Streetsblog New York City

This afternoon, the City Council passed the Manhattan Core parking text amendment with a vote of 47-0, with one abstention (Jessica Lappin). The zoning change, which modifies off-street parking rules in the densest parts of Manhattan, is as good as law now, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s approval basically a given.

A change to parking regulations in the Manhattan Core could be "a necessary prerequisite for any future parking reform." Image: DCP

The zoning change modifies the city’s 1982 shift from mandatory parking minimums to parking maximums in this part of Manhattan, which was spurred by the Clean Air Act. The regulations apply to Manhattan below West 110th Street and East 96th Street with limited exceptions, including Hudson Yards on the Far West Side. Parking minimums are still in force in almost all of the rest of the city.

The amendment includes a number of positive changes, including:

• Removing language that could be read as requiring parking for affordable housing units;
• Allowing buildings built before 1982, which had been required to build parking, to reduce or eliminate parking, though permission must be obtained from the City Planning Commission;
• Expanding the amount of space allowed in commercial districts for car rental and car-sharing vehicles; and
• Providing regulations governing the design and operation of automated parking garages.

The amendment would also weaken the distinction between public parking spaces, which can be used by anyone, and accessory parking spaces, which are intended for a building’s tenants and visitors. The new regulations allow accessory spaces to be opened to the public, giving developers a green light to build publicly-accessible parking until they reach the maximums in the zoning code — set at 20 percent of residential units below 60th Street and 35 percent of units on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side.

Many garages that were built for use by building tenants are currently operated and licensed by the Department of Consumer Affairs as public garages — no one enforces the rule against turning accessory parking into public parking. Instead of trying to tweak this laxly enforced system, the new regulations legitimize the existing practice of treating nearly all parking as public parking.

Some experts, including David King of Columbia University, argue that accessory parking should be eliminated entirely and replaced with a “shared parking” model that treats the total parking supply as a pool available to the public. The accessory parking model is fundamentally flawed, King says, because it assumes that certain land uses have an intrinsic need for parking that should be met by the zoning code. Weakening the accessory parking model is “the single best thing the city could do,” King told Streetsblog after DCP released the proposal last November. ”It is a necessary prerequisite for any future parking reform.”

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Yesterday, the City Planning Commission approved modifications to off-street parking regulations in the Manhattan Core, below East 96th Street and West 110th Street. Significant changes to the city’s only parking maximums, which have helped cut down on traffic in the city’s congested core since 1982, are on track for final approval from the City Council. Although the final proposal itself has not been released to the public by the Department of City Planning, the commission gave its unanimous approval.

The changes affect Community Boards 1 through 8, excluding the Hudson Yards district being developed on the Far West Side. Areas in red have stricter parking maximums than areas in orange. Image: DCP

The changes include some positive developments, such as eliminating parking requirements for affordable housing, retroactively applying post-1982 parking maximums to earlier development (thereby allowing parking spots to be repurposed for other uses), and new regulations for automated garages.

Community Boards 1 through 8 have already weighed in [PDF]. While some boards offered single-page letters of support, others produced in-depth critiques of the Department of City Planning’s proposal.

Community Boards 1, 2, 4, and 7, for example, expressed opposition to the more controversial changes, such as formally allowing accessory parking (which is intended to serve only building residents and visitors) to be opened to the public, and loosening the special permit process for building garages that exceed the maximums.

In a presentation on March 4 [PDF], DCP staff said the agency is tweaking the proposal to address some of these concerns. While the plan will continue to open accessory parking to public use, the special permit process for parking garages will be modified. The process will keep requirements for developers to state whether a new parking garage will increase traffic congestion (a requirement the proposal had initially discarded), and will allow the commission to consider vacancy levels in existing parking facilities surrounding a proposed garage. Supposedly, if they find there’s already an ample supply of parking nearby, the commission may use that fact to deny a request.

Special permits would continue to be granted, however, as long as the planning commission deems the garage permit request to be “reasonable.” “We think this description is entirely too vague,” said CB 4 transportation committee co-chair Christine Berthet. “‘Reasonable’ is really not a standard.”

