Development

For four years running, developers have built less parking per bedroom in new construction.

The Department of City Planning is preparing a major rezoning of East Harlem, and it calls for scrapping parking requirements along most of the avenues in the neighborhood.

For a long time, apartment buildings with ground-floor retail were the building blocks of America's cities and towns. Combining housing and commercial uses is also essential for walkability and affordability, enabling people to travel shorter distances for their daily routines and get around without driving. But in most of the country today, it's practically impossible to build or reinvest in this type of housing.

The Obama administration is taking on the crisis of rising rents in American cities, releasing a series of recommendations today to spur the construction of more affordable housing. Among the many ideas the White House endorses: allowing more multi-family housing near transit and getting rid of parking minimums.

It's a common practice for cities to make developers widen a street when they put up a new building. The thinking is that development creates car trips that must be accommodated with more asphalt.

People living in walkable cities may have high housing costs, but they also tend to have low transportation costs and better access to jobs, according to a new study from Smart Growth America [PDF].

Rental assistance from HUD isn't enough to make the cost of living affordable when the subsidies go toward housing in car-dependent areas, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Utah. The study evaluated transportation costs for more than 18,000 households that receive HUD rental subsidies, estimating that nearly half of recipients have to spend more than 15 percent of their household budgets on transportation.

Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito has released an "East Harlem Neighborhood Plan" to guide the city's rezoning of the community, and one of the recommendations is the elimination of parking minimums.

The notion that New York City housing construction shouldn't be weighed down by mandatory parking minimums got a combative response from some City Council members at a hearing today. Streetsblog will have a thorough round-up of who said what tomorrow morning. In the meantime, here's a quick detour to Park Slope for a related story about how parking rules everything around us.