ACTION: Corewell Parking Bomb, phase 2

Submitted by whitemice on Sat, 10/14/2023 - 14:40

As you may already know Corewell Health constructed a new office facility in Monroe North between the Brassworks building and the Embassy Suites hotel. They also dropped ~900 additional parking spaces into the neighborhood - a neighborhood immediately adjacent to the city's commercial core and a neighborhood intended to be a hub for recreation and access to the river. Well, they've come back with phase 2.0 of their plan: it is surface parking lots everywhere. Corewell's intention is turn the entire center of Monroe North into an auto storage facility. They make some hand-waivery about future "green space" and housing, but to start with they need to demolish existing buildings and lay asphalt.

Fortunately [I guess, see "Related" below], the creation of surface parking lots in this zone district requires Special Land Use. In pursuit of the city's blessing for this betrayal of every plan [the Michigan St. Corridor Plan, the Monroe North Plan, and GR Forward] Corewell will be appear before the Planning Commission on 2023-10-26, only a few weeks after this proposal was first released. No doubt they are attempting to move quickly, thus allowing the mayor and city manager to feign surprise when people see more of the city turned into parking. But there is still time to get in their way. Please consider 👉e-mailing your city commissioners👈 and the Planning Commission 👉(mailto:planning@grcity.us)👈. Below is a sample letter. Feel free to copy-n-paste, edit, add to or subtract from; whatever you feel makes it your voice. And do so soon.
Monroe North is a critical part of our city's urban fabric, its walk-ability, vitality, and economic diversity needs to be enhanced. This proposal backtracks on all of those goals, it will set this neighborhood's develop back by decades. Monroe North is an urban neighborhood, it is not an office park.

Related

In April of 2017 there was an policy proposal before the City Commission to ban the construction of new surface parking lots in City Center zones. This proposal came forward as a result of the adoption of the GRForward plan. Instead of following the lead of the plan with policy the City Commission tabled the idea, saying they would revisit it at a later time. That was five years ago. As with the policies which were brought forward when the city adopted "Vision Zero" in 2018 they were tabled and have never come back up.