So far, DCP has only shown the presentation about the updated parking proposal — the specifics have yet to be released. “The devil is in the details,” said Berthet. “Between the PowerPoint and the text amendment, it’s a huge space to cross.”

The full amendment could be released as soon as tomorrow. ”The modified text amendment is currently being proofed and approved,” said Michael Shilstone, a department spokesperson.

Borough President Scott Stringer has not yet expressed a public opinion on the proposed parking changes, a major transportation and environmental policy affecting the majority of the borough.

The City Council’s zoning subcommittee may take up the proposal at its next meeting on April 3, followed by the land use committee the next day, though agendas have yet to be released.

The Manhattan core parking regulations, most notable for setting limits on parking construction below 96th Street since 1982, have been an effective tool for reducing traffic in New York’s congested center. But the rules have also been plagued by loopholes and strange inconsistencies, like the persistence of minimum parking requirements for affordable housing. Recently, the Department of City Planning proposed significant adjustments to the rules, and while community boards have weighed in, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has yet to say anything on the issue.

Scott Stringer still doesn't have anything to say about parking reform. Photo: ethikus/Flickr

The city’s proposals include: eliminating parking requirements for affordable housing; improving utilization of the existing parking supply by converting accessory parking garages, currently intended only for a building’s residents or tenants, into public garages; greater flexibility in the permit process for developers seeking to build garages; and finally releasing developers from the parking minimums that apply to buildings constructed between 1961 and 1982.

Most of those changes have drawn support from parking policy experts and neighborhood groups (though there is some dispute about whether the accessory parking change will lead to less traffic or more). The exception is the looser permit process, which could lead to an escalation of parking construction. This is where Stringer could step in and make a difference. Community Board 4, for instance, passed a resolution opposing DCP’s proposal to lower the bar for developers looking to build public garages. It is urging the department to strengthen the requirements for a public garage permit by asking developers to examine the surrounding parking vacancy rates and consider the traffic generated by a new garage.

But it’s now been four months since DCP released its proposal, with no comment from Stringer. While he is under no legal obligation to weigh in, the Manhattan core parking regulations are a key environmental and transportation policy affecting the majority of the borough. Community Boards 1 through 8 had all passed resolutions regarding the new regs by mid-January [PDF].

The City Planning Commission held a hearing on the proposed parking reforms on January 21; a vote is scheduled for next Wednesday, March 20.

Stringer’s silence stands in contrast to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who released his recommendations for parking reform in Downtown Brooklyn two months after the DCP proposal was released and two months before the planning commission voted. DCP incorporated some of Markowitz’s suggestions, most notably allowing the new, lower parking minimums to apply retroactively, so empty parking spots can be repurposed for other uses.

Stringer’s office wouldn’t indicate if or when it would release its recommendations, only saying through a spokesperson that it “has the option of submitting comments to either the City Planning Commission or the City Council.”

Angie reported this morning that Washington, DC, is moving to reduce mandatory parking requirements in much of the city, which should lower the cost of housing and curb traffic. Meanwhile, despite talk last year of wide-ranging parking reforms for New York’s “inner ring” encircling the Manhattan core, the Department of City Planning has so far only managed to put forward a reduction of parking minimums in transit-saturated Downtown Brooklyn, the most screamingly obvious location.

All the shaded blocks will have no parking requirements under the plan approved yesterday by the Los Angeles Planning Commission.

Now you can add another city to the rapidly expanding list of places leapfrogging NYC on parking reform: Los Angeles.

Yesterday the Los Angeles City Planning Commission approved the Cornfield Arroyo Seco plan, which will eliminate parking minimums as part of a bid to spur mixed-use development along the Gold Line, a light-rail route that began service in 2003. (Streetsblog LA posted this summary of the plan by Joe Linton in 2009.)

Curbed LA reports:

City Planner Claire Bowin told Curbed today that the lack of parking requirements will allow developers to “minimize the amount of parking for specific projects,” given the neighborhood’s proximity to transit, the changing culture of Los Angeles, and the declining need for parking. Given that parking is usually one of the most expensive components of a development project, developers are expected to minimize the construction of parking, or build parking that they can then rent for public uses not attached to their site. The effect, says Bowin, will be to “let the market decide” how much parking is needed and where.

