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.

Graphic: Planetizen

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:

Communities across the United States are going broke, and we can rightly look to our municipal finance systems and our failure to fully appreciate the payoff for density as a big part of the cause. Let’s all do the math so we can make some positive changes in the system because, in the end, downtown pays.

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, far more than allowed under zoning. The community board, meanwhile, asked for no parking to be built. Image: Rudin via WSJ

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.

However, Stringer, who can be strong on parking issues at times, relied heavily on the formal — and generally problematic — analyses put forward in Rudin’s environmental impact statement [PDF]. He further admitted that there is enough empty garage space nearby to fit every new car predicted by Rudin’s projections, but said that would lead to garages between 91 percent and 98 percent full, which he said was too much. Stringer did acknowledge the community’s safety concerns and urged Rudin to install mirrors and audio-visual signals to alert pedestrians of crossing traffic.

The question now is whether the City Planning Commission, like Stringer, will defer to Rudin or look a little more closely at the numbers. The City Planning Commission is on the record stating that limiting the amount of off-street parking is “consistent with the objective of creating an area with a transit- and pedestrian-oriented character.” What’s more, the commission is only supposed to issue a special permit when necessary, which, as MAS showed, is not the case in this instance. Will City Planning stand up for preserving a quality walking environment?

New York City's unpassed 1969 comprehensive plan. Photo: Historic Districts Council

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.

Panelists also called for reforming the city and state environmental review processes. “It’s reactive rather than planning,” said Been, who called environmental review “one thing we know is broken.” The panelists suggested that to the extent possible, environmental regulations and land use regulations ought to be unified rather than left as separate legal regimes. In Duluth, Minnesota, said Elliott, the city sat down with state environmental officials to determine what land use patterns could guarantee compliance with stormwater runoff regulations. They then wrote those patterns into the zoning code, eliminating one procedural hurdle for developers.

“Blend all of the regulations that deal with a piece of land into one code,” agreed Kwartler, citing overlapping environmental, zoning, building and preservation codes. Those regulations can sometimes work at cross-purposes, he said, and often create redundant and costly review processes.

Ideally, that unified code would come out of comprehensive planning processes that develop an integrated vision for the future of a neighborhood. New York City does not do comprehensive planning, making it an outlier among municipalities. Under the Bloomberg administration, PlaNYC is meant to serve as a “strategic plan,” setting priorities for the city, but since it is not site-specific, it doesn’t always help the city balance competing priorities. Mitchell Silver, the planning director for Raleigh, North Carolina and president of the American Planning Association, said that rewriting Raleigh’s comprehensive plan made rezoning the city easier and more effective. “We understand what we’re solving and what we’re coding for.”

Instead of the often-ineffective public outreach done at the end of each legal review, said Elliott, developing a comprehensive plan would also let the public engage at the beginning, when input can be both more constructive and more impactful than in the current process, which Kwartler called “public hearings as public screamings.”

The positions presented on Friday represent only a sample of the competing visions for the city’s planning process, others of which were put forward at a MAS conference held last year. These big ideas notwithstanding, however, there is no indication that the city is considering starting over with a new system of land use regulation, rather than continuing to rewrite the city’s zoning one neighborhood at a time.

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.

Most New Yorkers spend a lot of time walking, so pedestrian infrastructure is bound to be popular. Image: Municipal Art Society

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.”

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.

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, far more than allowed under the zoning or wanted by the community. Image: Rudin via WSJ.

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.

Rudin came up with the 152 space proposal by using the company’s other properties to estimate how many St. Vincent’s site residents would own cars, said Gilbert. “They say that these people will be wealthier than the people in the neighborhood in general, so they will be more likely to own vehicles,” explained Dutton. Thus, though the neighborhood as a whole has one of the lowest car-ownership rates of anywhere in the country, Rudin wants to exceed the parking maximums.

Secunda said that the community board was unlikely to endorse the plan to build extra parking. “The Department of City Planning put in these parking regulations, which are maximums, to reduce the intensity of motor vehicles,” she said. “Here they’re trying to increase it.” A recommendation to scrap the garage entirely is still on the table, said Secunda, though no decisions have been finalized.

In order to receive a special permit from the City Planning Commission to build extra parking, developers must meet five criteria (standards are rife with loopholes). One requirement is that that there be insufficient parking in the vicinity to accommodate demand generated by the project. By Rudin’s own application, however, this lot doesn’t meet this criteria.

