There’s a 2.93-acre property at 1501 Learnard Ave. that used to be a greenhouse — a quirky old structure tucked into a quiet Lawrence neighborhood. You’ve probably driven past it without thinking too much about it, but it’s one of those rare spaces that could become anything. A community hub, an arts greenhouse, a café, a shuffleboard club, a small market, a micro-retail incubator — any number of ideas that might give the neighborhood a real center of gravity.

Instead, the current proposal is to tear it down and replace it with a 234-space surface parking lot for KU students who live a mile away.

A parking lot. For people who “probably won’t move their cars until the weekend,” according to the developer.

It’s hard to think of a more perfect symbol of where Lawrence keeps going wrong.

We talk endlessly about wanting to be a progressive, creative, walkable, interesting college town. We market ourselves as “Unmistakably Lawrence.” But when it comes time to actually build that kind of city, we default to the most generic, car-first development patterns imaginable. We flatten something interesting and replace it with something forgettable. We protect convenience over character, vehicles over people.

This isn’t an isolated decision. It’s part of a long pattern of demolition dressed up as “progress.” We’ve lost the old KU bookstore, Oldfather Studios, the KU Facilities Administration Building, Oliver Hall, Memorial Stadium, the US Bank on 27th, and blocks of green space at Iowa and 23rd. The replacements? More chain stores, more asphalt, more buildings that could sit anywhere in the Midwest and feel just as meaningless.

What we’re building doesn’t make people care about Lawrence; it makes them shrug.

Our streets are built for cars, not kids. Our sidewalks are narrow, our bike lanes unprotected, our buses infrequent. We keep designing a city that requires driving, then wonder why we need more places to store the cars. A parking lot for students shouldn’t be considered “infrastructure” — it’s an admission that we’ve failed to build a city where students don’t feel forced to bring a car in the first place.

A lot like this one could help us course-correct. It could become the kind of place that draws people out of their homes, connects neighbors and gives the community something to be proud of. A greenhouse-turned-café. A family-friendly activity venue. A flexible community/event space. A cluster of small, locally owned businesses. A place that helps make Learnard Avenue more walkable, not less.

Because people care about places that give them something to care about. They care about beauty, identity, local ownership, human connection. They care about places that invite them in rather than push them through.

A 234-space parking lot doesn’t do that. It won’t strengthen the neighborhood, won’t help local businesses, won’t reduce traffic, won’t improve quality of life. It will simply turn a unique site into an oven in the summer and a dead zone in the winter.

Lawrence has a choice to make. We can keep building the city we say we don’t want, or we can start building the one we claim to be: a walkable, livable, creative place full of community-scale opportunities instead of commuter-scale parking lots.

This greenhouse site is a small decision in the grand scheme of things. But small decisions accumulate, and eventually they determine who we become.

Lawrence deserves better than another heat island. It deserves a place that brings people together, not a lot where 234 cars go to sleep.

We don’t need more spaces for cars. We need places for people.

— Riggs Skepnek is a Lawrence resident who has degrees in landscape architecture and regional planning, and has worked on place-building and campus design for large companies and organizations across the U.S.