I thought this was kind of interesting, considering that practically every building being built in DFW is about 50% parking, 50% actual office space. The Granite Park ownership group did a multi-state study of their parking, and as a result are asking for a rezoning to 'right-size' their parking, which essentially amounts to building 2.5million sq ft of additional office space, removing ground-level parking lots, and building minimal amounts of additional structured parking on their Plano property.
https://www.plano.gov/AgendaCenter/View ... 12018-2691Paraphrased, since I can't copy from the PDF:
"The study has consistently shown that during peak demand roughly 30% of parking is not being used and sits empty when a building is 100% leased. Our study found that customers only use 2.17 spaces per 1000 sq ft during peak hour. During non-peak, even more sits vacant. The value of the 6580 unused parking spots of total 22360 is over $100 million dollars. In Granite Park Plano specifically a 4:1000 is offered, the actual use is 1.91:1000. So more than 45% will be vacant on the average peak day. In Dallas, 3.24:1000 is offered, 2.05:1000 is used."
Ideally, the city would see this and make major adjustments to their office parking ratios, but that's doubtful. Additionally, this would be useful to reconsider bank financing of parking, but I don't think Granite is a large enough player to do that either. The actual outcome will most likely that this request is granted but nothing more holistic will occur.
Interesting that both Dallas and Plano run below average for parking, so offices in Houston, Atlanta, Denver, and some place in Southern CA must run higher for the average to be 2.17:1000.
However this does show that the massive over-construction of parking is becoming a problem, and hopefully the large groups like Headington will right-size their lots and construct buildings to make better use of expensive assets.