Monday, May 25, 2015

Reminds me of a song.

"I see a bad moon a-risin'. I see trouble on the way..."

A new YAFULC*is taking shape right next to the college, in between campus and the "student suites" that have already been built. You know those kinds of student housing, where there's 4 bedrooms with 4 private baths, and a common kitchen and living space. But that's not what I'm going to talk about.

The YAFULC's anchor is a 22 screen movie theater. There are 2 huge rooms, and 20 smaller ones. The huge ones seat around 300 people, and the smaller ones seat around 100. That's a potential total of 2600 people in the rooms at any one time, plus all of the people coming and going to and from the next showing of the movies.

Signs are already sprouting up as to the future tenants of the other spots in the YAFULC. One is a local brewpub, one is a well-known ice cream store ("Icy Rock" IYKWIM), and the other is a fishy-named fish taco place. The other slots are currently empty, and waiting for new tenants to "Built-to-suit" the spaces. All-in-all, there's about 2 dozen spots for businesses to come into. Hopefully this won't be another retail hellhole, and will be more a nightlife type of venue.

Now the bad news: There isn't enough parking. Yes, it may look like there's plenty of parking with the huge lot for the "event center" next door, but whenever there's an event, you have to pay to park. Here's what I see happening:

  • People are going to park in the area reserved for the student housing, pissing off the students and the housing management. 
  • People are going to park in the area designated for the event center, and are going to be pissed off when asked to pay. 
  • People going to events are going to park in the free parking for the YAFULC, and are going to piss off the customers of the YAFULC, leading to the above. 
  • People parking in the YAFULC parking, patronizing the YAFULC businesses, are going to be pissed off at getting parking tickets; because the time limit they are going to set isn't going to allow them to have drinks, have dinner, see a movie, and have dessert afterwards, even though that's exactly what the businesses and planners want them to do. 
But wait, there's more!

This property (and the campus housing) is on property wholly under the jurisdiction of the Campus Police. I know you're doing a WTF right now, so let me clear this up: A State University has allowed a developer to build "off-campus, privately managed student housing" and a YAFULC, all on University property. 

It's bad enough that the current generation of college students have no respect for the police; but even though the Campus PD officers are all fully qualified, 100% legit, sworn Law Enforcement Officers as defined by state law; the students have less than zero respect for them. 

I can see that the mix of college students, booze, and campus cops is going to make for some really bad mojo for this YAFULC. 

The only redeeming quality is that it's right off the freeway, in case someone needs to make a quick getaway. 


*YAFULC: Yet Another Fucking Urban Lifestyle Center aka "Big Box with a Strip Mall"

1 comment:

VXO said...

It occurs to me that I've seen exactly this plan before for a shopping center to be crapped out on university property.....

Back in 2003 or so when I was engineer for the radio station at Florida International University, we were warned that we were going to lose our studio space if a plan by then governor Jeb! Bush to have university centers at the state's universities turned into shopping malls went through. The campus bookstore was going to become a GAP store, for crying out loud... Classroom space in the university center was to be taken away and offices upstairs were going to become stockrooms.

Luckily, they made it out only with a crappy Chili's Express replacing the campus pub, and a very weird long hallway to nothing being tacked onto the back of the building that would have once become the mall corridor.