Search Results for parking

Streetsblog NYC has been doing an excellent job of hounding the city on its lack of action on parking reforms, but this article with developer Alan Bell talking about his experience with parking minimums in the city is, I think, the best so far. Here’s an excerpt: Hudson might have built more housing were it not for parking minimums, however. Bell said in an interview that he’s walked away from a number of projects because he couldn’t make the required parking fit or evade the parking minimums by subdividing the development into small pieces. “One comes to mind on Grand Street in East Williamsburg. You couldn’t get out with the waiver because you’re building too many units.” Without the ability to claim an exemption from parking minimums, the economics of the development didn’t add up. “If you have a modest size building, it’s really prohibitive,” said Bell. In addition to the direct costs of building structured parking, which Bell said can range from $25,000 to $50,000 per space, making room for the parking can also reduce revenues. “If you’re up against other buildings on both sides, you’re going to have to reduce your perimeter retail frontage because you need an entrance for a garage.” Other times, said Bell, he’s able to manipulate the structure of the development to ensure that he can avoid parking minimums. In East New York, he divided one project into four different five to six story buildings. “We just played around with the unit mixes so that we could get each of them under the waiver.” Had he not been trying to avoid the parking regulations, said Bell, “theoretically, we could have built more units.” (In practice, a different set of city regulations would have prevented that at this particular site, even without the parking requirements.)

In the past, Market Urbanism has not been very pleased with municipal parking privatization schemes. While we are pro-privatization in theory, in practice, many of the schemes turn out to be seriously deficient in market credentials. For one, true privatization would mean giving the “owners” full rights to the land, including some sort of development rights. In addition to the option of leaving the land as parking, the “owners” should be allowed to use the space for other uses, like a parklet or maybe even opening it up to food trucks and small farmers’ markets. Or perhaps when they redevelop the property, they could extend the building a few more feet onto the sidewalk and make up the lost sidewalk space in what is now the parking space. Parking privatization schemes, however, allow for none of that. So the only redeeming quality is that they are politically palatable ways of raising woefully underpriced on-street parking prices. But as the Queens Gazette reports, New York won’t even get this benefit if Bloomberg’s plan is successful: The plan is similar to one established in Chicago in 2008 with one exception. Unlike the Chicago system, parking fees in New York City would remain in strict control of city officials. “In no way would officials give up the right to establish parking rates in New York City,” officials said. So if the owners aren’t allowed to do anything but park cars in the spots, and they don’t even have the right to raise prices, then what exactly does the “privatization” do? Well, for one it gives the city an lump-sum check – essentially the net present value of the revenues of the space. This is really just a form of borrowing – while they’ll be getting more money now, they get less money later. But […]

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s taken a look at America’s absurdly restrictive minimum parking requirements, but Streetsblog has come up with a really great example of really bad parking policy in action: The HUD-sponsored project, located on Bathgate Avenue between 183rd and 184th Streets, was originally slated to be an 18-unit building. Under the zoning that used to govern the site, the parking minimums were low enough that fewer than five spaces were required, said Ferrara. With such a small number of required spaces, the project was eligible for a waiver, meaning it didn’t need to build any parking at all. In October, however, the area was classified as a “neighborhood preservation area” by the Department of City Planning in its Third Avenue/Tremont Avenue rezoning. The new zoning, known as R6A, carries slightly higher parking requirements for affordable projects [PDF]. “When we went down to an R6A,” said Ferrara, “it put us in a position where we couldn’t get the parking waived.” In effect, the rezoning added parking requirements where there hadn’t been any before. I’ve praised Bloomberg’s rezoning in the past while also worrying that the lack of parking minimum reform would hold back growth. It looks like I was too generous—in some cases, the rezoning has actually made the parking minimum problem worse. And just for the record, I looked up the location on a map, and the specific location is about a 10 minute walk to the closest B/D local station on the Grand Concourse. Its zipcode is pretty poor – 10458’s average adjusted gross income has been in decline since 2000 when adjusted for inflation, and currently stands at only $23,781. And obviously it’s a HUD project. There’s also this interesting bit: Even though he reported that it’s “not uncommon” to subdivide a […]