Lexington, KY – A barren piece of land at the confluence of Main and Vine Streets will soon see construction equipment according to developer Phil Holoubek.
“We will now be able to develop a multi-story, mixed-use project. There’s first floor retail and several floors of residential units above,” Holoubek said as a result of a 150 to 162-space parking garage that will be built on the site by the Lexington and Fayette County Parking Authority.
Holoubek said he should start construction by the end of the year on the site and could open 15,000 to 18,000 square feet of first floor retail and around 50 one and two bedroom apartments on three or four floors above the space within 12 months of construction.
Holoubek, developer of Main & Rose and the Nunn Building, first approached city officials in 2008 about the prospect of building a garage on the eastern end of Lexington’s downtown as a way to spur development in the area.
“They made a very unfortunate vote to not put a parking garage there and you can see the result,” he said of the area that has been a vacant lot since 2010 when plans were announced to build a CVS on the site. Those plans fell through in early 2011 when developers could not figure out how to build the drugstore around an underground junction box for Kentucky Utilities.
At that time, Holoubek rolled out a design for a building that would allow access to the underground utility from a pass-through portion of the building. But work never began on that design as parking for the building wasn’t sufficient.
“The intent was always to put mixed-use [building] there if possible, but without the garage it was not possible. Now that we’ve got the garage we can put the density there that’s important for the community for the quality of life it adds to downtown and for the public sector revenue it generates,” he said.
Gary Means, executive director of LexPark said the garage will be constructed on a similar timeframe as Holoubek’s building but will be able to serve more than that proposed building.
“We wouldn’t build a garage in the middle of nowhere and hope people would come around it,” Means said Tuesday morning. “This is such a smaller scale that we can do it on our own, we can finance it on our own. It’s just a really cool opportunity to assist a development that really is going to happen and set the stage for additional development to happen.”
Holoubek cited a study conducted in Columbus, Ohio, that showed commuters would not walk more than 800 feet to get from their parking space to their desk, and the distance drops from there when the parking is for retail purposes.
The only other parking garage in the eastern part of downtown is attached to the PNC Bank Building on the corner of Main and Elm Tree, there are also spaces under Holoubek’s Main & Rose complex directly across Elm Tree from the PNC garage, but parking is limited to residents and those doing business with the commercial space on the first floor of Main & Rose.
The design of the parking garage, expected to be open to an RFP and finalized in coming months, will include what’s known as a retail wrap to allow for businesses to rent space along the sidewalk level of the garage. The Parking Authority will manage the space as it does along Broadway at its 302-space Victorian Square Garage.
The new garage should cost around $17,000 per space, Means said. The total project will be $2.7 to $2.9 million. It will have equipment and lighting similar to that at the Parking Authority’s other garages, three of which [the Helix, Transit Center and Victorian Square] it owns, while it manages the Courthouse Garage.