Lifts take parking to a new level

Developers save time, money stacking cars in high-tech garages

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Jun 5, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (4 Reader comments)

COURTESY OF JEFF JOSLIN

Japan was one of the first countries to break ground on an innovative car-stacking system, like this one in Kyoto.

If you can stack condominium units on top of one another – or, these days, “luxury apartment” units on top of each other – then you might as well stack their inhabitants’ cars on top of one another as well.

Car stacking is coming to Portland, and already it’s saving developers millions of dollars in construction costs.

For more than a year the Gerding Edlen Development Co. has been planning a new 51-unit apartment building at Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard and 20th Avenue.

But the building’s costs and projected revenues didn’t add up, or, in development lingo, didn’t pencil out, until project planners came up with a creative way they could offer residents parking stalls without having to excavate an underground parking garage.

Their solution is something called a triple-stacker semiautomatic puzzle lift, which will allow residents to keep 29 cars in a small ground-floor area that normally would hold only 10.

And the triple stacker, according to a host of local development and transportation officials, just might herald in a new age of automated parking garages in the city’s residential buildings.

“It’s going to save us money, and it’s going to save us time,” said Gerding Edlen development manager Aaron Jones of the parking system. “It makes the project doable.”

Without the triple stacker, Jones said, the apartment building would have needed an underground garage for residents. In today’s market, it costs about $45,000 per parking stall to excavate and build underground parking, Jones said. At 29 spaces, that’s about $1.3 million – enough to cancel the project.

The triple stacker, on the other hand, is going to cost closer to $15,000 per stall, something on the order of $430,000.

“Without this system we wouldn’t have been able to do the project, flat out,” Jones said. “The cost of excavating would have made the building too expensive.”

Last year, the Strand condominiums opened in South Waterfront with the city’s first modern parking lift, a simple stacker that allows residents to own lifts that can stack one car on top of another.

In April, construction started on the Mirabella, a high-rise for seniors in South Waterfront that will have its own car lift – 120 parking spaces that actually can hold 240 cars. The lift is saving developers a bundle by allowing them to build one level of underground parking instead of the two they would have needed if they couldn’t stack cars.

One open space is the key

But Gerding Edlen’s Haw-thorne Boulevard building will have the most sophisticated of any of the automated lifts installed so far in Portland. And it’s the puzzle in the puzzle lift that makes the thing work.

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit