Developer Proposes to Partner with City to Revive Stalled Parking Deck

Socks Construction – the company behind the mix-used Loop development on West Front Street – will present a proposal to Traverse City commissioners tonight (Monday) to partner on reviving a stalled third downtown parking deck and workforce housing/retail project on State Street.

Owner John Socks has requested 15 minutes of reserved comment at the end of tonight’s meeting to share his proposal. Socks and his team are currently constructing the Loop at the corner of West Front and Pine streets. The project has five planned buildings, four of which will feature ground-floor commercial tenants with over 160 residential units on the upper floors. The first building is expected to come online this spring, with the rest following in rapid succession through next fall, Socks tells The Ticker.

A sixth building would go where the former Gourdie-Fraser building is located and house a parking deck. However, Socks says the footprint is not nearly adequate for the Loop’s needs – the development likely requires a few hundred parking spaces, he says – nor the broader needs of west-end businesses downtown. The team compiled data showing a projected shortage of several hundred parking spaces downtown, with more developments still coming online.

A long-planned third public parking deck downtown was envisioned to meet that demand. The Traverse City Downtown Development Authority (DDA) went far into the design process for a 534-space deck on State Street next to the Loop, planned to be part of a larger mixed-use development that would also including retail space and workforce housing. The project was estimated to cost over $67 million. However, the DDA scrapped the project last year from a proposed new tax increment finance (TIF) plan over concerns it lacked community support.

Some board members resisted abandoning the project, saying the DDA has been promising for years to make up the parking spaces it was eliminating elsewhere. Socks – who made a land deal with the city in 2023 to purchase the Loop property and to sell the city the State Street parking deck property – was among the business owners caught off guard by the deck’s termination. “We put all the parcels together, we started construction (on the Loop), and then they stopped the process,” he says.

Socks is proposing a “true private-public partnership” whereby the city would convey the parking deck property to his company for $1. In exchange, “we will privately design, finance, construct, and manage the parking deck with no burden to the city,” he says. The first two floors of the deck would be public, while the upper four floors would be leased to downtown businesses. Public restrooms would be available at the southeast corner of the site, Socks says – easily accessible from Rotary Square, which has no plans for restrooms in its new design.

Socks Construction – part of a larger project team called ShoreNorth Development, which is also proposing the new hotel on Cherry Capital Airport property – would also build out the rest of the DDA’s master plan for the site. That includes the mixed-use development with ground-floor retail and income-restricted workforce housing, for which developers would seek a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) agreement with the city, Socks says.

“This is their plan,” he says. “We’re just following it through to the end. There are so many benefits for the city for this to happen. It’s workforce housing. It’s more retail space and jobs. It’s getting people to stop parking in Central Neighborhood. And because it’s city-owned property now with zero tax base, we’d be creating a major tax base…even with the PILOT.” If a new deck could be built, Socks says his company could also repurpose the Gourdie-Fraser building for a better use than parking on Front Street.

When asked if he’s concerned about the public criticism that caused the DDA to shelve the project, Socks says development pressure will soon cause worse outcomes downtown if a third deck doesn’t materialize. “We have our own needs, but that side of the city has those same needs,” he says. “We have this one moment in time to create a solution that can benefit so many people.”

Pointing to projects ranging from the redevelopment of the J&S Hamburg property to a new hotel going in across from the Loop on Front Street to a new Marriott hotel under construction in the Warehouse District, Socks says a deck could offer parking for some of those projects, allowing them to repurpose their own planned parking for other uses. “You don’t want to get multiple parking decks going in around town, but that’s what will happen…this could help consolidate everything,” he says. 

While Socks is only presenting his plan tonight – commissioners don’t yet have a formal proposal to act on – he’s hoping serious negotiations could start soon given the timing of the Loop and other developments. Meanwhile, the city separately this week will undertake clean-up work on a parcel it acquired in 2020 for the planned deck project: the former dry cleaning building on Pine Street.

When the DDA abandoned the parking deck plans – and city commissioners subsequently rejected attempts to clean up the dry cleaning site using a $1 million state grant – the DDA lost the grant for that particular property, as it was tied to economic development (the state agreed to redirect the grant to another upcoming project). However, the DDA and city later secured a $250,000 brownfield grant for clean-up. Those funds must be spent before the end of the year, according to City Communications Director Colleen Paveglio. Contractors will be demolishing the dry cleaning building today through Friday, with intermittent flag control planned on Pine and State streets Wednesday-Friday.

“The demolition of the building takes the parcel off the tax rolls that the parking fund has been covering,” says Paveglio. “Currently, the city has no plan for the parcel. It will be a concrete slab with bike racks.”

Pictured: City properties held for a downtown parking deck/mixed-use development. Photo credit: TC DDA.