A rendering of the Rudin family plans for new condos at the site of St. Vincent's Hospital. Rudin wants to include 152 parking spaces, while the community board wants zero. Image: Rudin via WSJ.

The City Planning Commission approved a Rudin family request to build 50 percent more parking than allowed at the site of the former St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. The commission’s unanimous approval came last Monday despite opposition to the parking garage from the local community board and evidence that Rudin hadn’t met the city’s own requirements for granting exemptions to parking maximums.

The advisory recommendations supposedly guiding the commission had been split over the garage. Community Board 2 urged that no garage be allowed at all, as the entrance would be the fourth on a single residential block of West 12th Street. Borough President Scott Stringer, however, approved of the Rudin request to build 152 parking spaces, rather than the 98 the developers would be allowed under the city’s parking maximums.

Additionally, the commission’s report suggests that all community members who testified on the issue of the parking garage at its public hearing opposed the extra parking spaces. “A number of speakers in opposition stated a concern for the proposed garage on 12th Street,” reads the report [PDF]. “These speakers said that the requested special permit to increase the size of the garage should be denied.”

Regardless of those recommendations, it’s debatable whether Rudin was even eligible for a special permit to exceed the parking maximums. To get such a permit, developers need to show that there isn’t enough available parking in the area to meet the projected demand from project residents.

Calculations performed by both Streetsblog and the Municipal Art Society show that wasn’t the case in the Village. “When the residential units are expected to be built there will be 740 available overnight spaces and 154 available weekday midday spaces within a quarter mile radius of the site,” wrote MAS in testimony submitted to the City Planning Commission [PDF]. “This is more than enough spaces to accommodate the 137 cars that the applicant is estimating will result from the addition of 450 new housing units.”

The commission, like Rudin, argues that many of the nearby spaces shouldn’t count, since they are “accessory” parking spaces not necessarily available to residents of the Rudin development. Surveys of the lots by both Streetsblog and MAS, however, both showed that those lots are overwhelmingly being rented to the general public.

The Rudin proposal now goes to the City Council. Christine Quinn, as both the local council member and the speaker, should have significant influence over the council’s decision.

As part of its plan to revise the parking regulations for the Manhattan core, which includes the Village, the Department of City Planning proposes tightening up the loopholes that allow so many special permits to exceed parking maximums. The granting of a special permit for the St. Vincent’s project shows how broken the current system is.

At the end of the year, though, DCP released the final version of its Manhattan core parking study. The internal conflicts seem to have been resolved, and the results are far more encouraging. The sloppy and misleading analysis is gone and the positive reforms remain.

Assuming that DCP continues on its current path — and that the City Council eventually agrees — Manhattan’s precedent-setting-but-decades-old parking regulations are on track to be updated for the 21st century. Specific language for the new regulations is due in the next few months, according to DCP.

In the final version of its Manhattan core study, DCP says unequivocally that the 30-year-old system of parking maximums has been successful, an endorsement nowhere to be found in the earlier draft.

“The Manhattan Core parking regulations have proved to be compatible with population and job growth and a thriving Central Business District,” the authors write. “In almost three decades since the Manhattan Core regulations were enacted, the Manhattan Core has added population and jobs and has strengthened its position as the vital heart of a world city. Travel into the CBD has shifted toward transit and away from private vehicles.” Those trends aren’t all the result of parking maximums, of course, but the regulations have helped shape the areas below West 110th Street and East 96th Street.

The reforms, which at this point are only described in broad strokes, appear to be the same as those summarized by law firm Kramer Levin last year. One of the last remaining parking minimums in the Manhattan core, which perversely covers affordable housing, is slated to be eliminated. DCP notes that the requirement to build parking “places additional cost burdens on affordable housing developments,” a lesson that will hopefully carry over once the department turns its attention to parking regulations in the rest of the city.

The reforms include a number of other beneficial changes. They would eliminate an incentive to build above-ground parking. Developers seeking to build more parking than allowed as-of-right will face tougher oversight under the revised rules, including new requirements that garages be designed for pedestrian safety. Large-scale developments, perhaps like the parking-stuffed Riverside Center project, will receive comprehensive assessments of the need for parking.

In perhaps the most sweeping change, the distinction between accessory parking, intended only for residents of a given development, and public parking would be eliminated. All parking would be open to everyone — what’s known as a “shared parking” model — which experts hailed as far more appropriate to a dense urban environment.

The details of all these changes are still forthcoming. That means there is still an opportunity for the city’s formidable real estate lobby to weaken these proposals or overturn the city’s strict parking controls. The Real Estate Board of New York is pushing for the maximums to be raised, allowing developers to build more parking in Manhattan. There isn’t any mention of that in DCP’s proposal so far, however.

Revisions to the study send a positive signal that DCP is going to stay strong in support of its parking regulations. The final version corrects mistakes in earlier drafts highlighted by Streetsblog and parking reform advocates, making the study far more accurate, useful, and supportive of the parking requirements.

No longer does the study look at changes in car ownership for the entire island of Manhattan, much of which is covered by high parking minimums, to make the case that the maximums have failed. Similarly, DCP took the advice of environmental planner Dan Gutman, who said that looking at rush-hour traffic volumes instead of 24-hour traffic volumes would more clearly show the effect — and benefits — of parking maximums. DCP clearly heard the criticisms of the draft and addressed them.

Perhaps most importantly, DCP now admits that parking maximums reduce automobile ownership. The department notes that residents of the Manhattan core own fewer vehicles than residents of the rest of New York City, controlling for income, in part because parking is so scarce and expensive. The high price of parking, in turn, is in part attributed to parking maximums. In other words, parking maximums reduce car ownership. That logical conclusion is the opposite of what DCP’s draft implicitly argued.

In its study, DCP concludes that “the 1982 Manhattan Core parking regulations have been successful and do not require fundamental changes.” Those changes they are proposing are beneficial reforms. Slowly, the Department of City Planning and its director Amanda Burden are moving toward parking reform. Once the Manhattan core changes are complete, DCP is expected to try to reduce the high parking minimums that govern development in the “inner ring” of neighborhoods around the Manhattan core: an issue with higher stakes and trickier politics.

The powerful real estate lobby is waging a campaign against Manhattan parking maximums, which help hold traffic in check. Will Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden withstand the assault?

Amidst a discussion of Manhattan’s parking maximums, Slattery suggested that the time has come to raise the limits on the amount of parking allowed in residential buildings, which the city enacted in the early 1980s in response to lawsuits brought under the Clean Air Act. “Despite regulations, auto ownership is rising,” Slattery asserted, echoing a draft study from the Department of City Planning that experts say is riddled with flaws. “Cars and trucks are a regular part of city life and we have to recognize the value they create.”

In addition to faulty DCP studies, Slattery is relying on logic that will harm New York. REBNY is betting that consumers buying apartments in the most transit-rich part of the country will pay a premium for in-house parking (upwards of $16,000 per space) instead of using subways and buses. New York loses in this scenario. When new residents decide to opt out of the very transit system that made their property valuable in the first place, the city loses a rider with a vested interest in sustaining transit in the city. Value is destroyed and New York takes a step toward becoming Houston.

The Department of City Planning seems to be in danger of caving in to real estate industry demands to eliminate parking maximums. At last Friday’s discussion, DCP’s Howard Slatkin did tout the use of zoning to promote sustainability: allowing for more density where there is transit and less density where residents are more apt to drive. But he also acknowledged City Planning’s desire to accommodate Manhattan developers.

Slatkin told the audience to anticipate the December release of a DCP study about automobile ownership that will explain where the agency seeks to change parking regulations, and where they won’t be touched. It may include both notable reforms and egregious backsliding.

In stark contrast to DCP, Bruce Schaller of the Department of Transportation demonstrated that at least one part of New York City government understands how parking policy can affect traffic and congestion. Following in the steps of San Francisco’s revolutionary SFPark system, New York is also finding, through DOT’s Park Smart program, that as prices for parking go up during high demand times of day, more curb space becomes available and drivers spend less time cruising for parking.

The panel also included two people with vested interests in curbside space: Carl Hum, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and Vincent Marino, delivery truck driver and representative of Teamsters Local 917. Hum stressed the importance of parking meters and the availability of curbside spaces for businesses in east and south Brooklyn. He said that he still has member businesses complain to him about eliminating metered parking on Sundays – a move that hurt their bottom line because customers no longer had spots available to park for short shopping visits.