In its land use application [PDF], Rudin points to the general difficulty of parking in the area and developments built since 2009 that replaced nearby surface parking lots, though without citing specific numbers to show a shortfall. But the more technical EIS shows that depending on the time of day, between 263 and 821 parking spaces available within a quarter of a mile from the site. That’s well above the 167 spaces Rudin estimates it needs. (Some of the available spaces are in accessory lots attached to residential buildings, where extra spaces are rented out.) “Which is it?” asked Secunda. “Is there not enough parking, or is there a lot of parking?”

If Rudin insists on building a parking garage exiting onto 12th, locals have drawn a line in the sand over the provision of a special permit for extra spaces. “We’re taking the position that this shouldn’t be a garage and that no matter what there shouldn’t be any more than the zoning would allow,” said Dutton. “I’m not sure if they’re designing for 1975 or designing for Westchester County, but that’s not where the community board wants this community to go.”

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.

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.

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 forced Alan Bell to put a parking lot directly next to the playground in this East New York building. It sits almost completely unused.

Housing is harder to build, more expensive, and often lower-quality as a result of the city’s parking regulations, according to one New York City developer.

Alan Bell was a high-ranking housing official in the Koch administration before co-founding the Hudson Companies in 1986. Since then, Hudson has built 4,250 affordable and market-rate housing units in the New York metro area, along with another 2,000 units under development.

Hudson might have built more housing were it not for parking minimums, however. Bell said in an interview that he’s walked away from a number of projects because he couldn’t make the required parking fit or evade the parking minimums by subdividing the development into small pieces. “One comes to mind on Grand Street in East Williamsburg. You couldn’t get out with the waiver because you’re building too many units.”

Without the ability to claim an exemption from parking minimums, the economics of the development didn’t add up. “If you have a modest size building, it’s really prohibitive,” said Bell. In addition to the direct costs of building structured parking, which Bell said can range from $25,000 to $50,000 per space, making room for the parking can also reduce revenues. “If you’re up against other buildings on both sides, you’re going to have to reduce your perimeter retail frontage because you need an entrance for a garage.”

Other times, said Bell, he’s able to manipulate the structure of the development to ensure that he can avoid parking minimums. In East New York, he divided one project into four different five to six story buildings. “We just played around with the unit mixes so that we could get each of them under the waiver.” Had he not been trying to avoid the parking regulations, said Bell, “theoretically, we could have built more units.” (In practice, a different set of city regulations would have prevented that at this particular site, even without the parking requirements.)

Sometimes there’s no way to avoid the parking minimums. Another East New York project of Bell’s has 179 units, enough that parking would be required even if the building were subdivided into pieces. To comply with the law, Bell built 62 surface parking spaces. “I have five takers,” he said. The rest sit empty. “Now instead of a big green backyard around the play area, I have this macadam. You just say why?”

The developer at The Crest, on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue, decided it was worth sacrificing ground floor retail to make room for parking.

Bell identified Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue as another design casualty of parking minimums, pointing to buildings like Boymelgreen Developers’ much-maligned Crest and Novo apartment buildings. The large buildings there were required to include parking, but subway lines under the street made putting it underground cost prohibitive. “[Boymelgreen] made the calculation that he’d rather sacrifice having retail on the ground floor in exchange for not putting the parking below ground, it was so expensive,” said Bell. The result is a series of buildings that are utterly indifferent to pedestrian life, presenting blank walls and parking to the sidewalk.

One solution Bell proposed is revising the zoning code so that parking minimums are eliminated in medium- or high-density districts near transit. Said Bell, “Historically, there’s no question, if I’m building near a subway stop, I’m going to attract a lot of people who don’t want a car or need a car. That’s proven in the marketplace.”

Although Hudson is a residential developer, Bell also urged the city to stop forcing so much parking into new retail centers like the East River Plaza, where 1,428 spaces sit empty. “It drives up the costs of the projects,” said Bell. “That comes out somewhere.” He placed the blame for these enormous parking lots directly at the feet of the public sector. “In the early days, it was the retailers asking for it. Now it’s the government.”

A new skyscraper development in Washington Heights could put up to 550 parking spots next to the 191 St. 1 train station at Broadway, marked by the red circle. Image: Quadriad

The Quadriad buildings, which would be constructed on both sides of Broadway at 190th Street, would stand in stark contrast to the neighborhood’s stock of low-rises. As reported in the Manhattan Times, there are two plans on the table. One would mean the construction of two towers for market rate housing, each more than 20 stories tall, on either side of Broadway, which Quadriad says could be built without rezonings or special permits.

