Streetsblog New York City

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.”

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Walkable development pays — that’s the conclusion of a study recently outlined in Planetizen. For cities and towns facing tight budgets — just about everywhere in the United States right now — the smart way to boost tax revenue is to encourage mixed-use, walkable development, as the above graphic amply illustrates.

The for-profit development company Public Interest Projects (PIP) reports that urbanism produces much more tax revenue for localities than sprawl. Analyzing tax data around Asheville, North Carolina, the research team found that downtowns — places with the most places to shop per acre — often subsidize the more suburban parts of the community. In places like Asheville, mixed-use developments offered up to eight times the tax revenue per acre of a Super Walmart.

Former PIP employee Joseph Minicozzi, now a principal with for-profit development firm Urban3, tells Planetizen readers that many cities are approaching development from the wrong frame of mind (emphasis added):

Our mistake has been looking at the overall value of a development project rather than its per unit productivity. Especially relevant in these times of limited public means, every city should be thinking long and hard about encouraging, and not accidentally discouraging, the property tax bonus that comes with mixed-use urbanism. Put simply, density gets far more bang for its buck.

He concludes that public policies that encourage low-density development urgently need to be reformed:

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The sides are lining up for and against the oversized parking garage that the Rudin family wants to build for its luxury apartments at the former St. Vincent’s Hospital site in Greenwich Village. Supporting the request to exceed Manhattan’s parking maximums is Borough President Scott Stringer. Opposing it are the community board and the urban planning advocates at the Municipal Art Society. Next month, the City Planning Commission will decide whether to ignore its own guidelines and grant a special permit raising the maximums for the Rudins.

The Rudins want to build 152 parking spaces for a 450 unit development. They are only allowed 98 by law. To get more, they need a special permit from the City Planning Commission.

Community Board 2 took a particularly strong anti-parking position, requesting that no parking at all be allowed in the development. The board’s official resolution [PDF] lists a number of reasons for opposing the garage, from the creation of a fourth curb cut on a single block, to the safety of the many pedestrians walking through the neighborhood and the desire not to induce more traffic on downtown’s congested streets. “Fewer people are driving in New York City,” states the resolution. “There’s an increase in use of alternative transportation modes and the encouragement of this approach (e.g. through bike share), which CB 2 supports.” New parking lots aren’t part of the community board’s vision for the neighborhood.

The Municipal Art Society, meanwhile, has called attention to Rudin’s funny math. As Streetsblog previously reported, to get a special permit, the developers need to show that there isn’t enough parking in the area to meet the demand generated by the project. In the Village, that’s just not the case. “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.”

Rudin attempted to claim that many of those available spaces shouldn’t count, since they’re meant to be used only by the residents of the buildings they’re attached to, but Streetsblog and MAS each scouted the area and found that almost all of the nearby garages allow non-residents to park.

“In order to reduce the amount of traffic on West 12th Street, which is primarily a residential street; the number of proposed parking spaces should be reduced,” recommended MAS.

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New York City’s zoning regulation turns 50 this year. Though the zoning ordinance has been amended extensively over the last half-century, land use in New York is still governed under a basic framework established under Mayor Robert Wagner. In a panel discussion held last Friday by the Municipal Art Society, experts put forward a vision for a brand new planning paradigm for New York City. The panelists called for fewer restrictions on how buildings are used, a merging of the city’s various land use codes, and a shift toward strategic planning.

Last week’s panel focused on the underlying structure of the zoning code rather than particular provisions. Rather than discussing the city’s many downzonings near transit or its parking minimums, each of which promote automobile use and increase the cost of housing, participants talked about the overarching principles that should govern land use regulation.

Each of the panelists endorsed a move toward what moderator Vicki Been, a professor at the NYU Law School, called the “Vegas principle” of zoning: “What happens in the building, stays in the building.” Zoning, they argued, should be more concerned with how buildings meet the public realm or impact public infrastructure than what people choose to do inside their property. “There’s nothing unsafe about having a business on the same floor as an apartment, if the people in the building agree to it,” said Michael Kwartler, a national expert on planning who helped write the zoning laws for midtown Manhattan.

When asked what she would change in the city’s zoning code, Jerilyn Perine, the head of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council and a former city housing commissioner, said “the word ‘family’ should be eradicated from the zoning resolution.” The definition of ‘family’ currently used in the zoning code limits the number of unrelated individuals who can legally share a single unit. The code “dictates not only how many people but who lives in places,” said Perine.

The desire to deregulate the use of buildings doesn’t mean that the MAS panelists were leaping to the New Urbanist solution of form-based codes, which can regulate the design of buildings as strictly as conventional zoning regulates use. The form-based code for the area around the Bay Area’s Pleasant Hill BART station, put forward by the Form Based Code Institute as a model, requires all buildings to be between two and four stories and for half of all upper-story units to include a balcony. “Figure out what elements of form really matter,” urged Don Elliott, the co-author of The Citizen’s Guide to Planning. “A lot of the details: it doesn’t matter, despite what the architects say.”

Kwartler and Perine, too, warned against over-regulating urban form, and especially against the current planning vogue for “contextual zoning,” which has been a hallmark of the Department of City Planning under Amanda Burden. “I hate this idea of contextual, this idea that what’s there should dictate what could be there in the future,” said Perine. Kwartler added that the Empire State Building is out of context with its surroundings, to the benefit of the entire city. Read more…

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.

