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A NEW WAY TO THINK ABOUT MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT By Ebby Zachariah and John Payne
Over the past 20 years, mixed-use development has become a staple of urban development in American cities. It’s easy to see its appeal for developers and property owners. By combining several different use cases within a single development, developers and owners can benefit from a variety of potential revenue sources. And the diversity of uses can provide stability because when one sector slows down there will be one or more other uses remaining to pick up the slack. Typically, owners and developers — and urban planners, for that matter — view mixed-use solely in the traditional context of a development combining parking and then some mix of retail, commercial, residential and/or entertainment development. But there’s another form of mixed-use development that’s worth considering: parking. Yes, just parking. You might wonder how a development that revolves solely around parking can be an example of mixed-use. Most parking facilities serve multiple user groups. These groups have different needs, use parking assets differently and may pay different rates. This is true of commercial, residential and even institutional development with parking assets. When developers and owners start to think about their parking assets in this context, it opens up a whole new world of revenue and tenant amenity opportunities. Parking Management Technology Until recently, it wasn’t possible to effectively and efficiently manage parking assets in multiple-use cases. Parking had to be treated as an afterthought at best — and a throw-in at worst — because parking management wasn’t automated. It was just too costly and time-consuming to manage different parking use cases by hand. With the emergence of parking management software platforms, however, owners can now manage each user group differently, providing access to specific areas of a parking facility, offering access at different times and even allowing them to charge different rates to different users. This presents extraordinary financial and tenant amenity opportunities to owners and developers. Before we discuss the different ways developers and owners can benefit from managing their parking assets with parking management technology, let’s first take a look at how it works. The heart of any parking management system is the software that
runs it. The best platforms can be customized to allow owners and developers to address their unique parking management needs, as well as the unique needs of their tenants and customers. The software stores information about each user’s parking needs to build an individual use case for that user. The use case determines how the parking can be utilized, managing when and where the vehicle owner can park, whether they will be charged and, if so, how much and whether the owner has access to a guest pass and, if so, how much they will be charged for each pass. The software should also have a robust accounting element that will automatically collect parking fees, transfer those fees to the appropriate bank accounts and provide accounting reports to both the owner/ developer and the tenant. There’s also a hardware component. Typically, parking entry and egress is monitored by license plate recognition (LPR) technology. When tenants or visitors drive into a garage or parking lot, the LPR cameras record the license plate information and associate the parking stay with an account. The same happens when the car leaves. Once the stay is over, the systems determines whether a parking fee is indicated and automatically charges the appropriate account. If the vehicle has a permit, the system associates the stay with that permit. How It Works: A Deeper Dive Now, let’s look at specific types of development and how parking management technology works to manage different use cases. Residential developments typically offer permit parking, with tenants provided one or more parking spaces as part of their lease agreements. The process is relatively straightforward in this case. The system merely monitors incoming and outgoing traffic and associates the vehicles with the appropriate resident permit. Residential complex owners also commonly provide guest parking passes to tenants. Historically, this has meant giving guests paper passes that can be left of the dashboards of visitors’ cars to alert enforcement personnel that the car is authorized to be there. This low-tech approach limits how much you can do with guest parking. However, using parking management technology allows you to manage guest parking much more closely and creatively. Owners can determine how many guest passes tenants can have on a given day, week, month, quarter or year — really, it can cover any period of time.