$35,000 parking spaces

Least surprising local news of the week is that the county will not proceed with making the Wailuku Municipal Parking Lot a multi-story garage, at a cost of $35,000 per stall gained.
That’s right. The parking spot would cost more than the car parked in it.
This is usual. When I worked in Des Moines, Iowa, the city built a series of multistory parking garages downtown, and each stall cost roughly twice what a new car cost in those days. The garages charged 35 cents an hour to park, and, remarkably, that was sufficient revenue to pay off the bonds. (In Des Moines, they used something called “tax increment financing,” which was a form of betting on the come – the bonds were supported by the expected increase in property taxes that was to come about when the garage made surrounding property more valuable; the parking lot equivalent of trickle-down economics. It worked, in the sense that the bonds did not default. It did not work, in the sense that the city was trying to revitalize downtown. People did not decide to forgo free parking at the suburban malls in order to pay 35 cents to park downtown.)
Should a Wailuku multistory garage get built, and should it be required to be self-supporting, presumably it would have to charge in the neighborhood of 75 cents an hour. Since the municipal lot is used largely by workers who park without charge, I do not see them welcoming the opportunity to pay $6 a day to park.
It shouldn’t have required an environmental impact statement to figure this out.
There’s a reason multistory garages are uncommon. They are ridiculously expensive. Only resorts, whose land is even more ridiculously expensive, have them; and Queen Kaahumanu Center.
At Kaahumanu Center, the owners (at the time, ML&P) wanted to retain their standing as the primo mall on the island, because of a rule of thumb in the mall business that the No. 1 mall enjoys an 8% premium in revenue over lesser malls. Unable to grow out, Kaahumanu Center had to go up, making itself two stories and adding two very expensive parking garages.
As it turned out, it didn’t work, for several reasons. One, Duncan McNaughton built a loooong strip mall along Dairy Road and placed in it a lot of stores that normally you’d find in the local dominant mall, like Sports Authority. Two, because Maui is a tourist island, Shops at Wailea and Whalers Village scarfed up the high-end retailers like Coach that normally you’d find at the local primo mall.
But Shops at Wailea did not become the local primo mall because it doesn’t have the stores that draw people to the dominant mall for their day-to-day shopping – no Macy’s or equivalent.
As often happens, Mainland rules don’t apply here.
Wailuku is certainly congested, but it is not obviously a place to put expensive parking: In general, it has the lowest commercial rents around.
So parking is likely to remain a pain in Wailuku. The only old city I have been in where no-charge parking downtown is not a pain is Savannah, Georgia. It was founded as a military colony and the original layout set aside every sixth block or so for militia training grounds.
Remarkably, these were not poached for development even after militia uses receded. As a result, there are miles of empty block fronts where cars can park a short distance from the built-up blocks where people want to go. It’s awfully expensive in land, but it works.
Lucky for Kamaaina Loan & Cash for Gold, we have our own private parking (it’s behind our retail store at 98 North Market Street).

To mall or not to mall

Some background on the controversy about the Kihei megamall:

Less than 30 years ago, the sum total of national retailers on Maui was Sears, National Dollar and Woolworth, among general retailers. No Kmart, no Wal-mart.

Today, no Woolworth and no National Dollar.

There weren’t a lot of specialized national retailers here 30 years ago, either: no Pier One, no Sports Authority (which didn’t yet exist).

Today we have outlets from Tiffany to Home Depot and it night seen that rural Maui has caught up with national urban retailing trends. Far from it,

Around 1990, a speaker brought in by the Main Street Association asserted that there were 140 national chains that were NOT on Maui.

I haven’t seen any more recent estimate, but although we have added many, many national chains since 1990, my guess is that the number today would be even higher than 140.

There are a lot more national (and even international) retailers like Ikea than there used to be.

If you think about just fast food chains, Maui lacks dozens. Chick-Fil-A is in the news, but on Maui you cannot either support or protest its position about marriage, because it isn’t here.

Neither is Sonic, Long John Silver’s, Popeye’s, Boston Market, Friendly’s and many more.

Among non-food retailers that are still absent are Target (probably on its way soon), Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pottery Barn and on and on.

This helps to explain the desire of developers to build more malls on Maui. Maui may or may not be a top tier location — it wasn’t for J.C. Penney — but national chains have to expand to satisfy Wall Street.