The company’s preferred option, dubbed the “New Strategy” plan, is to erect four buildings of 23, 33, 39 and 42 stories. The company says the project’s 650 or so housing units would be a combination of market rate sales or rentals and affordable housing (as defined by the city, which would still put the units beyond the reach of most Upper Manhattanites). The company would need city approval for its preferred plan.

Until recently, not much was known about the parking component of the proposal. Quadriad Chief Operating Officer Charles Lauster told Streetsblog in February that the company wanted “to get more input from the community before we get specific about the parking issues.” At a Wednesday night meeting of the Community Board 12 committee on land use, some of those specifics were revealed. Local resident and DNAinfo reporter Carla Zanoni was there:

Henry Wollman [Quadriad president and CEO] said the “New Strategy” plan (the one that includes the 42-story building) would include parking for approximately 500-550 cars and that they are currently looking into different garage systems to accommodate that type of load.

He also said that they were looking to create that amount of parking in response to community interviews they’ve held in which residents said “parking is a big problem in the neighborhood.”

Despite the fact that only around 25 percent of households in Upper Manhattan own cars, and that the area is served by a number of buses and two subway lines — the “New Strategy” plan would include partial renovation of the 191st St. 1 train station at Broadway — Quadriad will probably get no argument from CB 12 that its district suffers from a lack of parking. It’s more likely that the promise of an 85 percent parking spot to apartment ratio won’t be enough to satisfy the folks who killed a neighborhood Greenmarket to preserve unfettered access to 19 curbside spaces.

Assuming Quadriad and CB 12 come to terms, and if the project gets the all-clear from the City Planning Commission and City Council, residents of Washington Heights and Inwood — pedestrians and drivers alike — may find themselves wanting a new strategy to deal with the traffic generated by those 500+ parking spots.

With reporting from Noah Kazis.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz is hoping that a new hotel can replace excess parking near Yankee Stadium. Photo: Crain's.

As the operator of the taxpayer-financed Yankee Stadium parking garages heads toward default, there’s no longer any question that providing so much parking in such a transit-rich location was a mistake on the scale of Carl Pavano’s contract. The decision to give up $2.5 million in city taxes and $5 million in state revenue has proven a poor investment indeed. The question, at this point, is what comes next.

One idea, from Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., is to convert one of the garages into a hotel. “One of the older garages is perfect for hotel development,” said John DeSio, a spokesperson for Diaz. Diaz advocated for a new Bronx hotel in his State of the Borough address two weeks ago, saying that “a new hotel would create hundreds of good-paying jobs offering health benefits, pension plans, and a chance for its workers to have a better life.”

While the garages were built on what used to be public parks, the South Bronx is unlikely to see that parkland return. “We have to come up with a plan that not only benefits the neighborhood but is palatable for the bondholders,” explained DeSio. The bondholders will have to okay any new use for the garages, so it will have to be a revenue-generator.

In terms of parking policy more broadly, DeSio said that while there aren’t any major developments where parking is an issue currently being considered by the borough president’s office, “I’m sure that we’d have to take to heart what happened here in the future.” (Plans for a new East Bronx mall anchored by a Target are too preliminary to comment on for now, he said.) DeSio also suggested that the private sector will notice this high-profile case of wasting resources on providing an excessive supply of parking.

This block of Bathgate Avenue will have two fewer affordable apartments as a result of parking minimums. Image: Google Street View.

Parking minimums continue to stymie the creation of affordable housing in New York City, according to an architect who frequently designs those projects. When a rezoning suddenly put parking minimums in effect for an affordable housing project in the Bronx, Richard Ferrara of DeLaCour & Ferrara Architects was forced to cut apartments out of the building.

The HUD-sponsored project, located on Bathgate Avenue between 183rd and 184th Streets, was originally slated to be an 18-unit building. Under the zoning that used to govern the site, the parking minimums were low enough that fewer than five spaces were required, said Ferrara. With such a small number of required spaces, the project was eligible for a waiver, meaning it didn’t need to build any parking at all.

In October, however, the area was classified as a “neighborhood preservation area” by the Department of City Planning in its Third Avenue/Tremont Avenue rezoning. The new zoning, known as R6A, carries slightly higher parking requirements for affordable projects [PDF]. “When we went down to an R6A,” said Ferrara, “it put us in a position where we couldn’t get the parking waived.” In effect, the rezoning added parking requirements where there hadn’t been any before.

