I wonder why.

Costco drops Aurora warehouse plan

....withdrawn its application with the city of Seattle to develop a three-story warehouse at North 125th Street and Aurora Avenue North. The company had planned to build a warehouse on top of two stories of parking at 12220 Aurora Ave. N. and had completed two public design-review meetings with the city's Department of Planning and Development.

Costco builds multistory warehouses in high-density areas where it cannot acquire the 15 acres needed for a typical warehouse and parking lot. The North Seattle property where the Costco warehouse was planned consists of about 7 acres.

I'll be following this story as I would have shopped at this very store and I was curious to see how well Costco -- which I admire greatly in many respects -- would have done it.

Comments

[Matthew Amster-Burton]

Why the store over two levels of parking rather than two levels of parking over the store?

[David Sucher]

No idea but I seem to remember dimly that the site slopes away to the east from Aurora and so perhaps they wanted to have the store itself visble from the main street?

But I really don't know as I have never seen a site plan and have no direct knowledge of the project.

[Christopher Davis]

Well, there are a number of reasons, not immutable, why the parking goes below the store. One is that the street is at the ground level, and that cars are less manouverable than people, so it's harder (but still obviously possible) to make a car go up a ramp than a human go up an elevator or stairs. Also, people aren't used to descending into a store from their cars. It would be an interesting experience. And the most probably reason is that the structure to hold up a few hundred cars would need to be far greater than to hold up rows of merchandise and thus cost more.

Not using this as justification (I would just as soon see the parking buried or eliminated) but those are probably some of their reasons.

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