Marino stressed that delivery truck drivers never want to double park but do so under pressure to make their deliveries on time. They would benefit greatly from more curbside space to pull up. Perhaps at the next forum Marino and his fellow delivery drivers will voice support for parking-pricing reforms that could make curbside space more abundant.

Washington D.C. planning director Harriet Tregoning offered her assistance to New York City in eliminating parking minimums. Photo: Washington City Paper

Yesterday, the Department of City Planning asked experts from around the country how to make a more sustainable zoning code. Their response? Scrap parking minimums.

The recommendation came during a major conference held yesterday by DCP and Harvard University. Top urban thinkers from around the country gathered to discuss how the zoning code can make the city more globally competitive, socially equitable, architecturally significant and environmentally sustainable (for a good recap of the conference, check out the Architect’s Newspaper live blog).

When the conversation turned to suggestions for building a sustainable city, both panelists raised the issue of parking minimums.

“Parking is one of the biggest things,” said Harriet Tregoning, the director of D.C.’s Office of Planning, as she articulated how zoning can make cities greener. “[Washington has] removed our minimums for most buildings in the downtown and near transit.”

That policy puts D.C. significantly ahead of New York City. While the Manhattan core — admittedly a more populated area than all of Washington — has parking maximums in place, most of the city is still governed by parking minimums, even areas right on top of subway stations.

DCP is considering reducing parking minimums in the “inner ring” of neighborhoods around the Manhattan core, but not eliminating them. So building space for car storage will still be mandatory even in highly walkable and transit-rich neighborhoods like Harlem, while dense, transit-rich areas just a little further removed from downtown, like Washington Heights, may not see any reforms at all.

Tregoning said that D.C. opted to eliminate parking minimums entirely in response to “hard experience.” Having cut parking requirements in half, she explained, “we still had only half the parking used.”

D.C. is also replacing parking minimums with maximums in many places. The city received significant pushback from the public and developers, Tregoning admitted, so they developed a compromise. “You can build more than the maximums, but the first floor of that building has to be level and convertible so that if we’re right and you’re wrong, it can be something useful.”

Tregoning went so far as to offer herself as a resource to New York City should it decide to pursue parking reform. “We should think of ourselves as a band of brothers,” she said. “Why don’t we emulate success?”

The private sector, too, argued that removing parking minimums is critical to allowing sustainable growth. Developer Jonathan Rose noted that he applied for a mayoral override of the parking requirements for Via Verde, the green affordable housing project in the South Bronx that has received nothing but rave reviews. “We decided that affordable housing three blocks from transit in a great retail district didn’t need parking,” said Rose.

The goal of yesterday’s conference was to develop big ideas for the city moving forward. “Today’s discussion will really enable us to mark out new strategies for the city, for this administration and the next administration to come,” said DCP Director Amanda Burden at the event’s close. Will Burden listen to her invited guests and move boldly on parking reform?

At 1 Morningside Drive, parking minimums forced the construction of a 148-space garage. The developers put the parking on the ground floor, creating a blank wall facing a busy pedestrian street. Photo: Noah Kazis

Get your cameras ready, Streetsbloggers. It’s time to show Department of City Planning Director Amanda Burden what city-mandated parking garages are doing to the streets in your neighborhood.

In most of New York, it’s illegal to build anything of a certain size without a certain amount of parking, thanks to 1960s-era mandates in the city zoning code. Despite ample research showing that parking minimums encourage car ownership and cause traffic, DCP claims otherwise and clings to the position that these mandates are necessary.

Traffic isn’t the only cost of parking minimums, and under Burden DCP has at least acknowledged two other important ways they harm the city. Parking minimums increase the cost of housing, as the commissioner has stated, and parking on the ground floor erodes the pedestrian environment.

In some areas, DCP is beginning to rewrite the city’s archaic zoning regulations to try and prevent parking from taking the place of ground-floor retail, lobbies, stoops, and other uses that connect buildings to the sidewalk. On Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, where a 2003 rezoning led to a wave of development with ground floors dominated by ventilation ducts and even surface parking, DCP reversed course. In June, the department put out new rules forbidding curb cuts across the sidewalk, barring parking along the ground floor street frontage and encouraging retail uses. A draft rewrite of the parking regulations for much of Manhattan would eliminate a key incentive to build ground floor parking. In these select locations, Amanda Burden is making good on her widely-touted commitment to quality urban design.

Most of the city isn’t so lucky, however. In Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, parking is required in new developments. In practice, because developers often find it impractical to build underground parking, that often means the city is reserving ground floors for parking. Instead of new development fostering an engaging public realm, pedestrians encounter blank walls and curb cuts. The good news is that DCP is in the process of revising parking regulations for the “inner ring” of neighborhoods around the Manhattan core, which presents an excellent opportunity to stop forcing these dead spaces on neighborhoods everywhere.

Writing about parking regulations can get dry, so Streetsblog is going to start making the case visually. We need your help for our new photo series: “Pedestrian Burdens.”

Send us pictures of buildings in your neighborhood where parking harms pedestrian space, whether it’s a ground-floor garage, an egregious curb cut, or an ugly surface lot. Bonus points for buildings covered by parking minimums (larger buildings in Upper Manhattan or the other four boroughs) and built during the Bloomberg administration. Email your photos to tips@streetsblog.org and make sure to include the address of the buildings. We’ll feature the best on Streetsblog, building a visual case for Amanda Burden and DCP to act decisively on this critical urban design issue.

We’re starting with three of our own. The photo at the top of the post is from 1 Morningside Drive. That blank wall contains a garage with 148 parking spots, right at ground level.

On that site, on the north side of 110th Street, developer AvalonBay was required to provide a space for 50 percent of the building’s 295 units. It didn’t build a single parking spot beyond what was required by law. Had the same building gone up literally across the street, it would have been subject to parking maximums, not minimums. That solid brick wall of parking might have been more housing, retail, or open space. No wonder AvalonBay Senior VP Fred Harris has publicly called for parking minimums to be reformed.

Another blank wall created by a city-mandated parking garage, this time at 111th Street and St. Nicholas. Photo: Noah Kazis

A few blocks east on 110th sits 111 Central Park North, the most expensive building in Harlem. The front door, facing the park, boasts an elegant setback and sculpture. The luxury building presents the rest of the neighborhood, however, with a featureless wall, one-story tall. That’s its 34-car garage.

Again, the developers didn’t build a single space more than they were required to by the district’s 40 percent parking requirement. The building sits on top of the 2/3 train, three stops from Times Square.

Even without parking minimums, ground-floor garages get built on pedestrian-oriented streets. Photo: Ben Fried

City requirements aren’t the only reason parking interrupts the public realm, of course. At 655 Washington Avenue, the architect placed two single-car garages at ground level. The ten-unit building earned a waiver from the area’s parking minimums, so these were spaces the developer wanted. In fact, they’d have been eligible to build them even under Manhattan’s strictest parking maximums. Even so, the garages interrupt what is elsewhere a mixed-use street with ground-floor retail.

Funded with a federal TIGER grant, the DCP study will examine much more than the effect of a highway removal on traffic. Especially encouraging: The department wants to use a “triple bottom line” approach, measuring the impact of any decision on the economy, society, and environment. “For example, a road geometry change could reduce vehicle capacity but also reduce air pollution, maintenance costs, and injuries to pedestrians,” the agency explains in its slideshow.

That kind of perspective is a world apart from the New York State Department of Transportation’s approach. The state DOT’s most recent analysis of a Sheridan removal studied only traffic impacts, and based its evaluation on the unrealistic assumption that nothing would replace a decommissioned Sheridan.

DCP, in contrast, is studying three scenarios: one with the Sheridan kept in place, another with the expressway turned into a boulevard (think West Street or San Francisco’s Embarcadero), and a third with no road at all. In every case, major improvements to the Bruckner Expressway would be installed, including a new exit that would significantly improve truck access to the Hunts Point food market. Some of the opportunities DCP identified for the area, such as fostering development along the East Tremont Avenue corridor, could take place regardless of what happens to the Sheridan. Others, like the redevelopment of a small industrial zone sandwiched between the Sheridan and the Bronx River, DCP identified as contingent on changes to the expressway.

The Sheridan team will also investigate how each option would affect real estate values and employment, not only at existing job centers like the food market but also on newly developable land along or on top of the highway’s footprint. Additionally, the city is collecting new traffic data to improve transportation modeling.