The Municipal Art Society’s second annual survey on livability, released today, provides still more opinion data showing that New Yorkers want to see more bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. They’re more conflicted, however, when it comes to new, large-scale development.

The MAS poll, a survey of 1,000 residents performed by the Marist Institute, found that a preponderance of New Yorkers think that both bike lanes and pedestrianized streets make their neighborhoods better places to live. Bike lanes proved more popular, with 56 percent saying they improved livability and only 17 percent opposing them. Even the bold proposal of closing streets entirely to traffic had a citywide approval rating of 42 percent to 29 percent. Previous polls have shown similarly sizable levels of support for bike lanes.

MAS found more conflicted feelings toward new, dense development. While 62 percent of those surveyed believed that “large real estate development” is a good idea, an equal number said that development should “maintain the character of the neighborhood.” Bronx residents were much more willing to embrace development while Staten Islanders and Manhattanites were the least.

As MAS found last year, New York City’s staggering levels of inequality are reflected in New Yorkers’ opinions towards their neighborhoods. “We continue to see some underlying discontent, especially among people living outside Manhattan and those with lower incomes,” said MAS president Vin Cipolla. “It’s clear that citywide organizations like MAS need to step up our individual and collective efforts and presence in neighborhoods and forge new partnerships with community-based organizations to address these issues.”

What happened to the United States over the past several years is most commonly described as a recession. By the technical definition of the word we’re two years into a recovery. But it sure doesn’t seem that way.

Meanwhile, a growing chorus of intellectual leaders says the country is experiencing something different than a normal cyclical fluctuation: the end of an epoch.

Leading urban thinkers, from Richard Florida to James Howard Kunstler, believe we have reached the limits of our fossil-fueled, double-mortgaged, McMansion-based economy. Relief won’t come, they say, until America begins confronting the systemic problems that produced the meltdown, including inefficient and unsustainable public infrastructure investments and housing development.

“What were seeing right now is an inability to look at how we live and how it relates to our problems, and financial problems,” said Kunstler Tuesday during a speaking engagement with the Congress for the New Urbanism. “Production homebuilders, mortgage lenders, real estate agents, they are all sitting back now waiting for the, quote, bottom of the housing market to come with the expectation that things will go back to the way they were in 2005.”

But despite massive government expenditures to restart the old economic engine driven by suburban homebuilding, recovery is elusive, Kunstler said. The author of “The Geography of Nowhere” and “The Long Emergency” argues that suburbanization has been a multi-decade American experiment, and a failed one.

Kunstler is joined in that perspective by Charles Marohn, the director of non-profit group Strong Towns. A new report from Strong Towns places blame for the lagging economy directly on policies that favor low-density housing, fossil-fuel dependence and publicly-subsidized overbuilt infrastructure.

In its new booklet Curbside Chat, Strong Towns asserts that since the 1970s, the suburban growth that powered America’s economy operated much like a Ponzi scheme. In towns across the country, politicians traded the short-term payoffs of sprawling development — namely increased taxes — for long-term maintenance obligations that are just now coming due. And they’re coming up short.

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Last year, due to protracted financial difficulties, St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village closed its doors after 150 years, one-and-a-half centuries that saw the hospital play a major role treating victims of the AIDS crisis and the 9/11 attacks. Though many in the neighborhood hoped to see a full-service hospital remain in the Village, a plan eventually emerged to turn the landmark O’Toole building west of Seventh Avenue into an emergency room and outpatient surgery center, while the hospital buildings east of Seventh would be sold to the Rudin family and redeveloped as luxury apartments.

Though the basic shape of the site appears to have taken shape, the details remain hotly contested. In particular, the Rudin request to build a 152-space underground garage.

The garage would be the fourth to front the block of W. 12th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. “This would just add another garage, which would mean more traffic,” explained Community Board 2 transportation committee chair Shirley Secunda. ”It would also mean another encumbrance on pedestrian access, because you’d have another curb cut.”

That would be completely out of step with the pedestrian-oriented design and character of downtown, said former transportation committee vice-chair Ian Dutton. “As far as we know, there aren’t any blocks that have four parking garages anywhere below 14th Street,” said Dutton. “This is completely unprecedented.”

Neither the community nor Rudin wants to put the garage entrance on 11th Street, where drivers would exit next to an elementary school.

The project’s environmental impact statement [PDF] shows that, to access the new garage, 33 vehicles would cross the sidewalk in the peak hour of both morning and evening travel. The EIS claims that level of traffic won’t adversely affect pedestrian flow, despite an extra car crossing the busy Village sidewalk every other minute for two hours a day.

Fewer cars would need to cross the sidewalk if Rudin were willing to abide by the city’s zoning code. Under current regulations, residential developments in Manhattan are only permitted to build one parking space for every five apartments. Rudin wants to build up to 450 units, according to Rudin Executive Vice President John Gilbert, as well as a small amount of commercial space. But under the parking maximums in place, the developer would only be allowed to build 98 parking spaces. If Rudin builds fewer apartments, as may still happen, that would only reduce the number of spaces allowed.

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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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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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