Quote:
Originally Posted by wrendog
Well, losing 151 and gaining a residential tower and tower 8 seems like a good trade.
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I agree. It also sounds like it would be a taller residential building. Wasn't the last height around 319' or had it shrunk from that.
One note on the Cascade. The base wasn't built with the thought of a hotel being on the spot. Because of this, there would be limited parking available within the City Creek garage for the guests and staff. This is worsened if residential is also added to the project.
My understanding is that there are/were roughly 300 spaces set aside for the Cascade. In the past, I heard that the base was built to support approximately 30 stories of concrete construction.
I would expect that CCR would want to build on the empty spots first (1st South and State / 1st South 2nd East) before building the Cascade. This also allows other developers the opportunity to build their projects.
On the commercial develop front, there currently aren't many large companies that are looking to expand/move to SLC. Once Goldman chose 111 for their expansion, 151 was dead as a commercial property at that point only because of the need of a large tenant.
Patrinely, Held and CCR are all able to build commercial towers without needing to have 1/3 or more leased or a large tenant signed.
Within the current commercial real estate market, there is a need for a lot of smaller office space (10K to 40K sq ft) for the budding tech businesses. There is enough demand to fill up approximately 2 Million Sq Ft currently along the Wasatch Front just today. Unfortunately, most of this need has been met in the suburbs because of the cheaper rents from cheaper building/land costs.
Because of this, it is hard for a larger tower to be built in SLC as all the demand is being eaten up by the suburbs. The only way that SLC can get in on the action is for the developer to fund the tower themselves knowing the space will be filled.
One action that SLC could do is to offer substantial breaks for developers that build commercial towers. It could be as simple as property tax levels assessed equal the occupied space of the tower. So a tower with 50% occupancy only pays 50% of their assessed property taxes. There could be a requirement that the tower must be at least a given height (300') or along a frequent transit route with a minimum height of 200'. An additional deduction could be done for locations that have tech startups. This could possibly provide a rent reduction for the startup. Give the reduction for say 5 years for each startup.
The same could be offered to Residential buildings. The change here would be that the street frontage must be active use and no more than 100' long.
I can see a change coming for SLC in both markets but the commercial market may take some assistance from the City to help get some projects going.
There are a few tech projects going on around SLC currently. There is another shared tech office that will be opening soon (3rd South and Main) as well as interest by graduates from the U that want to stay close to where they live and the friends they know but there is a lack of available space that is also cheap for startups.
The only thing that might also help is what we have been discussing on the Transit thread, free transit. With the abundance of transit options in SLC, it becomes more economical for people to use transit to go to SLC than to drive across the valley. This may change over time but it would take a lot of capital and resources to improve the transit levels in the south end of the valley to equal what is available in SLC.
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