. But it is a large amount. This program has been used to support Dan Gilbert's Hudson's Tower in Detroit, but I don't think the subsidy amount was that high of a percentage of the development cost.

That's great! Retrofit the strip mall into a more urban design, add housing, and keep the existing businesses. Sounds like a win.

Agree in theory, but downtown is busier right now on evenings and weekends than it is during the workday. Which is the PScheme lot?

I rode Dash 3.0 this week. Went from the Main Library stop to the Museum District stop. I went clockwise, but the bus switched drivers at Downtown Market and sat idling for 10 minutes, which had me wishing I'd gone the other way, even though that would have been further in distance. A lot of people on and off at various stops along Ionia. Less busy after that stretch. I like how many destinations it covers, and the fact that it's a two-way loop, though.

I don't really understanding why there aren't solar panels on the butterworth dump. It seems like that should have happened 15 years ago.

My guess is this view will look very different by 2030, if not sooner. It feels like it's sitting and waiting for inevitable development, kind of like parts of Atlanta or other fast growing cities.

Malamiah closing sucks. I feel like they shouldn't have moved out of the Downtown Market...but also that their location right on the plaza at Studio Park should have been more successful. The pandemic didn't help, I'm sure.

It's kinda weird from 196 because it looks really far away from the rest of the skyline. It makes the city feel bigger though, which is cool.

It's going to be a new cul-de-sac with around a dozen single family homes. One of the few spots where EGR can actually add housing stock (other than the Ramona site, which is still inexplicably vacant). It will be very hard for the new residents to make a left onto Breton, but people will put with that to buy new construction in EGR.

10 years ago this picture would have been parking lots and the S-Curve. Pretty incredible.

What's confusing to me is that the south end of downtown (Heartside, etc) hasn't changed that much in the last five years. There were always gatherings of homeless people at the missions and in Heartside Park. It doesn't seem that much worse to me now. I will say this though - I put a lot more stock in the experience of someone who lives downtown vs someone who refuses to go downtown and yet claims to be an expert on it. Though here's my anecdote to add to this thread - our company is doubling our square footage in our downtown office, and we currently have team members that commute from Lansing to downtown GR because they'd rather be here than our suburban Detroit office that's a similar distance from their homes. We have a hybrid work schedule with three in-office days required. No complaints about "crime" or "vibe" from any of our employees or clients that have come here.

The towers will look great in the skyline but I'm interested in more details on the site layout. How will it address the corner of Fulton and Market (cautiously optimistic based on these drawings). How about the river? What is that space in between the towers going to be used for?

There's also a lot of issues being conflated here. The point of the original article was slumping office demand - which is a national trend. But now we're talking about suburbanites being scared to go downtown. And is the reason they're scared homelessness or gun crime? Because those aren't the same thing, either. I think all four are real things, but they're vastly different levels of severity. Homelessness is a crisis, though we should focus on providing solutions for the unhoused, not for the people who are uncomfortable seeing them. Office demand is a market problem in need of creative solutions from developers and planners. Gun crime is a serious issue, but not unique to downtown GR. People being scared of downtown is a social media trend that has minimal impact on downtown's highly successful housing, entertainment, lodging, and dining sectors. And it's not the reason the retail market is mediocre and the office market is declining.

It's just incredibly frustrating when driving into the city on 131 is FAR more dangerous than crime downtown Hell, driving to Ada or Zeeland or Rockford or wherever people go because they're scared of downtown is far more dangerous than crime downtown