Student housing developers near college campuses face a version of a problem that’s playing out across the country: available land close enough to campus to matter is scarce, expensive, and shrinking, while the expectations for what a student housing project needs to deliver keep growing. Municipal parking requirements sit right in the middle of that tension, and how a developer resolves it can decide whether a project pencils out at all.
A student housing community located just steps from the University of Florida in Gainesville offers a case study in that tradeoff. The off-campus development offers fully furnished 2-, 3-, and 4-bedroom apartments, and its design team faced a site with little tolerance for traditional parking ramps or the circulation space they require. The project team’s answer was a 46-space TrendVario automated parking system from KLAUS Multiparking America: a two-level, above-grade, no-pit configuration that let the building meet its required parking count without sacrificing units or driving up construction costs.
Christopher Tiessen, President & CEO of KLAUS Multiparking America, the U.S. subsidiary of a German manufacturer with more than 60 years of engineering experience in automated and mechanical parking, has watched the pattern repeat across multiple student housing markets, including projects near several University of California campuses…