The overall framework put together by DCP includes a number of goals, like improving waterfront access and pedestrian mobility, that are essentially incompatible with the Sheridan as it currently stands. Other goals include improving truck access to Hunts Point, which could be sufficiently achieved through the new off-ramps and other Bruckner improvements, but might end up cutting against a Sheridan teardown.

Early in the study process, local advocates had voiced complaints about DCP’s method and outreach, but those were quickly rectified. For now, DCP is compiling an honest and complete accounting of the costs and benefits of tearing down the Sheridan.

While DCP is developing a solid package of reforms for parking regulations in the Manhattan core right now, it is simultaneously preparing to open the door to the evisceration of parking maximums. DCP wants to sever the connection between existing parking maximums and the federal Clean Air Act, which is the ultimate guarantee that the parking rules will remain in place and be upheld.

Sandy Hornick, a retired Department of City Planning official who now consults for the agency, said DCP would ask the state to remove parking maximums from its Clean Air Act compliance plan. Image: Screenshot via NYU Rudin Center

Right now, parking maximums in Manhattan are backed up by the force of the Clean Air Act. Parking controls are not only part of the city’s zoning code, but also part of New York’s State Implementation Plan (SIP), which documents how the state complies with federal air quality standards.

Linking parking maximums to the SIP gives them teeth. Recently, when the city wanted to scrap parking maximums on the West Side as part of plans for the Hudson Yards development, neighborhood activists were able to take the city to court under the Clean Air Act. The city was forced to settle and enact a hard cap on the amount of parking at Hudson Yards, an important first for New York City.

Had parking maximums not been part of the SIP, eliminating them at Hudson Yards would have been a routine zoning change. In fact, while attempting to push through its parking plans for the West Side, the city tried to remove parking controls from the SIP in 2007. The state Department of Environmental Conservation did not go along with the city’s plans, however.

In a meeting earlier this year with parking reform advocates, DCP staff announced that they are again going to ask for parking caps to be removed from the SIP. Sandy Hornick, a long-time DCP official now serving as a consultant for strategic planning to the department, said that the department would make that request once the proposed Manhattan parking reforms are enacted, reported Christine Berthet, the co-chair of Community Board 4′s transportation committee, who attended that meeting.

Berthet said she believes that DCP’s actions don’t add up. “If all the efforts they are doing intend to reduce parking and reduce traffic, then why do they need to touch the State Implementation Plan?” she asked. She hypothesized that DCP might be seeking to inoculate itself from lawsuits the next time the agency tries to weaken Manhattan’s parking maximums.

The research on parking coming out of Amanda Burden's planning department has serious flaws. Will sloppy studies undercut promising reforms brewing inside DCP? Image: Wikipedia

Streetsblog reported yesterday that DCP is preparing significant revisions to parking policies in the Manhattan core. Limits on parking in Manhattan are a decades-old cornerstone of the city’s traffic management policies, but developers know how to game the rules and take advantage of loopholes, leading to the construction of large new garages in some of the most walkable neighborhoods in the country. Parking experts praised DCP’s reform package for tightening the rules and laying out an updated approach to parking policy appropriate for a dense urban setting.

Those plans are still just a draft, however, and DCP’s final proposal could look much different. The powerful real estate industry is mobilizing against not only the proposed reforms, but existing parking limits as well. Meanwhile, factions within DCP seem intent on undermining the draft parking reforms, while the top of the department appears rudderless on the issue. Lately the City Planning Commission has issued a handful of pronouncements about the relevance of parking policy to a good pedestrian environment, but Planning Chair Amanda Burden has yet to make a sustained public stand on matters of off-street parking.

Any adjustment to the city’s parking rules must go through the City Council, where the influence of the real estate industry will be felt. And the industry’s lobbying arm, the Real Estate Board of New York, wants to undo parking limits already in effect in Manhattan.

Currently, developers of new housing can’t attach parking to more than 20 percent of residences below 60th Street or 35 percent of residences below West 110th and East 96th Streets. “We would like to see those maximums raised to accommodate the auto ownership in those neighborhoods,” said Mike Slattery, senior vice president for REBNY. A more detailed set of real estate industry recommendations drafted by the law firm Kramer Levin [PDF] opposes most, but not all, of the draft parking reforms currently circulating inside DCP.

Interestingly, REBNY’s rationale for opposing parking maximums echoes DCP’s own studies. Borrowing a line from DCP’s 2009 residential parking study, Slattery argued that car ownership is independent of parking supply and instead determined mainly by household income. The implication is that parking maximums only lead to parking shortages, not to reduced car ownership and driving.

The argument is faulty (more on that below), yet DCP itself continues to perpetuate it. Despite the department’s forward-thinking draft proposal to reform parking policies in the Manhattan core, not everyone seems to be on board. The department’s transportation division houses a faction determined to provide the city with a steady supply of new parking spaces, even in the heart of Manhattan. The division is at work on a new study of public parking in the Manhattan core, and a draft recently obtained by Streetsblog [PDF] mainly serves to justify the need for more parking.

The presentation on the parking study [PDF] states: “Vehicle registrations in all of Manhattan increased 39 percent between 1982 and 2009, despite the 1982 policy to reduce parking.” Like Slattery, DCP’s transportation division is arguing that parking maximums do not, in fact, reduce car ownership. It’s the mirror image of previous claims from DCP that parking minimums do not induce car ownership. The argument is also riddled with flaws.

Parking construction is mandated uptown, so it’s completely improper for DCP to lump vehicle registrations inside the Manhattan core together with registrations outside the core. “This is, near as I can tell, an example of the sloppy nature of these studies. They’re fast and loose with their definitions to support the points they want to get to,” said Dave King, a planning professor at Columbia University. “There’s still hundreds of thousands of people north of Central Park who are all subject to parking minimums.”

Rachel Weinberger, a University of Pennsylvania planning professor, noted that the actual change in car ownership in the Manhattan core is consistent with the assertion that the parking maximums have worked.

Similar errors abound in DCP’s study, and all point in the same direction. Finding that car ownership in Manhattan is linked to income and parenthood, DCP concluded that “demographic changes among Manhattan residents have led to an increase in the number of private vehicles in the Core.” Again, the intent is apparently to dispel the idea that parking regulations affect car ownership rates. But correlation is not causation. It could be that the creation of more parking caused more high-income families to move to Manhattan.

It could also be a coincidence, as when DCP found a strong correlation between finance-sector employment and the number of vehicles entering the Manhattan core. The department interpreted that to mean that structural economic shifts rather than parking policy affect travel behavior. However, environmental planner Dan Gutman crunched the numbers himself and found that interpretation wanting. Even though finance employment has risen, he said, “hub-bound morning peak (7-10 am) volumes have remained essentially flat since 1978.” Since most high-paying finance jobs have daytime hours, it doesn’t appear to be the case that new financiers are crowding the streets.

A graph compiled by environmental planner Dan Gutman shows how a DCP study cherrypicked data to undermine the city's parking maximums. The red line, showing the amount of parking, appears to diverge from the blue line, the daily motor vehicle trips into the Manhattan core, evidence DCP used to argue the maximums were a failure. But the parking trend fits closely with the green line, showing total vehicle accumulation in the area, a more appropriate measure.

Instead, Gutman found that total vehicle accumulation in the central business district, the sum of all cars parked and driving in the area, declined in line with decreases in the parking supply. “This seems to imply that the increase in 24-hour hub-bound entries was largely related to through traffic or possibly other traffic during evening hours, and that reduced parking may have had the intended effect of reducing vehicle accumulation,” said Gutman. “Thus the 1982 parking policy may have been a striking success rather than a failure.”

Perhaps the most fundamental problem with DCP’s study is that it tallies up the benefits of parking without accounting for its costs. The authors are sure to note that “there will always be a need for people with medical conditions to drive.” Drivers entering Manhattan for entertainment or shopping trips, the report states, “should not be discouraged from parking in the Manhattan Core. They are a user group which generates revenue for the city and since they are likely to travel during off-peak hours and carpool, they do not create additional peak-period traffic congestion.”

No doubt shoppers bring revenue to the city, but so would the additional retail space that could be built in place of a parking garage. DCP’s report neglects to mention that. Likewise building more housing instead of parking would reduce rents for everyone. DCP officials, from director Amanda Burden to sustainability director Howard Slatkin, have publicly articulated some of the costs of parking in the past, but none of those costs were tallied in this study.

The pro-parking tenor of DCP’s Manhattan core study is difficult to square with the draft parking reforms proposed by the department. Inside DCP, it seems, support for more progressive parking policies does not run deep.

