Unless you've been living under a rock, you may have heard that Kansas City finally has a full-service grocery store downtown. On Tuesday, the downtown Cosentino's opened.
In my 13 years of living in Kansas City, only the Sprint Center's grand opening has met the same type of fanfair.
If the early crowds are any indication, the store will be a huge success -- smartly captializing on the downtown workers/residents with a huge section of the store dedicated to grab and go meal solutions and in-store dining options (including a full service salad bar).
The new grocery store will benefit the 10,000 to 15,000 downtown residents, and tens of thousands of other people who work downtown that can snag some last-minute groceries before heading home. The store will certainly raise property values on downtown residences, which will be good for both thoes residents, the city, and prospects for future development.
The question is, what took so long?
It is clear that there is a lot of excitement and demand for the downtown grocery. Why did it take this long, and a TIF-funding district, for the downtown grocery store to finally come into existance?
The long-running argument has been that the downtown population would not support a full-service grocery store. I'm not buying it. Overland Park has, to my best count, 18 full-service, non specialty grocery stores (counting Wal-Mart Supercenters). Overland Park has 170,000 residents. So that's roughly one, grocery store per every 9,500 residents in Overland Park. Downtown KCMO has had that many residents for nearly a decade now.
On top of costs of starting a downtown grocery, many of our city's codes make it even more difficult for a grocery to open. The downtown Cosentino's required 127 parking spaces in order to open -- in spite of reality that about 50% of the store's shoppers will walk to the store from their homes, from their places of work, or arrive via public transit. This would significantly impact the cost of opening such a business.
While we're celebrating the benefit to downtown residents (as we should)-- we should also be taking a long look at what city codes issues made this be such a long-overdo celebration for downtown residents? What could we have streamlined to have allowed another grocery store to serve these residents over the past decade and without TIF funding?
And then also ask, what other less high-profile neighborhoods are being affected by these barriers to starting a business that remain without basic services because they don't have TIF support?
Let's remove the unnecessary barriers to entry so residents in other neighborhoods throughout the city don't have to wait a decade for the services to catch up to the populations.
(Photo credit, the Kansas City Star).
Good news... The new development code will hopefully be approved by Council in the next month or two. The code has no parking requirements in the Loop. Zilch. None. And parking requirements in the Crossroads will be much lower.
Posted by: Eric Rogers | January 12, 2009 at 08:49 AM
Do other cities have less restrictive parking or other codes enforced on new businesses or developments in their downtown area? Eric, that's good news about relaxing the parking restrictions. If it's actually a problem for developers, this should help.
Posted by: TheKCGuy | January 12, 2009 at 09:06 AM
Eric,
That's great news about loosening the parking restrictions in the downtown loop and the crossroads. I really wish they'd extend it all the way down Main to the Plaza. That will certainly help a lot -- on a variety of fronts....including improving use of public transit, creating density, spurring development, etc.
KCguy, I saw your note on this...and yeah, I'd say having a grocery store need to come up with 127 parking spaces downtown was going to make it cost-prohibitive. You'd have to build a garage for that type of space, which would just double or triple your start-up costs. I've heard more than a few horror stories from small local business owners about the unnecessary hoops they had to jump through in order to open their businesses...parking seemst to be the biggest problem, but not the only one.
Posted by: Brent | January 12, 2009 at 09:35 AM
Eric, who is spearheading the changes to the parking code? This is fantastic and way over due. Hopefully they will look into other areas so Midtown doesn't turn into a giant sheet of asphalt.
Posted by: MichelleD | January 12, 2009 at 10:31 AM
Also, this store is fantastic and the prices seemed in line with other grocery stores. Which is suprising with the amount of overhead they must have. The staff they had on hand was also great and very helpful.
Posted by: MichelleD | January 12, 2009 at 10:35 AM
The parking code is currently in the Planning and Zoning Committee. It's part of a much bigger project to re-write all of the zoning and development code.
I think overall there will be less parking required. The no parking requirement in the loop will also extend to transit. There will be a certain radius around any MAX (or light rail) station where the parking requirement will be reduced or even eliminated.
Posted by: Eric Rogers | January 13, 2009 at 10:39 AM