Streetsblog New York City

Elana linked to this story out of Salt Lake City in the Capitol Hill headline stack this morning, and it's worth everyone's full attention. Derek Jensen reports on what may be the biggest impediment to urbanism of them all: The widespread bias of banks against walkable development.

Salt Lake City's new-urbanism epiphany -- fervently backed by Mayor Ralph Becker and the City Council -- appears to be catching static from an unlikely source.

Transit-oriented development isn't stymied by outdated zoning, unwilling developers or a lack of space. It turns out, banks, wedded to old-fashioned lending standards that stress parking, may pose the biggest blockade by denying financing.

The reason: Lenders operate from a tried-and-true principle that maintains more parking means less risk and a higher return on their investment. But ditching cars is the whole point of urban developers looking to create 24-hour live, work and play environments that hug light-rail hubs. 

Real estate lending standards: A work in progress. Photo: MSN.

That's right, the same sector that got such fantastic returns from the car-dependent suburban fringe isn't sold on the viability of neighborhoods where you can get around without driving. Salt Lake City banks are hardly the exception. Based on informal conversations I've had with people who deal with local lenders and developers, I can tell you that real estate finance in transit-rich New York City is far from enlightened.

If we're ever going to reverse the tide of car-centric development that is gradually suburbanizing New York, we'll need banks to change their assumptions. As Jensen reports, Portland shows that it can be done.

Forest City's Atlantic Yards project would create two massive superblocks in Prospect Hts., Brooklyn

Portland, Oregon, which has ascended the ranks of cities judged most walkable, bikable, and urbane, benefits mightily from its small 200-foot square blocks, which provide businesses more street frontage and people more streets on which to bike, cycle and walk. These short blocks did not create Oregon's and Portland's growth management and pro-transit policies, but they gave them terrain on which these policies could take root.

Contrast that to Salt Lake City. Its founder Brigham Young for some reason opted for one of the widest urban grids anywhere. (I've read he wanted teams of cattle to be able to turn around?) Its streets are laid out in a grid where each blocks is 660 feet square - which means that nine Portland blocks to fill up one Salt Lake superblock. This makes getting around Salt Lake City on foot very difficult, as I can personally attest.

New York City is somewhere in the middle, at least in Manhattan. Its numbered streets are set at a pedestrian friendly 200 feet apart while its avenues are set at a pedestrian unfriendly 800 feet apart, except where broken in two by Lexington, Madison or other mid-grid streets. This deficiency has long been noted, so if anything the city should have a set policy creating new streets when possible, and so to create shorter, more pedestrian friendly blocks.

But that is not the case. Instead the city and state often encourage one of the deadest institutions, the Superblock. Not content with blocks that are too large already, the city and state often team up to create even bigger blocks, and not even pedestrian friendly versions of those.

"Pull-in angle parking" on 97th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.

The drive to create additional (free) parking for the benefit of New York City's auto-owning minority takes many shapes and forms. Today, I'd like to take aim at a particular form of curbside parking: "pull-in angle parking." I've seen this type of parking in a few areas of the city, but I'll contain my assessment to the street I live on -- W. 97th Street between Central Park West and Columbus.

Rather than the typical, curbside parallel parking, on my street cars park bumper-to-curb at a 45 degree angle to the sidewalk. On my extra-wide street, this has increased the total supply of parking spots by 30 to 40 percent.

In some sense, it seems to be a decent trade-off -- less space for through-traffic and more space for local residents and visitors to store their motor vehicles. West 97th Street could be a dangerous four-lane speedway if all of the available road space were used to move traffic. The angle parking is a way of putting this block on a road-diet, though, installing bike lanes, a dedicated bus lane, a planted median or wider sidewalks would have the same result.