The mandate issued by end-users and the brokerage community for parking ratios ranging from four to six spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space isn’t realistic, and is leaving tens of thousands of parking spaces empty each day across our metropolitan area. This means wasted energy to light empty parking levels, millions of cubic feet of concrete underutilized, building footprints covering greenfield sites, and most of all, unnecessary investment by developers and added expense in rents incurred by end users.
I offer this set of statistics as one source of evidence for my position: Granite Properties recently completed a car count in all of its garages at Granite Park in Plano, a campus of more than 2.5 million square feet of multi-tenant office buildings, as well as a hotel and retail. Granite has consistently provided four per 1,000 parking ratios for tenants across the office park, and has built a dedicated parking garage for each of its six office towers completed to date.