Any parking reforms will have a difficult path forward, given the internal divisions at DCP, the opposition from the real estate industry, and the political difficulty of moving progressive parking policies through the City Council. Unless Amanda Burden shows leadership on the issue, a promising initiative to plan for a more sustainable city might not have much of a future.

The Department of City Planning is preparing a set of reforms that would strengthen the parking maximums in place in much of Manhattan. Image: DCP

The passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970 changed that. A series of lawsuits brought under the new law forced the city to reckon with the fact that parking mandates were making New York’s traffic and air pollution problems worse. The city changed course. In 1982, parking maximums replaced parking minimums in Manhattan below West 110th Street and East 96th Street. Nearly 30 years later, the limits on parking in the Manhattan core — parking is capped at 20 percent of new residential units below 60th Street, and 35 percent on the Upper West Side and Upper East Side — still constitute perhaps the most important use of parking policy to limit traffic in any American city.

Their effect is diminished, however, because the rules are riddled with loopholes. Special permits allow developers to skirt parking maximums, and parking minimums still impede the construction of affordable housing. Now, the Department of City Planning is undertaking a major rewrite of the Manhattan core parking regulations that could address these and other shortcomings. A summary of the proposed changes [PDF] prepared by the law firm Kramer Levin at the end of August for clients in the real estate industry and two documents outlining DCP’s research obtained by Streetsblog [PDF 1, 2] reveal the department’s thinking. (DCP would not comment for this story other than to say it has not yet produced a final proposal.)

According to parking policy experts, DCP’s Manhattan core proposal, as it appears in these documents, would be a significant improvement over the status quo, tightening the restrictions on parking and eliminating major loopholes and incentives that lead to parking construction. Parking maximums are also in place in parts of Long Island City, but it is unclear whether the reforms will extend into Queens; none of the documents Streetsblog obtained mention Long Island City.

The enactment of these reforms is far from certain. The real estate industry is lobbying against the changes and pushing for existing parking maximums to be loosened. At the same time, a faction within DCP believes that current limits on parking have failed to reduce driving and that building more parking is necessary to attract high-income residents and families with children. The future of parking reform in the Manhattan core is still very much in question.

While market-rate housing construction in the Manhattan core is governed by parking maximums, affordable housing is not. In fact, the city still requires parking in public and publicly-assisted housing built in the area. John Rhea, the head of the New York City Housing Authority, has stated that parking minimums impede the redevelopment of public housing. In the private sector, minimums have forced developers to cut affordable units from their projects.

DCP would eliminate those parking minimums and replace them with the standard Manhattan core parking maximums, according to the Kramer Levin summary. “That should be citywide,” said David King, a planning professor at Columbia University. “The evidence is becoming overwhelming that minimum parking requirements are a hindrance to affordable housing.”

Perhaps the most sweeping DCP proposal would eliminate the current distinction between accessory parking and public parking inside the Manhattan core. Why does this matter? First, some definitions. Parking spaces designated for a particular building or tenant are called “accessory” spaces — these are what parking minimums require. Parking spaces that anyone can use are considered “public” spaces.

Parking experts cheered the prospect of getting rid of the distinction between accessory and public parking. “Single use accessory parking is hugely problematic,” said Rachel Weinberger, a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Making all the parking public use represents the epitome of shared parking, which is one of the holy grails.”

The provision of accessory parking is based on the idea that every tenant or development should have its own parking. Under this model, a motorist should be able to pull out of the garage attached to his apartment building, park at his workplace, and park again at the gym on the way home. There has to be a space for him at each destination. Shared parking, in contrast, consolidates those spaces, allowing them to be used more efficiently and encouraging people to park only once per trip. “Requiring parking on premise is the wrong way to approach parking in an urban area,” said King.

Without accessory parking, DCP will also have to reconsider how it grants exemptions from parking maximums. Currently, developers can flout parking maximums by getting a special permit from the City Planning Commission. Though there are restrictions on issuing those permits, in practice, almost every request is granted, flooding neighborhoods like Hell’s Kitchen with new garages and allowing developments like Riverside Center to build enormous garages against the wishes of the local community board and elected officials.

Under the new proposal, to grant a special permit for a residential project, the City Planning Commission must find that “there is an imbalance between existing parking supply and new housing that generates new parking needs within a 1/3 mile area,” reported Kramer Levin.

“To require a demonstration of need based on area-wide availability is also an excellent idea,” said Weinberger. “It’s absolutely impossible to determine the ‘correct’ amount of parking required on a per use or building basis.” Even so, using an area-wide focus isn’t enough to ensure that special permits are not granted too freely, Weinberger said. “The potential downside is in how DCP determines ‘need,’” she explained. “That’s the $64,000 question.” If City Planning assumes that large numbers of people will drive no matter what, the agency will grant a large number of special permits, said Weinberger. If instead they look for ways to add transit capacity instead of parking, they might find far fewer spaces are needed.

The DCP proposal also targets an incentive to build parking caused by an exemption for above-grade parking. The zoning code restricts density using a measure called floor-area density. But parking built up to 23 feet above grade doesn’t count toward the allowed density. “The floor area exemption for parking essentially acts as a modest bonus if you build parking,” explained Raju Mann, the director of planning for the Municipal Art Society. A building limited to eight stories could potentially grow to ten if the first two floors were used for parking. That “doesn’t fit with the city’s transportation or land use priorities,” said Mann.

Under DCP’s August proposal, the floor-area exemption would be limited to underground parking, which the department sees as more pedestrian-friendly than ground-floor parking. It’s also much more expensive to build. “Developers are going to be less likely to want to build below-grade parking,” said King.

Four other proposals would also augment the existing parking rules in the Manhattan core:

• In order to ensure that retail in particular be designed in a pedestrian-oriented manner, DCP suggests dropping the parking maximum for retail from one space allowed as-of-right per 4,000 square feet to zero. King called that “a no-brainer.”
• Despite the stated goal the reduce the total amount of parking by 40 percent, the 1982 zoning rules prohibit the removal of any parking space that had previously been built to satisfy parking minimums. That provision would be eliminated under DCP’s proposal, allowing for the conversion of many lots and garages to different uses.
• The creation of any new surface parking lot in the Manhattan core would require a special permit.
• Currently, curb cuts are prohibited within 50 feet of an intersection. DCP would extend that to 70 feet.

“On balance,” concluded Mann, “the changes proposed are targeted but important improvements to parking rules that have worked pretty well for the Manhattan core.”

Those promising improvements, however, are threatened on all sides. Almost all are opposed by the real estate industry. DCP’s own studies appear to be deliberately written with the intent to undermine the city’s parking maximum policy. We’ll have more on the considerable challenges facing the Manhattan core parking proposal in a follow-up post.

A plan put together by the organization Community Solutions, which is working in Brownsville to prevent homelessness before it starts, would remap streets through superblocks and use infill development to revitalize an area dominated by public housing. Existing surface parking lots would be turned into housing, retail, schools and green space.

Leaders in New York City’s public housing community are interested in transforming city-owned superblocks into mixed-use, mixed-income communities that engage with the pedestrian realm. There are of course many obstacles to this kind of ambitious project, but only one was identified specifically in a Municipal Art Society panel on the topic last Friday: the city’s own parking requirements.

Developing existing NYCHA land could bring a wide variety of benefits to both public housing residents and the surrounding communities, said John Rhea, the chairman of NYCHA, and his fellow panel members. On the one hand, he explained, the housing authority has a $6 billion backlog of necessary maintenance exacerbated by declining federal funding. On the other, New York City’s relative success with public housing stems from its commitment to serving both low- and middle-income households. Infill development, said Rhea, means “we can do a lot more to ensure that the income diversity is stronger.”

Infill development also would allow the city to undo some of the design drawbacks of the tower-in-a-park style housing project, common in many parts of the city. A plan put forward by Rosanne Haggerty, the president of the homelessness prevention organization Community Solutions, for four adjacent housing projects in Brownsville would build between 700 and 1,000 units without displacing a single resident, she said. Her organization’s design would break up the existing superblock by restoring the original streets back through the housing project and put new buildings facing the sidewalk, recreating the traditional pedestrian environment. “Those blocks can reknit into the surrounding street grid,” said Haggerty. Surface parking lots would be replaced with new housing, retail, schools and green space under Haggerty’s plan.

