Streetsblog New York City

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.”

Read more…

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

Said Slatkin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?”

Read more…

Since January, Upper Manhattan has been abuzz with news of a proposed development that could bring four new residential towers to Washington Heights. And according to developers Quadriad Realty Partners, there’ll be ample parking to go along with them.

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.

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.