Including the now-required parking in the project came at the cost of affordable housing. “We had to reduce the number of apartments. We wound up losing two apartments,” said Ferrara.

In general, said Ferrara, parking minimums add to the cost of projects. “There’s a cost implication,” he said. “In some places you have to go into the cellar, it becomes more expensive.”

Even though he reported that it’s “not uncommon” to subdivide a project into smaller buildings in order to receive a waiver for each half, Ferrara said even that “is a cost item.” If you subdivided a taller project to avoid parking requirements, you’d have to spend twice the money and space on elevators, he offered as an example.

Two affordable units are not, on their own, the difference between an affordable housing market and an unaffordable one. But if it’s routine for parking requirements to cut 11 percent of the units out of other affordable projects, the impact would be substantial indeed. That’s not a price worth paying for the dubious goal of making it easier and cheaper to drive in New York City.

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.”

Hunter's Point South will have good bike infrastructure, as shown here. But will it be transit-accessible or swamped by parking? Image: NYC Mayor's Office via Flickr.

This morning, the Bloomberg Administration announced the developer for the first phase of Hunter’s Point South, a Long Island City project the city is billing as the largest middle-class housing project since Co-Op City and Starrett City went up in the 1970s. A team led by the Related Companies will be developing the first 900 units at what will eventually be a 5,000-unit complex along the East River.

Whether Hunter’s Point South turns out to be the most recent in a line of auto-oriented projects along New York City’s deindustrialized waterfront, or a project in line with the city’s sustainability goals, will depend on whether developers choose to build all the parking they are entitled to, whether the MTA extends bus service into the complex, and whether the city’s attempts to foster ferry transit across the East River are successful.

The nearest subway station to Hunter’s Point South is the Vernon-Jackson Ave stop on the 7. The northeastern corner of the site is only two blocks away from the station. Those are long blocks, however, making the walk about three-tenths of a mile. That’s not right on top of the subway, but it is walkable. The far end of the 30 acre site, however, will be 0.6 or 0.7 miles from the subway, more than the half-mile rule of thumb for transit-oriented development.

Over the course of the project, the city has been in talks with the MTA to extend bus service, most likely the Q103, into Hunter’s Point South. There is no concrete promise to provide transit to the heart of the project, however, nor have funds to pay for more buses been publicly identified.

But the city’s new subsidized ferry service will stop at the site. Midtown will be only one stop and $3 away, though downtown will be a longer and more expensive ride. If ferry service is popular, many Hunter’s Point residents could use it to get to work. However, since the ferries will cost more than transit, leave only every 20 minutes during rush hour, and shut down after 8 p.m., it remains to be seen how popular they will be. The costly ferry program could even be canceled before Hunter’s Point South is completed.

Hunter’s Point South is planned to include laudable bike and pedestrian infrastructure. The city’s RFP calls for a two-way bike lane protected by a landscaped median to run the length of both 2nd Street and Center Boulevard, the two main north-south corridors through the project. In addition, bike lanes are planned for a pair of cross streets. The RFP also calls for bulb-outs at Borden Avenue and 2nd street to ease crossings.

As with so much of the recent waterfront development in New York City, large amounts of parking could push Hunter’s Point South residents to drive. According to the RFP, the project has no parking minimums, but developers are allowed to build a space for up to 40 percent of the residential units. The project’s environmental impact statement puts that number at 2,660 parking spaces — and therefore 2,660 more cars — if built to the maximum.

The owners of the Grand Prospect Hall want to turn the next door parking lot into a 400-space garage and hotel. Photo: Bess Adler/Brooklyn Paper.

There’s a lot not to like about parking in New York City. It deadens urban space. It drives up the cost of housing and doing business. And it’s a powerful generator of traffic and congestion.

So why does it keep getting built everywhere? A brewing fight over a proposed hotel at the south end of Park Slope helps explain why. Parking is an obvious sweetener to overcome local opposition to new construction.

Michael Halkias, the owner of the Grand Prospect Hall on Prospect Avenue, wants to build a new 11-story hotel next door to his banquet hall, the Brooklyn Paper reported earlier this month. The area, though, is a mid-rise residential district. Under current zoning, Halkias can’t build a hotel and can’t build a structure taller than 50 feet, according to the Department of City Planning. In other words, he needs city approvals twice over to build his hotel.