Standing in the way of this kind of revitalization, however, are the city’s antiquated parking requirements. “With a certain density of housing, you have to build a certain amount of parking,” said Rhea. “Certain zoning rules may need to be reconsidered.” Currently, parking minimums are in place for public and publicly-assisted housing built anywhere in the city, even in the Manhattan core where market-rate development is subject to parking maximums. Rhea said that he’s in the middle of conversations with the Department of City Planning about whether their rules are “working against us instead of supporting us.”

NYCHA is able to pursue some infill projects despite DCP’s parking requirements, but Rhea said it’s difficult. According to a 2005 report commissioned by the city, NYCHA has abandoned recent attempts to build out some of its sites due to parking minimums. At the St. Nicholas Houses, said Rhea, the authority was able to build a new school with the Harlem Children’s Zone on top of a former parking lot because a remapping of 129th Street — the first remapping of a street through a public housing superblock in the city’s history — provided enough new on-street spaces to compensate for the lost lot.

George McCarthy, the director of the Ford Foundation’s Metropolitan Opportunity portfolio, said that he works in nine regions trying to connect public housing residents to good transit. “It really begs the question about parking,” he said, given that New York City’s public housing generally already has such good transit access. He called for eliminating the requirements and allowing NYCHA to build parking only as needed. “Why do we continue to permit ourselves to build institutions that hamper our ability to provide enough housing?” McCarthy asked.

Two surface parking lots are set to be developed into a new downtown for Staten Island. But even in this transit-rich location -- the ferry, bus terminal and railroad are all visible in the lower right of this satellite image -- NYCEDC is making parking a priority. Image: NYCEDC

St. George Staten Island could become the region’s next great downtown. That’s the plan over at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is about to redevelop two waterfront sites immediately adjacent to the ferry terminal.

Yet even though EDC touts the unparalleled transit access at the sites, which are currently surface parking lots, and its desire to make this a pedestrian-friendly development, the agency is requiring that any development include a huge amount of parking. Not only would every surface space have to be replaced, but EDC intends to accommodate anyone who wants to drive to the developments and find a parking spot.

EDC makes the case for a vibrant urban development at St. George as well as anyone could in its request for expressions of interest, released yesterday:

The adjacent Ferry Terminal is Staten Island’s transit hub linking 70,000 daily commuters with the Staten Island Railroad, 20 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (“MTA”) bus lines, and the Bay Street and Richmond Terrace bikeway…

It is widely recognized that the neighborhood represents a great opportunity for Staten Island to accommodate significant population growth (Staten Island is expected to grow by +65,000 people in the next twenty years, including 35,000 seniors and 17,000 young adults) and establish the kind of vital downtown that has long eluded Staten Island but emerged in municipalities stretching from Jersey City to Long Branch.

Indeed, this is an ideal location for dense, downtown-style development. New Urbanist leader Jeff Speck even identified the site as crying out for construction in a presentation to the City Planning Commission in January of last year.

Yet EDC wants the island’s transit center and would-be downtown to make room for a sea of parking, which will draw more traffic to the neighborhood streets, eat up space that could be used for housing or offices, and degrade the pedestrian environment. At this stage in the development process, it’s not clear exactly how many spaces the new development might contain. But all the spaces in the enormous surface parking lots would have to replaced one for one, ensuring at least a full floor of parking almost by definition. On top of that, EDC expects that additional parking be provided for all “the expected demand produced by the proposed development.” With 14 acres up for development, that could be quite a lot of spaces indeed.

In the past, EDC has used the formulas embedded in the environmental review process to predict demand for parking; those formulas have contributed to thousand-space lots at the New Domino development in Williamsburg and Riverside Center on Manhattan’s West Side, among others.

That level of parking isn’t necessary. Only 63 percent of Staten Islanders drive to work. If the borough were to secede from New York City, it would have fewer car commuters, as a percent, than Portland or Los Angeles, and just a hair more than Chicago. Moreover, St. George is on track to become even more transit-rich than it is today; the city is currently studying the creation of a bus or rail rapid transit line along Staten Island’s north shore.

The prioritization of parking comes from the very top. In a press release announcing the development plans, the only official to mention parking was Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself. “The potential to develop these sites while maintaining the availability of parking – combined with projects at the Homeport, Howland Hook, and at the Ferry Terminal – will be a catalyst for the further revitalization of the North Shore, as well as the entire island.” EDC would not comment for this story beyond pointing us to the official press release.

The city’s belief that a “vital downtown” is compatible with parking requirements flies in the face of experience. Downtown Manhattan was largely developed prior to the enactment of any parking regulations; today a strict parking maximum is in place. Downtown Brooklyn is largely zoned so that commercial development does not require off-street parking; developers and elected officials in the area have been pushing hard for the residential requirements to be eliminated as well.

Jersey City, ostensibly one of the city’s models for St. George, took the opposite approach to parking in revitalizing its downtown. “Jersey City’s an interesting model for the area around the ferry terminal, since both places are transit-rich, with access to ferries, buses, and rail,” explained Steven Higashide of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. “In most downtown developments in Jersey City, developers aren’t required to provide any parking and there’s instead a parking maximum. That makes it less costly to build and makes it easier to create a lively streetscape that isn’t interrupted by parking lots and overrun with traffic.”

EDC isn’t the only guilty party in St. George. The St. George special zoning district, proposed by the Department of City Planning in 2008 and passed later that year, increased residential parking minimums to 100 percent and forbid developers from subdividing properties to waive the requirements. Keeping Staten Island suburban, even in its downtown, is official city policy.

Last year, City Council Member James Vacca supported a plan to increase parking minimums in the red striped areas, which largely run along the path of the 6 train through the Bronx. For a larger version of the image, click here.

The Bronx is booming. Over the last decade, no borough added more new residents or posted faster wage growth.

The Bronx’s incredible resurgence even attracted national attention last week from USA Today, which turned to City Council Member James Vacca to explain the wave of residential development in the borough. Vacca used the opportunity to basically argue for halting growth in much of the outer boroughs, advocating for restrictions on density and higher parking requirements.

As both a council member and a community board district manager, Vacca has responded to rising demand for housing by fighting for zoning changes that would lock in a more car-centric cityscape. Neighborhoods like Throgs Neck were granted the city’s special suburban-style classification (the technical term is “Lower Density Growth Management Area“), meaning even more parking and even larger yards are now required for new development.

Regrettably, there’s nothing unusual about New York’s representatives closing the door to development in their neighborhoods by pushing for a major downzoning, even near transit. Swathes of the city have seen development restricted, nearly always to cheers from residents and elected officials.

On a City Council full of believers in subsidized parking, Vacca has managed to distinguish himself with a laser-like focus on providing more and cheaper parking, even right next to the subway. In explaining why development had to be limited, the transportation chair told USA Today, “Many of these row houses that went up came without parking or adequate parking.”

Nowhere has Vacca’s commitment to high parking requirements been more evident than in a rezoning adopted last March for the Westchester Square and Pelham Bay neighborhoods of the Bronx, which he strongly supported.

In 2006, the Department of City Planning had rezoned most of the area as low-density districts with high parking requirements. Along the last six stops of the 6 train, however, urban-style growth would still be allowed. In fact, City Planning explicitly reduced parking requirements on shopping streets close to transit. The East Bronx would be allowed to stay semi-suburban, but not near the subway.

Last year’s change effectively undid that policy, hiking parking requirements in the same areas where they had been left low.

Mandatory parking ratios were increased from three parking spots for every ten dwellings to five. Perhaps more importantly, the changes prevent developers from subdividing their lots to earn a waiver from the parking requirements. Waivers are commonly used to get around parking requirements, so much so that Department of City Planning officials count on them to mitigate the impact of imposing high parking minimums.

For the purpose of parking regulations, last year’s change even makes the areas along the 6 a “Lower Density Growth Management Area,” despite the fact that City Planning reserves that designation for areas that are “generally distant from mass transit.” While other rezonings have forced more parking into new development, few if any have so deliberately injected parking around subway stations.

“Many of our apartment houses in Pelham Bay are pre-World War II,” Vacca told Streetsblog at the time, meaning they were built without parking. “Everybody’s complaining about the lack of parking. They come home at night and can’t get a parking space.”

As transportation committee chair of America’s most car-free city, Vacca considers himself a supporter of mass transit. When he pushed for this rezoning, though, he didn’t think the area’s subway and bus lines would be able to serve East Bronx residents. “Although I have the 6 train,” he said, “not everyone has easy access to the 6 train.” That’s true, but a quick glance at the map of last year’s changes shows the argument is largely irrelevant; the affected areas have strong access to the 6.

