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Friday, January 8, 2016

Uptown's Newest Drive-Thru Bank Secures More Parking

Wells Fargo had their appeal granted at the Zoning & Planning Committee yesterday. The vote was unanimous to allow the new Lake & Humboldt Wells Fargo to exceed the parking maximum by eight spaces--for a total of 25. As a condition of the parking variance, the bank will need to commit to sharing their lot with the neighborhood or a local business during non-banking hours.

The parking maximum is lower than it otherwise would be, because the site is located in the Lake and Hennepin Pedestrian Oriented Overlay District. This calls for a more pedestrian friendly environment, which includes smaller parking lots. A drive-thru, similarly prohibited by the district, was allowed by the Planning Commission last month.

One neighbor, concerned about street parking, was there to testify that biking and busing for a bank employee or customer is "unrealistic." She called out a collection of working-class heroes by name and described how they drive 2-3 miles to work from Linden Hills (camera pans to the brave faces of Adrian, Marsha, and Georgianne, presumably parked next to Michelle Obama). Not very shrewd of these folks to eschew a 13-minute bus ride in favor of enduring the daily Uptown a-park-olypse. (I enjoyed her testimony. Watch the video below.)

I can't understand the argument that a bank will bring parking disaster to the neighborhood. Banks are open during banking hours. Banking hours coincide with the time of day that many residents, even non-bankers, will have driven their cars off to work and parked them in someone else's neighborhood. Council Member Lisa Goodman seemed to be thinking along those lines when she asked the Wells Fargo representative what their plans were for the empty lot during off hours. Answer: keep it empty.

Council President Barb Johnson made the social engineering argument, saying we shouldn't use the parking maximum to "force people to use a particular form of transportation." I should remind you that Barb had no problem forcing people build more parking when she weakened reforms to parking minimum regulations last year. And then there was her usual anecdote about how hard it is to find parking on her Uptown shopping trips. You may remember last year when Barb griped about that one time she had to walk a block and a half in Ward 10.

Despite approving the extra parking, the committee was largely in agreement that this is a pretty terrible project for this location. "It needs density, it needs more than one story, and there's way too much surface parking," said Andrew Johnson. Lisa Bender described the sentiment she hears from the neighborhood association as a question of "how do we get this project to totally change into a different form that's not a single story building surrounded by surface parking?" It's too late for that. Uptown is stuck with this over-parked, single-story, drive-thru bank for decades.






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