At a breakfast meeting on Wednesday, City Planning Commission Chairman Dan Garodick was asked if parking was "the linchpin" and he said, "It's important, but it's not the linchpin." Sara Lind, the co-executive director of Open Plans, begs to differ.
We cannot allow parking mandates to be the sacrificial lamb of the City of Yes negotiations.
When the City Council votes on City of Yes for Housing Opportunity later this year, it can vote to pass the reform in total or pick which proposals make it into the final version. Some Council members, due to their own (or their voters') windshield perspective, might attempt to nix the elimination of parking mandates in order to get the rest of the proposal passed.
But it doesn’t work like that. The elimination of parking mandates is not an isolated issue that’s merely adjacent to producing more housing; lifting them is the lever by which the other proposals will deliver the progress that New York City desperately needs. Full citywide elimination of parking mandates — not parking, mind you, but the requirement — must remain in City of Yes or it simply cannot be effective.
We can’t build vibrant neighborhoods with parking mandates. City of Yes includes proposals to promote new three- to five-story apartment buildings near transit and along commercial corridors above ground-floor retail. This style of housing is iconic to New York, but bafflingly prohibited in many neighborhoods in our current zoning code; even corridors famous for it can’t build more today.
City of Yes would fix that. But under current zoning — with the parking requirement — it becomes impossible to build because the new upper-story units would trigger new parking spots, and there would be nowhere to put those spots but on the ground floor. Instead of creating vibrant urban development that fosters commerce and community, we end up with housing that supplants local business and deadens the streetscape.
Or, worse, we build nothing at all, because the required parking makes the project too expensive to be feasible.
The Universal Affordability Preference in City of Yes could generate tens of thousands of new affordable units by allowing developers to build 20 percent more housing if the additional units are permanently affordable. But under current zoning, outside the transit zone, those units would trigger additional parking spots, forcing construction costs to balloon to rates that don’t make economic sense. Instead of adding affordable units, developers will simply forgo the affordability bonus and build only the market-rate housing.
We’ll have passed a housing reform that encourages affordability in name only.
This is especially frustrating since lower-income residents seeking this affordable housing are less likely to even own a car.
Parking mandates would also make it impossible to build accessory dwelling units, like backlot cottages or converted garages. Under current zoning, that one unit would trigger a required parking spot. And where would it go? In the exact location where the dwelling unit itself is meant to go. Technically someone could build a new detached unit that includes an apartment above a new garage, but that defeats the purpose of the reform which is meant to take advantage of housing opportunities within existing contexts.
In other cases, the parking requirements just don’t make sense for the type of development that City of Yes aims to encourage. The proposal to legalize small and shared housing arrangements like SROs would dramatically lower our housing market’s barrier to entry, providing a much-needed option for single New Yorkers or seniors looking to downsize. This type of housing is especially unlikely to attract residents in need of private parking, but if we don’t lift parking mandates citywide, we’d have to include it. Again we would be reserving space for cars that no one asked for and forcing this untraditional housing model into the same old car-centric molds we already have.
And what’s worse — we already know that much of the required parking in New York City is truly not needed or wanted. Take one real-estate portfolio with 3,089 units in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island: the developer was required to build 1,114 parking spaces to meet zoning parking minimums — yet 42 percent of those remain unused by building residents. On some of the most valuable and in-demand real estate in the world, that space is languishing unused.
Minneapolis recently passed major zoning reforms to promote housing, similar to the City of Yes — and it worked, prompting the director of City Planning in the Mini Apple to say, "No single legislative action did more to contribute to housing creation than the elimination of parking minimums.”
Lifting these outdated zoning rules is not ancillary to housing, it’s central to it.
And remember: eliminating parking mandates from the zoning code won’t mean we can’t build parking in the future, but it will mean we can finally prioritize people. New Yorkers are counting on our Council members to recognize this and take action by including citywide elimination of parking mandates. City of Yes can only work — and we urgently need it to work — if we do that.
