In 1970, Joni Mitchell famously lamented the paving of paradise to put up a parking lot in her hit song “Big Yellow Taxi.” On Monday night, the members of the Assembly Lands Committee were singing a slightly different tune — distressed, instead, by the loss of a parking lot.
The committee put a proposed downtown housing development on hold after learning that the developer planned to destroy the North Franklin parking with no plans to replace its 23 spots.
“I have a real desire to promote housing downtown, but I don’t want to exacerbate the parking problem, which we are doing by putting housing without any residential parking at all,” Lands Committee Chair Kate Troll said during the meeting.
Most, if not all, committee members were on board with the city’s plan to sell the parking lot — located at the intersection of North Franklin and Second Streets, across from the Baranof Hotel and High Tide Tattoos — to a developer in order to spur downtown housing development. The city has been slowly headed in that direction for a while.
[City seeks housing proposals for parking lot]
A 2014 appraisal of the property determined that the “highest and best use” for the land wasn’t parking. Instead, it recommended selling the land to a developer who could turn it into a mixed-use building with commercial space on the ground floor and residential units above.
After soliciting letters of interest from developers who could take on such a project, the city’s Chief Housing Officer Scott Ciambor thought he had found a suitable developer. The catch, as the Lands Committee sees it, is that developer isn’t interested in providing on-site parking.
Eagle Rock Ventures LLC, a Seattle-based development company, submitted a proposal purchase the North Franklin lot for $530,000 — its fair market value. In its letter of interest, the company proposed to turn the lot into the very type of mixed-use development that the city appraisal recommended.
“ERV understands the lack of supply of workforce housing and strong demand in Juneau, has the financial track record to complete a project of this scale, and noted a desire to work with good people,” Ciambor wrote in an Aug. 5 memo to the Lands Committee recommending that it support sale of the parking lot to Eagle Rock Ventures.
Tracey Ricker, broker and owner of Ricker Real Estate Consulting, is representing ERV in this transaction. Though the development firm is from out of town, Ricker isn’t, and she said that ERV’s proposed mixed-use building is sorely needed.
“I’ve got skin in the game, but I’m also a citizen,” Ricker told the Empire in a phone interview Wednesday. “I think that downtown really could use a building like this and units like these as a part of its revitalization.”
The development company has completed seven similar projects in Seattle, adding about 250 housing units to the city’s market. The company didn’t say what exactly its North Franklin lot project would look like. It doesn’t know yet. The company stated in its letter to the city that it wouldn’t spend money on design until the deal was finalized.
Ciambor seems to think that this development “could mean anywhere from 30 to 40 units or maybe even more.” And this is exactly the type of development Juneau’s “stuck” housing market needs, according to the city’s draft Housing Action Plan.
Especially given the company’s tenants in Seattle are “a mixture of working citizens” from service-industry workers to young professionals, ERV wrote in its letter of interest, explaining that its goal is to create affordable housing.
In order to do that, though, the company said that it couldn’t also include parking.
“Parking is expensive to build and does not pay for itself, so higher apartment rents usually subsidize parking,” the development company wrote in its letter to the city. “Therefore, like our other small apartment projects, we will not building parking for this urban project. That will save the tenants rent.”
But it won’t save Ciambor — and everybody else involved — headache.
The parking debate put the Lands Committee at odds with Ciambor Monday, and it could sour the potential deal with ERV.
“If you choke out all the parking from downtown, you’re going to make the problem worse,” committee member Debbie White told Ciambor Monday. “I’m not going to take a bus to go to the Baranof. I’m not going to take a bus to go to SALT or to got to Saffron on a Friday night. To me, parking is still super important for downtown.”
Troll and her fellow committee members explained to Ciambor that they thought developers interested in buying the parking lot would at least build parking for residents. That was never the case, Ciambor said.
“This is a fair market sale,” he explained. “The more we dictate the process before they own the property, the closer we are to driving any developer to close up shop and move away.”
Still, the Lands Committee directed Ciambor to go back to ERV and ask the developer if it could include parking in its plans. Ciambor is meeting with a company representative later this week to make this pitch, but he doesn’t have high hopes that the developer will bite.
“I think it’s pretty clear what their model is and what they’re comfortable with,” Ciambor told the Empire in a phone interview Wednesday.
The issue will be back before the Lands Committee at its next meeting, which is scheduled for Aug. 29.
The city’s Lands Manager Greg Chaney might as well be North Franklin’s Nostradamus because he predicted last month that if anything could spoil the housing development plans, it would be concerns over parking. Ricker said this was also a concern for ERV heading into the project.
Even without Chaney’s crystal ball, it’s not difficult to see that the Lands Committee and Assembly as a whole will have to reassess their priorities in order to solve this problem. What’s tougher to predict is whether the city’s governing bodies will choose parking or housing.
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
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