Streetsblog New York City

What appears to be an internal rift within the Department of City Planning could disrupt attempts to reform the city’s parking policies for the Manhattan core, in the face of opposition from the powerful real estate industry.

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.

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A generation ago, every new building in New York City had to include parking. Even in downtown and midtown Manhattan, the law required developers to build parking spaces for 40 percent of all new residences. The most walkable, transit-accessible districts in the country had mandates to set aside space for car storage.

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.

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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.

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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.

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When taking a tour of the Sheridan Expressway, the first thing you realize is that you’re also taking a tour of the Bronx River Greenway. The two pieces of infrastructure — one a 1.25-mile stub of highway, the other a still-piecemeal bike and pedestrian path reconnecting Bronx neighborhoods to the water — both run through the low river valley. The greenway and the cleaned-up river, products of decades of community activism, are signs of the incredible revitalization of the South Bronx.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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We reported yesterday that Department of City Planning Sustainability Director Howard Slatkin recently announced that his agency “believe[s] there are opportunities to lower parking requirements” in a ring of neighborhoods around the Manhattan core. This would be an important step forward in overhauling decades-old policies that lead to more traffic and less affordable housing. Importantly, Slatkin also revealed a major reason why the department sees mandatory parking minimums as so important — it’s all about the politics of development.

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?

In its recent update of PlaNYC, New York’s long-term sustainability plan, the city committed itself to the proposition that “requiring too much parking to be built in a dense city like New York can encourage driving, contribute to congestion, and unnecessarily raise the cost of new development.” That was a major breakthrough given the Department of City Planning’s previous reluctance to admit that parking minimums induce traffic, but PlaNYC’s lack of substantive commitments to parking reform left many wanting.

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.)

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