For everyone keeping score at home, Los Angeles has managed to do away with parking minimums along a corridor that’s served by a single light-rail line. Here in NYC, Amanda Burden’s planning department could only muster the will to halve parking requirements for Downtown Brooklyn, with its 14 subway lines.

Parking reform for Downtown Brooklyn — which would take the mild but worthwhile step of cutting the district’s mandatory parking minimums in half – went before a City Council subcommittee on Monday. The fate of the proposal now comes down to council members Tish James and Steve Levin, who represent the area. The two representatives are talking tough and trying to get DCP to do more — but what they want has little to do with parking policy.

Tish James and Steve Levin want to use parking reform to address unrelated aspects of Downtown Brooklyn's 2004 rezoning. Photos: City Council

James and Levin want guarantees that repurposed parking garages or future development will include more income-restricted units, a new elementary school, or other community facilities that they say are lacking since more families moved to the neighborhood following a 2004 rezoning. The council members are basically using parking reform as leverage to extract unrelated amenities from the city.

“Council Member James and I would like to see these issues addressed sooner rather than later,” Levin said at Monday’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises hearing, “and see this as a particular opportunity to have that conversation.”

On the affordable housing front, one step that would also make an impact would be to eliminate parking mandates entirely. But neither James nor Levin are asking for the elimination of parking minimums. This despite the fact that James herself acknowledges that parking mandates increase the cost of housing.

The Navy Green development, in her district, received a waiver from the city’s existing parking rules, allowing it to keep costs down for tenants and increase the number of affordable units. DCP wants to eliminate all parking requirements for income-restricted developments like Navy Green, a proposal James supports.

At the same time, James is skeptical that market-rate housing consumers would benefit from the same type of reform. ”I’m not naïve enough to think that savings will be passed along to buyers or renters,” she told Streetsblog. ”Most developers are not in the business of benevolence.”

But the evidence does not suggest that developers will just pocket the savings from not having to build parking, said Simon McDonnell, a research affiliate at New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. ”If the market is operating, a reduction in developers’ input costs clearly gives them more leeway to offer lower prices,” he said, which could put market-rate units within the range of people who can’t afford luxury housing but don’t qualify for income restricted housing.

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The 1982 Manhattan core parking regulations are up for some significant changes. Image: DCP

After more than three years of work, the Department of City Planning has released its proposed changes to the rules governing off-street parking in much of Manhattan. Some parking experts are calling it a necessary step toward continued reform, while neighborhood watchdogs fear that DCP’s proposed changes will ultimately lead to more driving in the city’s congested center.

The “Manhattan core” area covers the area below 96th Street on the East Side and below 110th Street on the West Side. Unlike the rest of the city, where zoning requires developers to build a minimum amount of parking, developments built in the core have been subject to parking maximums since 1982.

There are several changes on the table in DCP’s proposal, some of which will clearly reduce the burden imposed by parking minimums (more on those later). But the biggest change is more complicated: The city is proposing to weaken the distinction between “accessory parking” – which is intended for a building’s residents or tenants – and public parking — available to anyone who wants to use it. Currently, developers are allowed to build accessory parking spaces up to a maximum number. If developers want to build more accessory parking than is allowed by right, or build a garage that is open to the public, they must get a special permit from the City Planning Commission.

In reality, much of the city’s accessory parking is already open to the public, because unless a building operator chooses to restrict parking to residents or tenants only, the Department of Consumer Affairs licenses garage operators without restriction on who is allowed to park in the facility.

Now, instead of working to ensure that licenses comply with the intent of the zoning law, DCP wants to change the zoning so it “reflects how parking is actually being used in the Core today.”

Calling this change “the single best thing the city could do,” professor David King of Columbia University says that he’d like to see the city completely eliminate accessory parking from the zoning code. By moving to a “shared parking” model, parking spaces are no longer reserved for specific buildings, removing the expectation that a driver should have an off-street space at the beginning and end of every trip. “It is a necessary prerequisite for any future parking reform,” he said.

Applying the shared model to accessory parking spaces could have some unwanted effects, however. “On the one hand, it’s much more efficient, because idle parking spaces aren’t a particularly good idea,” parking policy expert Rachel Weinberger explained. However, making more parking available to the public can lead to more driving, Weinberger added. “It has the potential to increase the parking supply.”

