Parking

Brooklyn Community Board 1 has had enough of the "war on cars," and they're taking it out on pedestrians, cyclists, and local businesses.

Streetsblog's Parking Madness competition has highlighted the blight that results when large surface parking lots take over a city's downtown. Even though Rochester, winner of 2014's Golden Crater, certainly gains bragging rights, all of the competitors have something to worry about: Cumulatively, the past 50 years of building parking have had a debilitating effect on America's downtowns.

With a plan due by May 1, the clock is ticking for Mayor Bill de Blasio's housing team to come up with a plan to improve housing affordability. Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been, who authored reports on the city's regressive parking mandates before joining the administration, is at the center of the team producing the plan. But it's still not clear that the final product will consider the elimination of parking requirements as a strategy to create more affordable housing.

This morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the appointment of Michael Schlein as chair of the city's Economic Development Corporation. Schlein, a Wall Street insider with close ties to the mayor, joins EDC President Kyle Kimball atop the agency's leadership. EDC has a terrible track record of subsidizing parking garages and overseeing mega-projects with acres of excess parking. The contours of a new direction under de Blasio -- perhaps one with less parking -- are still taking shape.

Reader Eric McClure spotted these flyers today on cars "up and down Jay Street between Johnson and Willoughby," in the 84th Precinct. This comes a few weeks after attendees at a public workshop identified illegal parking as a major safety hazard and a major source of dysfunction on Jay Street, where pedestrians, cyclists, buses, and private motorists all mix near the Manhattan Bridge approach.

If you own a car in New York City and need a place to park, leaving it on the street is a nice bargain. The only "cost" is alternate-side restrictions for street cleaning -- otherwise, all that space is free. It's such a good deal that in outer-borough neighborhoods, most car owners with an off-street space at home still choose to leave their cars at the curb.

It's March, which can only mean one thing: Parking Madness time. Last year we asked our readers to help us crown the worst parking crater in an American city, and in that inaugural 16-entry bracket, Tulsa blew away the competition. But we know there are still plenty of other parking lots out there that make downtown look like a lunar landscape, so here comes the sequel.

In his first big stand on development, Mayor Bill de Blasio is trying to wring more affordable housing out of the Domino Sugar Factory project on the Williamsburg waterfront. The mixed-use plan currently calls for 2,284 housing units, 29 percent of them affordable. The mayor is looking for more affordable housing, while so far developer Two Trees Management has offered to solidify its existing commitments.