More people want to live in the East Bronx than live there now — that what keeps motivating Vacca to bring up parking, whether in the land use process or to USA Today. And the demand exists for housing without parking attached; the developers’ repeated willingness to subdivide their lots in order to earn a waiver is testament to that. Ultimately, Vacca would rather fill that space in his district with cars instead of people.

The transformations visible from the side of the highway also include shuttered factories that would be redeveloped as 1,200 units of new housing under a proposal by former City Council Speaker Gifford Miller. On a tour I took of the Sheridan and Hunts Point areas last night, the scent of hot dogs still hung over one former frankfurter factory that would be replaced with apartments and a new school.

The tour was part of the public process for a federally funded study currently being undertaken by the Department of City Planning. The study is meant to augment the state Department of Transportation’s analysis of a Sheridan teardown by comprehensively and holistically imagining the potential redevelopment, parkland, and street improvements should the highway be torn down. The City Planning officials leading the tour were clearly already immersed in those possibilities, pointing out the properties and intersections that would be most affected by a highway removal, usually highlighting the positive.

Below are some photos I took on the tour, running roughly from the northern end of the Sheridan to the southern end.

At the very northern end of the Sheridan, the highway turns into East 177th Street, a local road. Behind the chain link fence immediately to the left of the highway is a future entrance to the Bronx River Greenway, due to open in May. As long as the highway remains, pedestrians and cyclists using the greenway will have to navigate across the exiting traffic.

One block further north, the ongoing construction of the greenway is visible through a fence.

The Bronx River itself, seen here from East Tremont Street, is lush and green at this point in the summer. This location marks the southernmost sighting of José the Beaver, the first of his species seen in New York City in 200 years and a sign of the environmental rehabilitation of the river.

West Farms Road, which runs adjacent to the Sheridan, is largely developed with light manufacturing uses, along with a few small residences. Under a proposal by former City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, now a real estate developer, much of the road, including this site just across the street from the Sheridan, would be rezoned for larger-scale residential uses with ground-floor retail. Miller’s plans will be included in the city’s Sheridan study, said tour leader Vineeta Mathur, as the knowledge that someone already wants to redevelop the area is relevant to any plan for the neighborhood’s future.

Sheridan study project manager Tawkiyah Jordan told tour participants to imagine this building full of families who might want better air quality and more access for their children to the parkland across the highway.

A few blocks west of the Sheridan, large apartment buildings are the dominant building type. Next to the highway, it’s mostly one-story industrial uses.

Right now, the only connection to Starlight Park, which is currently being completely reconstructed, is across a single bridge over the Sheridan at 174th Street. When the new park opens, it will be a major amenity for the neighborhood, though one relatively hard to reach.

From the 174th Street Bridge, you can look directly down onto the Sheridan. This photo was taken at roughly 6:50 p.m. Traffic was still crushed on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, but light on the Sheridan.

This car parts salvage yard is surrounded by the Sheridan on one side and freight tracks on the other. Jordan noted that if the Sheridan were removed, it would suddenly be connected to the neighborhood, completely changing its development possibilities.

Here, an off-ramp from the Sheridan runs freely onto local streets, without a stop sign or traffic light to slow traffic. Two more one-way streets merge with the off-ramp to create what Mathur called extremely dangerous conditions for pedestrians. Half a block back from this intersection is a playground.

After crossing over the Sheridan, we walked through Concrete Plant Park, a major piece of the Bronx River Greenway. An active concrete production facility until 1987 and a brownfield afterwards, the site was transformed into a beautiful park, complete with salt marshes at the riverside and a boat launch. The state DOT is currently trying to connect Concrete Plant Park and Starlight Park with another stretch of greenway using eminent domain and bridges over train tracks. At the southern end of Concrete Plant Park, however, the greenway dead-ends directly into Bruckner Boulevard and the Bruckner Expressway.

The interchange between the Sheridan and Bruckner Expressways is at the heart of the state DOT’s plans for the area. Whether or not the Sheridan remains, the state DOT is planning a series of improvements to the Bruckner at this location to allow traffic to move more smoothly. A new off-ramp from the Bruckner will allow trucks to exit directly to the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, which handles 60 percent of all New York City’s food, potentially providing truckers an alternate route instead of using the Sheridan and then local streets.

To cross onto the Hunts Point peninsula from the nearest subway station requires crossing six lanes of traffic in each direction. These cars are about to enter the on-ramp for both the Bruckner and the Sheridan. Drivers, ready for the highway, floor it. The pedestrian crossing time appeared to be about thirty seconds long. Long-time Hunts Point residents and workers on the tour said this crossing was a consistently terrifying scramble.

Along Hunts Point Avenue, construction is underway for a planted median that will be part of the South Bronx Greenway. The median will add greenery to the neighborhood and have a traffic calming effect. Some hope that it will dissuade trucks from using this street, which is not a truck route, to get to the market.

Trucks at the Food Distribution Center are visible behind Hunts Point Riverside Park, illustrating the central challenge of the Sheridan area. The city does not want to reduce truck access to the food market, which employs 10,000 people directly, tens of thousands more indirectly, and feeds the city. Many of those trucks currently use the Sheridan. The city hopes that the needs of the market and of the neighborhoods can both be met, as at this park.

All photos: Noah Kazis

Though the 2 train runs up White Plains Road, the Department of City Planning has proposed downzoning all the areas bounded by yellow on either side of the street. Image: NYC DCP

The Department of City Planning’s commitment to rezoning the city along more transit-oriented lines is a critical component of its sustainability agenda. Allowing more people to live and work next to transit means more people will ride transit and fewer will drive.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, upzonings have indeed been concentrated near transit. But what the administration gives with one hand, it takes with the other. Over the last decade, the Department of City Planning has also downzoned large swaths of transit-accessible land, preventing further development in these locations. Indeed, under one representative five-year period of Bloomberg and Burden’s city planning, three-quarters of the lots rezoned for greater density were located within a half-mile of rail transit, but so were two-thirds of the lots where development was further restricted, according to research by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The pattern still holds. In fact, some of DCP’s most recent rezonings are restricting development on blocks literally around the corner from a subway stop.

Take the Williamsbridge/Baychester rezoning in the Bronx, which the City Planning Commission certified last month. There, an elevated train, the 2, runs up White Plains Avenue. Along White Plains itself, DCP proposes to either maintain the existing rules or allow slightly more growth. But turn the corner off the main street even a fraction of a block, and the department is seeking to sharply curtail the opportunity for growth.

At the 219th Street station, for example, the allowable floor area ratio (or FAR), a measure of density, would drop from 2.43 to 1.25 as soon as you move east off of White Plains. Parking minimums would rise, requiring 85 parking spots for every 100 homes (up from a 70 percent ratio). To the immediate northwest of the station, the proposed zoning would be even stricter, with a FAR of 1.1 and a parking space required for each new residential unit.

The story is the same one stop further north at 225th Street. Walk one short block south of the station, turn left and the allowable FAR drops to 0.9, again with a parking space required for each unit.

Two sides of the Baychester Avenue stop on the 5 line are slated for the same extremely restrictive zoning, but in that case there won’t even be any upzoning along a main street to compensate for it.

Those neighborhoods are in the northeast Bronx, near the end of the subway system. Even so, transit is heavily used in the area; in that City Council district, less than half of residents drive to work.

Moreover, DCP is tightening its zoning precisely because developers want to build in these areas. Explaining the need for the new restrictions, the department writes on its website that “the residential neighborhoods in the rezoning area have been experiencing development pressure” and that the new rules are needed to “preserve the scale and context of these areas.”

Richard Gorman, the chair of Bronx Community Board 12, put it more explicitly. “We are all extremely excited about the proposed rezoning,” he told the Bronx Times-Reporter. “We have low-density communities, and we would like to keep that character alive here.”

Surprisingly, City Planning claims that this rezoning is transit-oriented. Said DCP Commissioner Amanda Burden to the Times-Reporter, “In keeping with our commitment to transit-oriented growth, this rezoning would direct development away from residential side streets with small homes, to blocks than can accommodate new commercial and housing opportunities.” DCP did not respond to Streetsblog inquiries for this story.

Williamsbridge and Baychester are far from exceptional cases. Another DCP proposal currently working its way through the public review process will change the development rules for Sunnyside and Woodside in western Queens. That plan includes some significant upzonings near transit, near the 40th Street 7 station, for example. But while DCP pushed for more growth near some rail stations, it proposed restrictions near others.

