The city has struck a deal with Kestrel Biologics to jointly fund a 600-space parking garage on Foundry Row, a project officials say is necessary to accommodate the neighborhood's growing biotech workforce but one that has already drawn complaints from residents who say the area needs less car infrastructure, not more.
Under the agreement, Kestrel Biologics will cover about 40 percent of the garage’s estimated $18 million cost in exchange for a guaranteed block of 240 reserved spaces during business hours, with the remaining 360 spaces available to the public evenings and weekends. The city will finance the rest through a combination of parking-revenue bonds and a portion of the tax revenue generated by Foundry Row’s biotech growth.
City Manager Marcus Whitfield said the arrangement grew out of conversations tied to Kestrel’s recent $64 million funding round, which the company has said will support roughly 150 new hires at its Foundry Row campus over the next two years. “We couldn’t tell a company we wanted to keep growing here and then hand them a parking problem as a welcome gift,” Whitfield said. “This was the fastest way to solve it without waiting years for a purely public project to work its way through the budget.”
A deal shaped by the neighborhood’s new height limits
Council Member Luis Bettencourt, who represents Foundry Row, said the garage is in some ways a direct consequence of the council’s recent decision to cap new construction in the neighborhood at 12 stories, a move meant to preserve Foundry Row’s industrial character. With less room to build upward, he said, existing surface lots have become more valuable as employers compete for a shrinking supply of parking near their offices.
“We capped how tall buildings can go, which I still think was the right call, but it means we have to be smarter about the footprint everything else takes up,” Bettencourt said. “A structured garage uses a fraction of the land that surface parking for the same number of cars would.”
Elena Marchetti, Kestrel Biologics’ chief executive, said the company approached the city after surveying employees and finding that more than half commute from outside the neighborhood, many from West Bellwater and Cedar Hollow, where public transit options remain limited outside the newly approved transit corridor’s initial route. “We’d love it if everyone biked to work or took a bus that doesn’t exist yet,” Marchetti said. “Until that’s realistic, we have people who need somewhere to park, and so does everyone else working within four blocks of us.”
We capped how tall buildings can go, which I still think was the right call, but it means we have to be smarter about the footprint everything else takes up.
Luis Bettencourt, City Council Member, District 5
Not everyone is convinced
Some Foundry Row residents have pushed back on the project, arguing that a large new garage undercuts the city’s own transit ambitions just as the $86 million bus rapid transit line linking Foundry Row to Downtown Core and West Bellwater is under construction a few blocks away. Foundry Row resident Miriam Okonkwo, who has lived in the neighborhood for nine years, called the garage “exactly the wrong signal at exactly the wrong time.”
“We just spent years fighting for transit investment in this neighborhood, and the first big infrastructure project to actually break ground is a parking garage,” Okonkwo said. “That tells you something about whose convenience actually gets prioritized.”
Whitfield said the two projects aren’t in tension so much as running on different timelines. The transit line isn’t expected to begin service for at least another year, he said, while Kestrel’s hiring is already underway. “If the bus line were open today, this conversation might look different,” Whitfield said. “It isn’t yet, and we have people driving to work right now who need somewhere to put their cars.”
Marchetti said Kestrel has committed to reevaluating its share of reserved spaces once the transit line opens, with any reduction in employee demand freeing up additional public spaces rather than sitting unused. Bettencourt said he intends to hold the company to that commitment. “This isn’t a permanent monument to cars,” he said. “It’s a bridge until the transit investment we already approved actually starts running.”
Construction on the garage is expected to begin within four months, with completion targeted for roughly 14 months after groundbreaking, according to city planning documents. Whitfield said the city will require quarterly usage reports from Kestrel once the garage opens, part of an effort to head off criticism that the reserved-space arrangement functions as a private subsidy dressed up as public infrastructure.
Okonkwo, the Foundry Row resident who has raised objections, said she doubts the quarterly reporting requirement will amount to much in practice. “By the time anyone reviews those reports and decides Kestrel is holding too many spaces, the garage will already be built and the precedent will already be set,” she said. “I’d rather the city had asked harder questions before signing the agreement than promise to check the math afterward.”
Bettencourt said he understands the skepticism but argued the alternative, doing nothing while Foundry Row’s biotech employers keep growing, would have left the neighborhood with even more informal parking pressure on residential side streets. “I’d rather have a structured garage with reporting requirements than cars circling blocks looking for curb space,” he said. “That’s not a perfect answer. It’s the answer we could get built in a reasonable amount of time.”
Whitfield said the city has not ruled out additional parking or mobility investments elsewhere in Foundry Row if the transit line’s ridership falls short of projections once it opens, though he said no such plans are currently funded. For now, he said, the garage represents the fastest available fix to a problem that was already visible before Kestrel’s expansion was announced. “We were going to need more parking in this neighborhood with or without this deal,” he said. “This just meant we didn’t have to pay for all of it ourselves.”