How Hard Is It to Park in Downtown East Lansing? Depends Who You Ask
What needs changing in East Lansing’s downtown parking system to make it better? Should the city build another parking garage west of Abbot Road? Should rates charged for parking in ramps and on the street be raised or lowered?
Should the Council change East Lansing’s zoning laws to encourage developers to build parking into their new buildings instead of the current approach – encouraging them to use the municipal system’s ramps instead? And how hard is it really to park downtown?
It all depends who you ask, as quickly became evident at this week’s Downtown Development Authority meeting.
On the packed agenda for the Thursday (July 27) meeting were just two issues related to parking. But the topic ended up consuming most of the two-hour meeting, as data presented by hired experts sometimes clashed with DDA members’ perceptions.
The Graduate Hotel wants to rent the Evergreen Properties for valet parking.
The first parking issue on the DDA’s agenda was a request from the Graduate Hotel. The hotel opened at the corner of Grand River and Evergreen avenues in 2021 and was constructed with no on-site parking and no driveway for drop-offs or pick-ups.
On busy weekends, the Graduate’s valet line has been snaking around the block down Albert Avenue, stifling the flow of bikes and vehicles on that street.
Of late, the hotel has also started having its guests’ cars parked for long stretches in metered spots along Valley Court Park, spots that have typically been used by patrons of the farmers’ market and nearby businesses. Crunchy’s customers, for example, normally use those spots, a concern not lost on DDA Chair Mike Krueger, who owns Crunchy’s. (Disclosure: Crunchy’s sponsors ELi’s weekly East Lansing Insider newsletter.)
Now, the Graduate wants to rent part of the DDA’s Evergreen Properties, land that’s been used most recently as a construction staging site for the MSUFCU project, to use for additional parking. The hotel’s request was presented to the DDA Thursday.
While DDA members liked the idea of having some income from that empty land while they try to figure out how to get the Evergreen Properties redeveloped, some noted that Peoples Church and MSUFCU might also like to use the land for parking.
DDA members struggled with the question of how to manage potential multiple requests for parking on that land. First come, first serve? Highest bidder?
An additional challenge is caused by the fact the land is zoned RM32 (for multi-unit housing). The property would have to be rezoned if a private entity like the Graduate wanted to use it for parking. Even if a majority of Council ultimately allowed the rezoning, that could take many months to come to pass.
Heather Pope, the City’s Interim Administrator for Community and Economic Development, also told the DDA that city staff “want to avoid having an entity come in and compete with the [city’s] parking system.” The city’s parking system is already significantly underutilized and has been for years. (See ELi’s prior reporting on this from 2019 and 2018.)
No decisions were made about the Graduate Hotel’s request at Thursday’s meeting – the plan is for staff to bring back more information at the Aug. 24 meeting. But the discussion did bring forward agreement on one point: There are a lot of players looking for a lot more parking west of Abbot Road.
New DDA member Dave Ledebuhr said the discussion “points out to me the ever-growing demand for parking on this side of town is not ending.”
Ledebuhr, who owns a nearby real estate business and is a member of Peoples Church, has been active in the area of parking concerns. He called the parking need in that area “paramount” and said the DDA needs to really focus on it.
But building a new parking ramp west of Abbot Road is not an economically simple goal.
If the city were to build a new parking ramp in the Valley Court area – on the Evergreen Properties, for example – it’s unclear where the money would come from to build the structure.
Interim Planning Director Tim Dempsey reminded the DDA that parking garages are typically built using Tax Increment Financing (TIF). Such tax capture plans are created to take new taxes generated from a redevelopment project and redirect those funds to pay for some aspect of the new development – in this case, a parking garage.
But there’s nothing scheduled to be built west of Abbot Road that would produce the sizable taxes required to build a new ramp. The only project in the works is the low-to-moderate income apartment building that PK Companies is looking to build near the park, and affordable housing projects don’t produce significant tax income.
The DDA could in theory use its TIF #2 tax capture plan to pay for a new parking garage, but the DDA has already promised to use that revenue to pay its bond debt related to the purchase of the Evergreen Properties. That debt is scheduled to run through 2035.
In terms of the cost of construction, parking garages in places like East Lansing don’t pay for themselves with their revenue, so it’s not just a matter of borrowing money and hoping parking revenues later cover the cost of construction.
And the city’s parking consultants, like city staff, point out the city already has a costly underutilization problem in its system.