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Yesterday at the Municipal Art Society Summit, three architecture firms — Foster + Partners, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and WXY architecture + urban design – unveiled proposals to remake public space in Midtown East, as the Bloomberg administration sets out to rezone the area for taller towers.

How a pedestrianized Vanderbilt Avenue might look, according to Foster + Partners.

The rezoning covers a large swath of Midtown, aiming to take advantage of new transit capacity as the Second Avenue Subway and the LIRR’s East Side Access project bring more people to the area. In an interesting twist, the administration wants developers to pitch in for pedestrian improvements as the area becomes a bigger destination for people.

In their public space proposals, the three firms focused on the area immediately around Grand Central Terminal, because although it lies at the heart of the district, the public realm outside the station’s grand interior often leaves much to be desired. The streets surrounding Grand Central empty out at night, and from the outside, the terminal can feel like a bit like a fortress. “It’s opaque,” said Claire Weisz of WXY. “There should be so much more happening.”

The attention-grabbing visual yesterday was SOM’s proposal to build a circular walkway above Grand Central, floating up and down between new skyscrapers on either side of the train terminal. In a panel discussion with the architects, New York magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson dismissed the concept as a “flying doughnut.”

The encouraging part of the panel was that aside from the flashy rendering, the architects are generally looking down, not up, to improve the public realm in Midtown East – and they urged the city to do the same as the rezoning moves ahead.

“The vibrancy of Manhattan is because there is so much action at the sidewalk level,” said Sir Norman Foster. “In exploring the fine print of the zoning, it should be sensitive to the activities at the ground plane, on the sidewalk.”

City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden has already expressed interest in pedestrianizing Vanderbilt Avenue to accommodate the increased foot traffic that will accompany the completion of the East Side Access project. The architects followed Burden’s lead and went further, proposing to expand the pedestrian realm beyond Vanderbilt Avenue.

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The New York City Department of City Planning announced yesterday that the City Planning Commission has approved a measure to reduce Downtown Brooklyn’s onerous parking minimums. But the commission, chaired by Amanda Burden, appears to have wasted an opportunity to improve on the timid reforms.

The City Planning Commission moved ahead with reducing -- but not eliminating -- the Downtown Brooklyn parking minimums that force developers to build entire floors of unwanted parking, like at 29 Flatbush.

The good news is that new developments in Downtown Brooklyn, one of the most transit-rich places in America, will no longer have to include four parking spaces for every 10 residential units, and the mandate for affordable housing to include parking will be eliminated. That should make it easier to supply much-needed housing and lessen the government-mandated incentive to own and drive a car.

The bad news is that the new rules still require two parking spaces for every 10 units of market-rate housing. Instead of letting builders supply parking based on demand or capping the supply of parking to curb traffic, DCP and the planning commission insist on guessing how many people will own cars and compelling developers to build that amount of parking. In DCP’s words, the amendment is an attempt to “match residential requirements to residents’ use.” But as one downtown Brooklyn developer told DCP officials at a June hearing, a 20 percent mandate still compels the construction of more parking than some developers believe residents will use.

At public hearings this summer, Borough President Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn Community Board 2, and a parade of developers all asked for the lower parking minimums to apply retroactively, so that residential parking spots which currently sit empty can be repurposed as retail space, offices, or other uses. The zoning amendment that the planning department linked to in its Twitter announcement yesterday [PDF] does not apply the changes to existing buildings, however. Streetsblog has a request in with DCP to see if the planning commission decided to update the proposal and let developers repurpose their empty parking spaces after all before voting on the amendment.

UPDATE: DCP confirms that the amendment was revised to apply the lower parking minimums retroactively — a welcome improvement. A second revision would let developers site the mandated off-street parking up to half a mile from a new project, up from a quarter mile in the original amendment. This enhances a provision that allows developers to put the mandatory parking in public parking garages.

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Borough President Marty Markowitz wants to reduce parking minimums in Downtown Brooklyn, and he thinks developers should be able to convert existing parking spots to other uses.

