Company withdraws $15 million offer for Raleigh’s Wilmington St. parking deck
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Gold Crown offered $15.4 million to buy the Wilmington Street parking deck.
- Local groups warned the sale could end two-hour free parking and hurt downtown visits.
- City garages lose money; a rate hike narrowed an $8M gap to $2M.
A Denver-based company has withdrawn its $15.4 million offer to buy one of downtown Raleigh’s city-owned parking garages after community groups and residents expressed concerns about the sale.
The City Council was set to discuss the offer at a Tuesday meeting.
But local organizations, including Marbles Kids Museum and the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, raised objections to selling the Wilmington Street Parking Deck because of its potential impact on downtown businesses.
Raleigh leaders were already approaching the offer with caution.
“We recognize that the offer created a lot of conversation in the community,” city spokesperson Julia Milstead said in a statement Thursday. “We also recognize that this offer potentially provided opportunities to address the city’s stated goal to improve the financial stability of our parking program. As the city grows, we continue to look for efficiencies in our systems so that our residents’ tax dollars deliver the highest level of services for the city.”
Milstead said the city would not comment further.
Who was the prospective buyer?
Gold Crown Management Co., the Denver-based company that offered to buy the deck, is a real estate management company. It has a partnership with another Denver-based company called Parkwell to operate parking garages. Parkwell operates parking garages mostly around Denver, but also in states like Florida, California and Utah.
Gold Crown had not announced its intentions with the garage.
Neither Parkwell nor Gold Crown responded to The N&O’s request for comment Thursday.
Concerns about parking prices
The Downtown Raleigh Alliance and Marbles Kid Museum, a popular attraction across from the deck, worried that selling the garage would keep people from coming downtown if a new owner raised hourly and daily parking prices.
The city has 10 downtown garages. In 2024, it started offering free, two-hour parking at five of them, including the Wilmington Street deck.
“There’s about a 37% increase in users of that deck,” Bill King, president and CEO of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, told ABC11, The N&O’s newsgathering partner. “And we surveyed users of that deck last fall. Forty percent of the transit users on that deck said they were parking there and they visited because of the free two-hour parking program.”
In a survey after the program started, the Downtown Raleigh Alliance found that 88% of respondents were more likely to visit downtown because of the program.
Marbles Kids Museum, which is directly across South Blount Street from the garage, sent a letter to its supporters to contact their council members to voice their concerns.
Marbles met with the prospective buyer, the museum’s spokesperson Jillian Olsen said, and “expressed our concerns around losing two-hour free and affordable parking, the hardship it will cause for families and the long-term impacts on the vitality of downtown Raleigh.”
“In a recent parking survey, 66% or two-thirds of Marbles guests parked in the Wilmington Street Deck,” Olsen said.
What did the council think about the offer?
Many council members expressed caution about the potential sale.
Council member Jane Harrison told The N&O she had expected a discussion Tuesday but no decision.
But even if the council had accepted the offer outright, it would have been subject to an “upset bid” process, she said, to give others a chance to bid on the garage.
Council members Christina Jones and Megan Patton both emphasized how important downtown business is in the city and both said they likely wouldn’t have made any final decisions Tuesday.
Still, the garages remain a large expense for the city.
“Quite frankly, our parking garages — they lose the city money,” council member Jonathan Lambert-Melton said.
Before the city passed its fiscal year 2027 budget, which took effect Wednesday, it had an $8 million gap between the revenue parking garages generate and their associated expenses, according to the budget.
The city raised parking rates in the garages by $1 an hour (to $3 an hour), which helped to narrow that gap to $2 million.
But that still doesn’t account for needed repairs on the garages, which cost millions more.
Earlier this year, city officials discussed putting out a request for information, a preliminary step in a bidding process, to see if anyone wanted to buy the Wilmington Street garage. One of the reasons cited was that it has fewer contracts with people reserving spots.
Before the request was put out, Gold Crown sent its now-withdrawn offer to buy the garage.
“A new buyer could make it nicer” by spending money the city can’t, Lambert-Melton said.
Already, 10% of the city’s property tax rate increase this year of 3.7 cents per $100 was attributed to costs associated with its parking infrastructure, he said.
That translates to about an additional $6.70 on the tax bill of a home valued at $390,000, the median assessed home value in Raleigh.
This story was originally published July 2, 2026 at 4:05 PM.
