Parking

New York City is moving forward with possible plans to privatize its on-street parking to some degree. An RFP released last week by the city's Economic Development Corporation asks investment banks to submit their best ideas for privatizing city assets. Parking tops the list of assets the city is interested in contracting with the private sector over. (Large pieces of transportation infrastructure are also on the list).

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.

We reported last week that Boston, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. are each making policy shifts to curb the proliferation of off-street parking even as New York City continues to enable the construction of more and more traffic-inducing, land-devouring parking.

Mayor Bloomberg unveiled his budget plan yesterday, including hundreds of measures to close a deficit of billions of dollars [PDF]. While the most controversial element may be Bloomberg's plan to lay off thousands of teachers, included among the smaller-scale deficit-closing measures is one that is sure to set up a fight over transportation policy. The budget again includes a 25 cent increase in the hourly rate for on-street parking in most of the city, a proposal which the City Council negotiated out of this year's budget in January.

In her State of the City address this afternoon, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn laid out her priorities for the year ahead. Her speech focused on four issue areas: balancing the city budget, creating jobs, preserving affordable housing and parking.

You don't need Jimmy McMillan to tell you that housing in New York is expensive. But figuring out why the rent is so damn high, and what to do about it, is a knotty policy question.

Wondering why the city is subsidizing 18,000 square feet of parking for a project that's supposed to make fresh food more accessible to low-income New Yorkers? Political favors seem to have something to do with it.

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.