The Garage — Everyone Has to Keep Parking

You can phase a garage into sections, but the cars in the closed section have to go somewhere. On a full building with no overflow, that means off-site parking, shuttles, or a very tightly sequenced program — and all of it needs deciding before the schedule is published, not after.

There is a second constraint that boards discover late. Overhead repair work requires the bay directly below to be closed as well, for the safety of anyone parking there, which means the number of spaces lost is larger than the number of spaces being worked on. On a garage with no spare capacity that difference can be the whole phasing plan.

A parking structure has no envelope, no conditioning and, on most levels, no roof. Rain reaches it directly, salt air reaches it directly, and chlorides tracked in on tires are deposited onto the slab every day and dissolved by the next rain into the concrete below.

It is the most exposed structure the association owns and the one nobody inspects, because it looks like infrastructure rather than like part of the building. In a coastal Florida condominium it is reliably the element that needs restoration first.

1. 01Plan phasing and displaced parking with the board before publishing.
2. 02Maintain safe circulation and pedestrian routes throughout.
3. 03Repair concrete, treat steel, correct drainage.
4. 04Apply traffic coating where specified, with realistic cure windows.
5. 05Return each phase before opening the next.

Solve the parking before you sign anything. It is the single most common reason garage projects stall, and it is an association problem rather than a contractor problem — which means it needs to be resolved by the board while the schedule is still theoretical.

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