Halkias’ strategy to win local support? Build a 400-space garage. At a public meeting about the project, he described the garage as a “magnificent cake” for the neighborhood, with the hotel merely “the cherry on top.”

The strategy seems to have won over Irene Lo Re, proprietor of Aunt Suzie’s restaurant and the head of the Fifth Avenue BID, who has a history of supporting additional off-street parking in the belief that it will help businesses in walkable Park Slope. The Brooklyn Paper reports that Lo Re gave the garage glowing remarks at the hotel hearing. “We can’t turn our back on 400 spaces,” she said. Lo Re did not return Streetsblog’s request for comment.

Of course, not all the Grand Prospect Hall’s neighbors see that much parking as a boon to the neighborhood. “This is a neighborhood that has massive overdevelopment, much of which has lots of off-street parking,” said Aaron Brashear of Concerned Citizens of Greenwood Heights. “For every person that has a car in a parking lot, that’s another car on the street.”

Eric McClure of Park Slope Neighbors agreed. “The idea of a 400-car parking garage on Prospect Avenue, entering and exiting on 16th street seems a little crazy,” he said. Park Slope Neighbors just concluded a fight to scale down a similarly sized garage proposed for a new Whole Foods supermarket on Brooklyn’s Third Avenue.

The retail giant, the nation’s largest employer, has been eyeing the untapped New York City market for years. So far, opposition to Wal-Mart’s notorious labor record has kept the chain outside city limits, but a new push to establish a beachhead in the five boroughs is now underway.

The likeliest site for a Wal-Mart in New York City, East New York's Gateway Center, is a collection of big-box stores and free parking with its own highway off-ramp. Image: Google Maps.

The likeliest site for the city’s first Wal-Mart, according to Crain’s columnist Greg David, is at the Gateway Center in East New York. The shopping center’s website brags that it’s “one of the largest suburban-style retail developments” and touts its sea of free surface parking. In other words, a Wal-Mart on that site would stick to the most traditional big-box design, straight out of Bentonville.

Bringing Wal-Mart to New York City doesn’t have to be that way, though. A similar lobbying blitz is underway in Washington, D.C., where Wal-Mart is attempting to open four stores. Unlike in New York, however, Wal-Mart is attempting to win support by adapting its stores to the urban environment. For one of the stores, they propose a five-story building with smaller retail along one side of the block and apartments above the stores. “It may be the most well-executed new urban big box department store in America,” said Greater Greater Washington.

The executives in charge of expanding Wal-Mart into D.C. clearly believe that good design is the key to winning the support of that city’s decision-makers. Here in New York, though, no such pitch is underway.

This plan for a Washington, D.C. Wal-Mart integrates the store into the urban environment. But is a Wal-Mart worth integrating? Image: Greater Greater Washington.

Then again, would you expect there to be? It’s hard to imagine that when the City Council holds its first hearing on Wal-Mart on February 3, they’ll be concerned with its car-centric, traffic-inducing design. After all, this is the same City Council that responded to merchant opposition to the Flushing Commons development by throwing in $3 million to offer free and discounted parking at that project’s 1,600-space garage.

Of course, a D.C.-style design wouldn’t change the economic arguments against Wal-Mart.

In fact, a new report by Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio and the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development [PDF] argues that smaller Wal-Marts might make the situation worse by spreading the negative effects of the store to more neighborhoods. Write the authors:

The overwhelming weight of the independent research on the impact of Wal-Mart stores on local and national economies – including jobs, taxes, wages, benefits, manufacturing and existing retail businesses – shows that Wal-Mart depresses area wages and labor benefits contributing to the current decline of good middle class jobs, pushes out more retail jobs than it creates, and results in more retail vacancies. There is no indication that smaller “urban” Wal-Mart stores scattered throughout a dense city in any way diminish these negative trends. Rather, such developments may actually result in more widespread economic disruption.

The report goes on to catalog the research supporting their argument that Wal-Mart would be a disaster for workers and small businesses. If Wal-Marts wipe out smaller retailers, that would also be quite a disaster for the city’s pedestrian environment.

We’re hoping, though hardly holding our breath, that at February’s hearing the Council looks not only at what Wal-Mart means for the city’s economy, but what big box development means for the city more broadly. Whether we’re talking about a Wal-Mart, a Costco, or another brand of big box, what does this kind of building mean for traffic, the environment, or street safety? What questions would you like to see the Council address during its Wal-Mart hearing?