Establishing commuter parking at Ken Smith (with some kind of bridge to the train) is a rare opportunity–a no-brainer that if not taken advantage of now, will haunt the village forever. There is no reason the owner couldn’t make money on it.
Whats the up side for Ridgewood for more commuter parking ?
Who are these extra parking spots for, residents or out of towner s?
Some folks believe more commuters using the train station equates to more people patronizing shops and restaurants in the CBD, the theory being when they get off the train, they will not go directly to their cars and leave town. I’m not sure I buy into that theory though.
But most believe that commuters will get in their cars and drive home. After a long work day most are not looking for retail therapy.
Commuter parking on the upper levels that will connect to the train station, shopping/business parking on the lower levels.
Construction is simple.
they do go for a drink, a bit to eat, or pick up food and take it home, this is a good thing.
how much is the parking.
A combination of commuter parking on the upper levels combined with retail on the ground level would be an excellent use of the site. There is no doubt the Ken Smith site is by far the best commuter parking location in town. The big challenge is getting it to work financially. Adding a retail component would certainly go a long way to solving that problem.
Sell the “horse farm” and put the money into the Ken Smith parking center.
I agree. We could do a mixed use @ the horse farm, a few homes and some 55+ adult condos and make more than the 10m back that was wasted on that place. Put some ratables back in town.
Good try #11 but the economics would not work. Based on 10MM in land cost the usual formula is 1/3 land cost and 2/3 build-out. This means the project build-out would be 30-35MM. Based on a reasonable developer cost of $250K/ unit they would need to build at 140 units just to break even. To achieve a reasonable profit they would need to build 180-200 units. Imagine how well that would go over in town.
#7…then I guess the land won’t sell for 10MM.
let’s see …I own a valuable piece of property that I want to develop and profit from…nahh, I’ll sell it to the Village for a loss so they can build a parking lot and keep the Ridge moms happy.
or, hey — raise our taxes to fund the purchase of the property for a big ugly parking lot smack in the center of town.