News Headlines

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Great News for Downtown Tacoma!

Attached is a link to an article, “Businesses Clear Out for South Park Plaza Development” from the Tacoma Daily Index. This is encouraging news for those of us who frequently go downtown. In case you don’t know, this parking garage is a huge eyesore and it isn’t the best addition to a reinvigorated downtown. Some good businesses have unfortunately been affected by the change. But overall, a greater good will come about if the redevelopment of this property goes well. What I’m personally hoping for is something that is much more attractive and pedestrian friendly. We’re well on our way Tacoma!

Tacoma Daily Index

2 comments:

drizell said...

This is a great opportunity for the central part of downtown. I've never seen any portion of the sidewalks under the Park Plazas occupied by any shoppers or restaurant goers.

It would be nice, if the engineering allowed it, to create more than just two floors of office space on Park Plaza South as is proposed. The vacancy rate of downtown office space is less than one percent, meaning that there is almost no space available should a company want to move downtown. According to a Dan Voelpel column in the News Tribune in January 2007, Tacoma has lost out on enough willing tenants to fill the Wells Fargo building because it didn't have any available office space.

Tacoma should take advantage of this opportunity to build on (literally) what's already there and create more office space downtown.

Erik B. said...

This is a critical project for downtown as it would restore around 6 retail spaces on the "main street" of downtown Tacoma which are vitually uninhabitable.

It would also add needed office space.

The centric position of the parking garage makes it even a higher priority.

This is one of the ways Tacoma's urban grid can be repaired