The second parking-related item on the DDA’s agenda was a presentation of the Parking Master Plan update from Walker Consultants, experts in municipal parking. (See the report here.) Key among the observations presented by Walker’s Andrew Baglini and Jim Corbett is that East Lansing’s downtown parking system continues to have a high rate of vacancy, and that’s bad for the City’s economy.
The downtown system has 3,087 parking spots including in ramps, surface lots and on the streets. About 86% of those spots are in garages, which is high compared to comparable cities, according to Baglini and Corbett. Only 14% of the parking spots downtown are on streets or in surface lots.
Based on Walker’s study of the system last fall (2022), use of downtown parking on an average day peaks at 12:30 in the afternoon. At that time, only about 65% of the three thousand spaces are being used.
“Generally, parking systems start to feel full or effectively full when you hit about 80-85% of the system being used,” Corbett told the DDA. Lower usage rates mean greater economic problems when it comes to running and maintaining the system.
The only lot downtown reaching the desired level of occupancy is the small lot next to CVS, as shown in this “heat map” from Walker.
The Walker consultants acknowledged the perception there is a need for a new ramp west of Abbot Road. But they expressed concerns about the vacancies in existing lots in terms of the city’s finances.
In terms of what is being charged to park, the Walker consultants said East Lansing’s rates are “largely in line” with what other Big 10 and similarly-sized Michigan cities charge for both hourly parking and monthly permits.
What about parkers’ perception of East Lansing’s downtown?
To get at this, Walker conducted an online survey this March. A total of 274 people chose to take the survey and, of those respondents, 64% said they usually or always find their preferred parking space downtown.
Corbett said this result was “a pleasant surprise,” as it is a higher rate than found in most surveys about downtowns. He praised East Lansing’s approach to good lighting and walkability and also noted the East Lansing survey respondents were willing to walk farther for parking than respondents for other cities.
Asked how easy it is to park downtown in East Lansing compared to other university communities, 41% of the survey respondents said it was about the same, while about 22% said it is easier to park in East Lansing and about 37% said it is more difficult.
One survey question asked, “Public right of way space is limited in downtown East Lansing. Please rank the following right of way uses based on what you believe is the most important infrastructure to provide in this limited space.”
Respondents valued wider sidewalks, green space and landscaping, outdoor dining/furniture, and bike lanes as higher priority than adding street-parking spots or vehicle driving lanes.
The parking plan consultants had a number of recommendations for improving East Lansing’s parking system.
These included converting more of the downtown street parking spaces to short-term (15- or 30-minute) parking, both to allow more turnover for people doing quick-stops at businesses and to push more people who want to park longer into the underutilized ramps.
The consultants also recommended putting electronic signs along Grand River Avenue to tell people in real-time how many spots are open at various parking ramps. This could help push people to the less-used ramps and challenge the perception that parking is not available downtown.
Another idea floated was to get rid of meters, which are expensive to service, and switch to phone-based street parking payment systems like the Passport app. While some DDA members seemed fine with the idea, Interim City Manager Randy Talifarro worried senior citizens won’t be amenable to using an app.
In their written report, the Walker consultants recommended continuing to support the use of scooters and other transportation methods besides cars because they reduce traffic.
The parking consultants also said it’s time for East Lansing to seriously consider charging different amounts for different ramps. Again, this is in an effort to get people to use the less-utilized ramps, but also to earn more money for the system from the most popular lots (Albert Avenue and Grove Street).
The consultants recommended as well that the city consider using “vehicle immobilization” or what are called “boots” on cars to deal with scofflaws. According to a comment from the City’s Parking Task Force in the report, “The City [issues] about $70,000 per month in parking tickets, [only] roughly half of which is collected upon.”
Finally, the consultants recommended again being cautious about building more ramps.
“We never recommend building new parking until the existing parking is utilized,” Corbett told the DDA. “It just doesn’t make sense to do that.”
Luke Hackney, vice chair of the DDA and chair of the Parking Task Force, told ELi in a brief phone interview after the meeting, “I go both ways. Are we under-parked? Sure. But there is a small demographic of people who are very insistent on adding parking on the west side of downtown.”
Asked about the Walker presentation, Hackney expressed concern the online survey may have had too few respondents and not enough representation of the range of demographics of people who seek to park downtown.
“I think it has a lot of valuable information to consider, but I don’t think it tells us the complete picture. . . . And we still need to keep in mind that things could change very quickly,” depending on future redevelopment, he said.