The area of downtown Brooklyn rezoned in 2004 will be affected by DCP's proposed parking rule changes.

This spring the Department of City Planning unveiled a plan to cut Downtown Brooklyn’s onerous parking requirements in half, and Markowitz’s recommendations [PDF] are the latest step on the way to enacting some type of reform. In some respects, his preferred parking reforms go farther than DCP’s original proposal and a resolution passed by Community Board 2 this summer. The borough president wants to retroactively apply the reduced parking minimums to downtown Brooklyn properties developed since 2001, condition the relaxed parking requirements for new development on the inclusion of affordable housing units, and increase the requirements for bicycle parking.

While this bodes well for Downtown Brooklyn parking reform, it also indicates that DCP didn’t aim very high with its original proposal. With local Council Member Steve Levin being an early proponent of reform, perhaps the complete elimination of Downtown Brooklyn parking requirements would have stood a chance.

Markowitz’s bike parking recommendation is attracting the most attention this week, but his most significant request may be to retroactively apply the new parking rules to any development built since 2001, which would allow parking spaces that currently sit empty to be converted to more productive uses. Markowitz’s position goes farther than Community Board 2, whose land use committee voted 9-2 in June to support retroactive application only for projects that included an affordable housing component, after a vote to apply the rules to all existing development failed.

Markowitz does not go so far as to support removing parking minimums entirely. “We should not make future plans based on initial trends of the past decade,” he states in the letter. Arguing that the area may attract residents in the future who “will view access to automobiles in a different light,” Markowitz says that one of the country’s most transit-rich neighborhoods needs parking mandates in cases when “public transportation is inadequate for the intended journey.”

And in fact he’d like to attach some conditions to relaxed parking minimums in new development. Echoing CB 2, Markowitz wants the zoning code to create further incentive for developers to utilize the inclusionary housing program, by triggering the reduced parking requirements for market-rate units only if at least 20 percent of a project’s units are affordable. It should be noted that lowering parking minimums is, on its own merits, a way to reduce the cost of housing.

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The Midtown skyline could look very different, with new buildings (an example is shown in white) reaching taller than the Chrysler Building. Such height would only be allowed in return for funding pedestrian improvements in the area. Image: DCP via the Observer

Transit-oriented development is a virtuous circle. New transit infrastructure makes it easier and faster to get to a place, and then that place grows. New development in turn leads to demand to justify better infrastructure, and more tax dollars to pay for it. That, in a nutshell, is the story of how Manhattan grew into what it is today, first around streetcars, then els, and eventually the subways.

In its new proposal for a major rezoning of Midtown East, the commercial capital of the country, the Bloomberg administration is embracing this virtuous circle. Due in part to the billions of dollars being invested in the Second Avenue Subway and the East Side Access project linking the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal, the administration wants to allow a crop of new skyscrapers, some nearly as big as the Empire State Building. To build tall, though, developers will have to kick in funds to improve Midtown’s cramped pedestrian environment, above ground and below.

For a detailed look at how the zoning proposal will work, check out Matt Chaban’s write-up in the New York Observer. In short, though, the city plans to allow developers in the area — roughly from Madison Avenue to Third, and from 39th Street to 57th Street — to proceed with fewer procedural hurdles and to build bigger.

Along Park Avenue, new projects could be as large as Goldman Sachs’ new downtown headquarters, which is 43 stories tall. Around Grand Central, the transportation heart of the area, buildings could be roughly as big as the 51-story 1 Bryant Park. And if developers come up with something near Grand Central that exhibits “superior design relative to the sidewalk and the skyline,” said Frank Ruchala, the project manager for the Department of City Planning, it could reach taller than the Chrysler Building. The goal is to spark development in an area that only saw two new office buildings constructed in the last decade.

More office space around Grand Central would, on its own, promote a more sustainable regional transportation system. Almost every new Midtown commuter will take transit or walk to work. According to a separate DCP study, 86 percent of commuters entering the central business district during rush hour took transit in 2009.

DCP has structured the upzoning to improve the quality of those trips on train and on foot as well. To build taller than current zoning allows, developers will have to contribute to a new “District Improvement Fund” dedicated to public space and pedestrian improvements.

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