In the four-block area between the 65th Street station on the M and R lines and the 69th Street station on the 7, for example, DCP is seeking to reduce the allowable density of development while adding a requirement that all new residences include a front yard. The yard must be at least as deep as that of the yard next door and no less than five feet deep.

Every time the Bloomberg administration restricts development near transit, it means people who would want to live or locate businesses there cannot. The forestalled development will be pushed somewhere else, perhaps away from transit, out in the suburbs, or out of the New York region altogether. Those would-be transit riders will drive and New York housing prices will rise. It’s hard to see how actively halting or shrinking development near transit squares with the goals of PlaNYC.

With a curb cut, surface parking along the street frontage, and no retail use on the ground floor, the pedestrian-hostile design for the "Le Bleu" hotel wouldn't cut it under newly proposed zoning rules for Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue. Photo: Ben Fried.

When the Department of City Planning put forward its rezoning of Park Slope in 2003, one of the earliest of the now 111 rezonings under Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, it was intended to help turn Fourth Avenue into “a grand boulevard of the 21st Century.”

The sought-after residential development has started to take place, but at street level, there’s been widespread disappointment with the results. Instead of providing a healthy pedestrian realm, the ground floor of many new developments has been taken up by ventilation equipment and even a surface parking lot.

In response, the Department of City Planning has put forward a new set of rules intended to ensure that as Fourth Avenue develops further, it does so in a way that invites people to walk along the street.

At least half of the ground floor frontage of each new building along Fourth would be required to be retail, and parking wouldn’t be allowed anywhere along the ground floor street frontage. Requirements for a certain amount of glass storefronts would provide opportunities for window-shopping, while strict restrictions on curb cuts across Fourth Avenue sidewalks will give pedestrians more space and comfort.

With the endorsements of local Council Members Brad Lander, Stephen Levin and Sara González, the plan is likely to move relatively smoothly through the land use review process over the next few months.

The underlying zoning, including bulk, use, and parking requirements, will remain the same along Fourth. However, many of the worst offenders of the last development cycle would not be up to code under the new regulations.

The “Le Bleu” hotel, for example, includes a curb cut to a surface parking lot in front of the building, two would-be violations of the new zoning rules. Behind the parking lot is a lobby without any retail, another violation. If that project had been built under the proposed rules, the hotel could still have parking, but it would have to be structured parking, at least thirty feet back from the street or underground and accessed from a side street rather than Fourth.

It will be interesting to see how developers respond to the tighter restrictions on where parking can be placed. Building underground parking on Fourth is even more expensive than usual due to the subway tunnel that runs under the street, so it’s not unlikely that, on the margin, barring parking from part of the ground floor will result in less total parking being built along the street.

While parking requirements along Fourth generally require a parking space for 40 percent of the dwelling units, much of the parking built along the street was a result of developers’ profit motive. At the Novo, for example, the developer built 60 spaces when only 45 were required by zoning. At the Crest, a DCP spokesperson said, the developer was eligible to have parking requirements waived entirely. In buildings like those, neither of which engages the sidewalk, making it slightly more difficult to build parking could mean the developer would choose to build less parking altogether.

When DCP originally rezoned Park Slope, a department spokesperson told Streetsblog in 2008, it opted against retail requirements on the grounds that in a less-established commercial area, such requirements might inhibit development altogether or result in empty storefronts. That they are ready to put those requirements in place on Fourth — similar transparency rules are in effect on 125th Street and the St. George area of Staten Island, according to DCP — suggests that even in a downturn, the real estate market in that rapidly gentrifying section of Brooklyn is strong.

Said Slatkin:

We are a growing city that needs new housing development. But in communities, acceptance of new housing and the zoning that allows it is closely linked to the community’s confidence that new development will not exacerbate the overutilization of on-street parking.

In other words, the Bloomberg administration believes that for upzonings to be politically feasible at the neighborhood level, it has to throw in parking minimums. This is less a principled stand in support of parking minimums than a calculated decision that they are a price worth paying for new development.

There’s a certain logic to that argument, even from the perspective of sustainable transportation. If you build 100 New York City apartments, even with 50 parking spaces included, that will still be far greener and more transit-oriented than 100 new houses in the suburbs. But it’s far less green (and makes housing less affordable) than using the same space to build 125 NYC apartments and no parking. The question is whether the political tradeoff is truly necessary.

The fact that the city’s support for parking minimums rests significantly on a political argument heightens the importance of strong organizing by advocates for green transportation and affordable housing. If advocates can show now that communities don’t need parking minimums to support continued development it will free up the political space for City Planning to put forward larger reductions.

Moreover, any change to the city’s zoning would be reviewed by the city’s community boards and borough presidents, and subject to a binding vote by the City Council. The council consistently fights to add more and cheaper parking in new developments whenever it is given the opportunity. Any parking minimum reductions will surely be formulated with an eye toward this gauntlet of reviews, so shoring up support ahead of time is critical.

Whatever City Planning puts forward, whether weak or strong, is sure to be met with a barrage of opposition from those who want to stuff parking spaces into every available space in New York City, regardless of how much that parking adds to the price of housing and the congestion on city streets. Will the city’s car-free majority be able to speak louder?

Parking minimums could decrease in "inner ring" neighborhoods, said DCP director of sustainability Howard Slatkin. Image: NY Real Estate Journal

All that was promised were three studies: one on parking requirements inside the Manhattan core, one on parking minimums in the rest of the city, and one on the effect of minimums on affordable housing. Now, however, a clearer picture is beginning to emerge about how city planners intend to address the latter two issues.

Speaking at an event held by NYU’s Furman Center last week, Department of City Planning sustainability director Howard Slatkin explained that the department is working toward reducing parking minimums for both market-rate and affordable housing in what he called New York’s “inner ring”: Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, northwest Brooklyn and western Queens. The department appears to be unlikely to lower parking minimums beyond the inner ring. (The event was off the record, but DCP allowed us to use Slatkin’s remarks.) While the Manhattan core already has parking maximums in place — though not without loopholes — developers building in the neighborhoods immediately outside the central city are still forced by the zoning law to include a certain amount of parking. That could soon change.

Explained Slatkin:

The department’s policy in the past decade has been to shift housing growth to denser, transit-served areas — where people own fewer cars. It is within these “inner ring” neighborhoods outside the Manhattan core — well served by transit, relatively dense, with lower car ownership — that we believe there are opportunities to lower parking requirements.

This approach still hews to DCP’s belief that parking minimums do not substantively affect the demand for car-ownership, said Slatkin, who pointed to both DCP’s own research and, surprisingly, Transportation Alternatives’ study “Guaranteed Parking — Guaranteed Driving” to make this point. (The TA study did indeed show higher car-ownership rates in wealthy Park Slope, built largely before advent of parking minimums, than in Jackson Heights, built largely after minimums took effect, but its prime finding was that the guaranteed parking spots that stem from parking minimums lead Jackson Heights residents to drive to work at much higher rates.)

Instead, Slatkin argued that building dense and mixed-use neighborhoods near transit reduces car ownership, allowing DCP to respond in those areas by shifting parking minimums downward. In other words, reducing parking minimums is seen only as a response to lower car ownership, not as a policy that will proactively reduce the amount of driving in New York City by eliminating a major market distortion.

Delving further into the rationale behind the potential parking policy shift, Slatkin said that parking requirements impose steep costs on developers — an important acknowledgment for the department to make publicly. Slatkin did point out that three-quarters of new residential development in the inner ring had been eligible to receive waivers from parking requirements, creating opportunities to avoid those direct costs, but when pushed, he added that even developments built with a waiver might have been negatively affected by parking minimums. Reworking developments to slide in under the waivers, by subdividing a project into smaller pieces, for example, adds its own costs.

In affordable housing, the cost component of parking minimums is even higher. Because of the requirements of certain affordable housing funding streams, explained Slatkin, it is even more difficult to rework those projects in order to be eligible for a parking requirement waiver.

That DCP is finally getting ready to reduce economically and environmentally costly parking minimums is an important step in the right direction. There’s a lot that can happen between now and the fall, when Slatkin said DCP’s studies will be released, and then when any zoning changes are actually voted on. We don’t know how the studies will be structured, what parking minimums they will recommend, and most importantly, what political forces will weigh on City Planning. More on that critical last question in a follow-up post.

