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Walker wrote >>
cc wrote >>
I think there should be some extra tax on undeveloped land in the downtown area...City Council President Andrew Ginther agrees with you:
From here: http://www.columbusunderground.com/council-pres-ginther-discusses-future-of-columbus
"I was recently speaking with someone about the Downtown Master Plan. We were talking about all of these surface lots Downtown and what Mayor Ed Rendell did in Philadelphia, which really made a dramatic impact in their central city is  they created a tax on property owners whether there was a building on their property or not. There was actually a greater tax if there wasn’t a building than if there was. If you took that same sort of approach to our Downtown, parallel to what we’ve been talking about here, we would be incentivizing people to build things as opposed to maintaining surface lots, which we have far too many of in all of the wrong places in Downtown Columbus."
I think Ginther is very wrong about this.
I'm sure that speculation holding is one of the reasons, but I don't think it is the primary reason. We already have flatlots assessed at triple value by the SID for nearly ten years and it hasn't changed anything. We've had a moratorium on new ones since 1994 as well. So that idea is already in practice here and has not worked.
making lots more expensive doesn't make potential buildings on those plots more desirable, in many ways it actually makes them less.
The Old rule of thumb in downtown real estate is that having immediately adjacent parking doubles the value of your building. Even if it's just a block away, the compounding factor drops significantly. Many properties downtown without having adequate dedicated parking of some sort have great difficulty in attracting and maintaining tenants. And good luck trying to sell condos without parking.
You make the parking more expensive, all you'll probably do is drive up rent and thus decrease demand for buildings we do have. One of the biggest reasons I hear from people switching jobs to outside downtown is that they don't like paying so much for parking, whereas their new employer provides it at no out of pocket cost to the employee.
and FWIW CRE people hang onto buildings and green fields too in the same fashion as they do flats lots for speculation, case in point being the site where the Arena Casino would have gone. Even the city itself is more or less doing the same thing with 3 acres of Columbus Commons. It's just the way that CRE business has seemed to run for decades. It happens outside of downtown as well. e.g. There are plenty of plots in the New Albany area especially held by all sorts oddball LLCs that are just dormant waiting for some can't refuse offer.
Anyway flat lots are the symptom not the cause of the problem imo. The core problem is lack of demand for buildings themsleves and having to provide a lot of parking to service that demand.
If you do something to incentivize garages (which are crazy expensive to build), change people's driving habits somehow (cultural change, change in mass transit use etc), or incentivize buildings (e.g. the 10 yr abatement on condos while missed it's target goals worked pretty dang gone well). I think you'll see better results in getting build up on those lots than just trying to bury them in extra costs.
We aren't Philadelphia where it is comparatively harder to drive to the burbs or where I should note they have a more mature and diverse mass transit ( SouthEastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority ) system. Here people 90%+ commute by car, they have lots of choices and making it more expensive downtown doesn't make it more attractive to them.
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