And while mass transit is reducing the need for the amount of parking, Daniel Shallit, director of real estate for the Northeast Region at the Sports Authority, said parking cannot be totally eliminated from the retail model. “Looking at the Philadelphias of the world or the Bostons or other large urban markets, we still need it,” he said, noting that parking changes would affect store sizes. “The logic is, if you buy a treadmill at a Sports Authority, you can’t take that on a bus or a train. You need a car or you need some way to access a car to get that product home.”

Using New York City as an example, Shallit said its Manhattan locations sell less hard goods (like weights and fitness equipment) and more soft goods (like clothing and shoes) due its ease of transport on a bus or train. “But we still want to be close to mass transit because it builds awareness,” he said. “The more people that see us by commuting know that we are there and that’s really, really important to us.”

Supermarkets are also facing similar issues. Dennis P. Bachman, senior real estate representative for Wakefern Food Corp., said a large food shop could be difficult to do on a typical train or bus. “Cabs have certainly become a much more important factor,” he said. “Typically in a city store, especially if you have a lot of customers who would use mass transit, you would tend to have higher customer counts, greater shopping frequency and a lower average order size, so the per trip spend would be less, which adds some additional complications to the business. Learning to handle those additional customers, staffing levels and things like that, parking is still an important criteria.”

But some food retailers are paring back on parking altogether. G. Lamont Blackstone, principal of Mount Vernon, NY-based GL Blackstone & Associates, LLC, worked on the development and leasing of Harlem’s largest Pathmark store. After battling over the normal requirement of parking spaces versus the constraints of the development plot, Blackstone put in 2.3 cars per 1,000 people, lower than the industry standard of five per 1,000. “We are blessed that we live in a democracy, but sometimes there are inherent tensions between the vetting and the public input requirements, particularly as it relates to land use decisions of urban democracies versus the execution of requirements for urban developers and urban retailers,” he said. “That’s why it is critically important for developers from day one right out the gate that they put the best face forward on their projects in order to minimize the potential issues that will come down the pike.”

And due the large expense parking garages can bring, Larry Rose, principal, RK Realty Advisors, explained that urban retailers must understand their demographics before making an investment. Where parking at Bronx Terminal Market averages at 20% utilization, more shoppers are filling up spaces at Sky View Center in Flushing, Queens, where more residents own a vehicle. “Even though the site is at the end of the 7 line, half the people are driving and are beyond where mass transit is,” he said.

Peter Ripka, partner at Ripco Real Estate, a retail firm serving New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Westchester County and Lower Connecticut, explained that all forms of transportation play into what makes a site successful or not. Using its Target-anchored Sayville-Patchogue shopping center as an example Ripka said the property is centrally located on a major Long Island thoroughfare, Sunrise Highway. “People can easily come from long distances to those shopping centers, and mass transportation does the same thing in the urban environment,” he said. “People are able to come from a large area, and therefore, parking is not as necessary.”

While public transportation has become the “lifeline” for projects to happen, urban consumers should have choices, said panel moderator Ken Narva, co-founder and managing partner of White Plains, NY-based Street Works. “If you provide 30 teaser parking spaces at grade, that can make a store successful,” he said. "It is the same thing that on-street parking plays, which is the quality of the space, the sense of convenience and the sense of activity.”

But overall, Narva said the future of CRE investment is urban. “We live in an experience culture, and downtown is an experience where people interact with each other, and that experience is very important and is not going away,” he said. “As electronic retailing continues to grow, consumers still need to get out and interface with each other.”