DOT considers this the optimal route for a Red Hook streetcar, but recommended against the whole project. Image: NYC DOT

Proposed Red Hook streetcars aren’t worth the cost, according to the city DOT. In a presentation to community groups last Thursday [PDF], DOT revealed the results of its streetcar feasibility study and recommended against the construction of a line that would run from the Smith/9th subway station into Red Hook and up the waterfront to Borough Hall. The creation of a streetcar or light rail line along the northern Brooklyn or western Queens waterfront was a Bloomberg campaign promise in 2009.

The most fundamental critique in the study is that the streetcar would cost too much for too little. Building the 6.8 mile line is estimated to cost $176 million, with another $6.2-7.2 million in annual operating costs. According to DOT’s analysis, that investment would only create 1,822 new daily transit riders.

DOT also found that the streetcar wouldn’t offer quicker travel times or more reliable service than existing buses.

The low increase in ridership comes not only because of the lack of mobility benefits, but also because in Red Hook, where 81.5 percent of households don’t own a car, many residents are already transit-dependent.

We have a call in with DOT to learn more about the premises that underlie this study. More information should also be available in the full report, which is due out today.

The logistics of running a streetcar line through the neighborhood seem to have been greatly complicated by the department’s fear of removing parking spaces.

The presentation focuses on the difficulties of fitting streetcars onto Red Hook’s narrow streets, especially if you want to preserve existing bike lanes, and giving streetcars enough space to make tight turns. The presentation suggests that parking bans along the street or at intersections could solve those problems (the other option is narrowing sidewalks, which ought to be a non-starter for a pedestrian-friendly administration).

A final objection, though, seems to reveal either a lack of coordination between city agencies or a study designed to reject the streetcar in advance. Having looked at streetcar projects in other cities, DOT found that installing the transit line would only promote economic development if it was paired with changes to the area’s land use planning. Noting that the Department of City Planning doesn’t have any plans to upzone Red Hook’s residential areas or otherwise plan for growth, the DOT study concludes that the “current City development/land use policy is not complementary to streetcar as an economic development driver.”

If the Department of City Planning truly wouldn’t adjust Red Hook’s zoning in response to a major new piece of transit infrastructure, that would be a failure of coordination within the Bloomberg administration, not to mention a rejection of the concept of transit-oriented development. Alternatively, what this might really suggest is that the administration was not serious about a streetcar in the first place. After all, why should DCP plan a rezoning if DOT isn’t planning a streetcar line?

Instead of a streetcar, DOT proposes reworking the intersection of Mill Street and Hamilton Avenue, with the goal of improving pedestrian, bike, and bus access into Red Hook, as well as some additional shelters along the B61 bus route.

City Planning is currently considering granting a special permit to this 44th Street parking garage to allow it to buck the Clean Air Act and store 90 more cars than currently allowed. Image: Google Street View.

We reported last week that Boston, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. are each making policy shifts to curb the proliferation of off-street parking even as New York City continues to enable the construction of more and more traffic-inducing, land-devouring parking.

Streetsblog followed up with Debbie Schaaf, a senior transportation planner at Philadelphia’s planning department, about her city’s new direction on parking policy and how it compares to the state of parking policy in New York. Our conversation highlighted a rift between policy makers in the two cities, suggesting that under Amanda Burden, New York’s city planners have lurched out of sync with their peers on the issue of off-street parking.

The policy changes in Philadelphia are advancing on two fronts. Right now a rewrite of the zoning code is tightening parking minimums, and in the longer-term, the city’s new comprehensive plan calls for the institution of parking maximums. “We don’t want to overload the city with too much parking, which can encourage more automobile traffic,” explained Schaaf.

New York’s Department of City Planning, in contrast, has denied that there is any meaningful relationship between the amount of off-street parking required by the zoning code and car ownership rates. ”It is not the requirements themselves that influence car ownership, but rather, housing density and distance from the core of Manhattan, among other factors, such as the habit of  families with children to select housing in lower density areas where parking is available,” concluded DCP’s 2009 report addressing parking requirements.

Schaaf said she did not agree with New York’s position and that parking requirements and car ownership are indeed related.

She listed a number of reasons Philadelphia is trying to limit the amount of off-street parking that gets built. “It should make development more affordable,” she said. “It should make development more pro-transit.” She also said that less parking would mean a more sustainable city with better air quality.

Maximums, explained Schaaf, will eventually be an important part of Philly’s parking policy portfolio. “Developers sometimes are forced to provide more parking even than they think they need, either by lenders or by community groups that want more parking,” she said. “If you have a maximum in place, it would make it a little bit easier to resist that.”

While New York City has parking maximums in parts of Manhattan and Long Island City, the current Department of City Planning habitually grants requests for special permits to ignore them.

The maximums in the core of New York City date from the 1970s, when the city responded to lawsuits brought under the Clean Air Act. Despite the passage of PlanNYC nearly four years ago, under the Bloomberg Administration, New York has failed to build on its inheritance of progressive parking policy. While cities like Philadelphia are trying to curb traffic by preventing the oversupply of parking, New York has seemingly forgotten what it once knew about the connection between congestion and parking.

Large parking lots, like the one at the Grant Houses on 125th Street, increase the cost of affordable housing and take up space that could be used for more apartments. Image: Google Street View.

Thanks to new research from NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, one underlying reason for the high cost of New York City housing is crystal clear: The mandatory parking minimums in the city’s zoning law, first established more than half a century ago. The evidence is more solid than ever that the city’s parking minimums are a major factor making New York City less affordable.

The report, “Minimum Parking Requirements and Housing Affordability in New York City,” shows for the first time the extent to which parking minimums actually affect New York City developers. Data compiled by authors Simon McDonnell, Josiah Madar and Vicki Been indicates that in many cases, they only build as much parking as they are required to by law.

Before this research, said McDonnell, “No one had any idea at a broad scale whether developers were building at the minimum.” Without the minimums, developers would probably build less parking.

Looking at every large, market-rate and entirely residential building completed in Queens between 2000 and 2008, the authors compared how much parking was required by zoning to how much was actually constructed. Of the 38 buildings that met those criteria, 18 of them had exactly the amount of parking required by the minimum. Another four actually had less than required, perhaps because they received a variance. Only five buildings built more than four more spaces than required. “That would suggest the minimum is quite binding,” McDonnell concluded.

Academics have long understood how city-mandated parking can increase the cost of housing. If developers can turn a profit on parking, they’ll build it themselves. Any additional parking built because of a mandate is a money-loser (at least compared to the additional housing that might be built in its place), the cost of which must be borne by tenants and buyers. Housing advocates, too, have argued that requiring more parking drives up housing costs.

Apologists for parking minimums could always contend, however, that developers would build that much parking anyway, in order to meet demand. The new report confirms that the minimums are in fact distorting what gets built. In a majority of the cases studied, parking requirements are binding developers and therefore increasing the price of housing.

McDonnell, Madar and Been don’t estimate exactly how much parking minimums increase housing costs, but they do offer some guideposts. Above-ground structured parking, they say, costs more than $21,000 per space in New York City, not including the cost of land. Below-ground parking is even more expensive. Even surface parking carries enormous costs given the price of land in New York. In the very least expensive residentially zoned areas in the city, they estimate, just the land required to build a five car parking lot would cost more than $100,000.

And that’s only direct costs. By taking up valuable space and making it harder to build, parking minimums also restrict the supply of housing, driving up costs across New York City. If the oversupply of parking leads to increased car-ownership and increased driving, as all but one study in their lit review shows (that one, tellingly, is from the New York City Department of City Planning), then all the safety, environmental and congestion costs of increased auto use should also be included.

Future research, said McDonnell, will broaden the inquiry to smaller projects, other boroughs, and commercial uses.

Based on the author’s literature review, the case for making housing more affordable by cutting parking minimums is already incredibly strong. A 2003 report by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects [PDF], for example, noted that many of its members had to cancel projects because parking requirements made them uneconomical. Moreover, they wrote, “Parking requirements often limit the size of a building footprint more than floor area ratio,” the piece of the zoning code intended to limit density.

“The largest and most difficult zoning constraint affecting the development of new housing has been the requirement of building on-site parking spaces,” stated a report commissioned by New York City to lay out a comprehensive program for reducing housing costs [PDF]. That 1999 report, updated in 2005, found that even where parking minimums had been cut, as for affordable housing projects, they were still making development expensive or impossible. The report noted that NYCHA had recently abandoned attempts to build out some of its sites because the agency couldn’t meet the parking requirements.

As McDonnell, Mahar and Been write, “Setting the minimum parking requirement is likely more high stakes than municipal planners have realized.”