You live in an area where parking spaces are at a premium, have a Victorian style apartment building and don’t want to screw up its aesthetics by sticking a big ugly parking bay underneath it, what do you do? You could do what one building owner in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood did and build a secret garage at the bottom of the building that hides behind a folding Victorian facade.
I’m sure this cost a pretty penny, but it looked like the ground floor was going unused and converting it to a tiny parking lot makes good business sense. The owner could choose to either A) rent the spaces out; or B) increase the cost of the apartments in the building. Either way, it is a clever way to deal with the parking problem that faces city dwellers the world over.
