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Op-ed on Boston.com:
PAUL MCMORROW
Minimize parking, maximize the city
By Paul McMorrow | October 23, 2010
SOUTH BOSTON has a well-earned reputation for obsessing over parking. In the old neighborhood, where the supply of cars eclipses the number of spots in which to park them, the automobile is at once a birthright and a constant source of angst.
Things are different on the neighborhood?s waterfront. In a cruel twist, Southie?s emerging frontier has long been plagued by an overabundance of parking lots, and a dearth of buildings and people.
So it?s appropriate that this part of the neighborhood is at the forefront of a new, forward-looking way of building. This public policy change is responding to a dramatic shift in the way citizens relate to their cities, but it also threatens to exacerbate pressures on the region?s already-strained transit system.
When Boston development officials recently handed permits to the developers of Waterside Place, they did so despite neighborhood concerns that the developers wanted to build far more apartments than parking spots. On A Street, the Boston Redevelopment Authority is close to green-lighting a 21-story residential tower. The tower?s developer had originally planned to build one parking spot for every two residential units, an abnormally low supply; BRA officials are pushing the developer to push that ratio even lower by replacing a whole floor of parking with innovative workforce housing units.
These permitting decisions are not happening in a vacuum. Government-imposed floors on the number of parking spots required at new developments are falling across the city, and beyond. Somerville, for instance, is increasing zoning density and lowering parking requirements along the route of the planned Green Line extension, with an eye toward spurring new transit-oriented development. But the change is especially pronounced in the Seaport, where developers are working with as close to a blank canvas as you?ll find in any major American city.
City planners are in the middle of an extensive re-thinking of Boston?s zoning codes. As they work, neighborhood by neighborhood, to update the code, they?re flipping the conventional thinking about parking on its head: Instead of mandating that minimum levels of parking accompany new developments, they?re pushing to establish maximum parking caps.
Minimum parking requirements are relics of a time when urban vitality depended on developers? ability to draw suburbanites into the city to work, shop, or live. As the suburbs boomed, cities imported suburban-style infrastructure and grafted it onto a decaying urban fabric. The result wasn?t just a landscape scarred by highways and pockmarked by monolithic concrete parking garages; this postwar shift also left reams of zoning code built on the assumption that the world revolved around the automobile.
Patterns of living, and travel, have evolved. Residents now work and shop in closer proximity to their homes. The city is no longer at the automobile?s mercy. But zoning hasn?t caught up to this new reality. Until now.
Environmental officials imposed flat parking caps downtown during the 1970s, but this new approach is surgical. The old parking cap made wide allowances for automobiles at residential developments. City planners are now arguing that residential developments should be given less leeway, not more, since many urban residents don?t need a car to get to work. That?s true in the Back Bay and downtown, and especially along the waterfront, where the BRA is trying to create a critical mass of technology and innovation firms by pushing small business incubators and cheap live-work space.
Developers aren?t huge fans of large parking requirements for urban apartment buildings, since parking garages are expensive to construct. Often, the cost of building parking spaces can make or break a project. Developers are also finding that renters aren?t demanding as many parking spots as they used to. Archstone?s Chinatown tower, for example, was built with a glut of excess parking; the last two residential towers to enter permitting in that neighborhood have been designed with dramatically lower quantities of parking. And the envelope can be pushed even further.
With planners and architects favoring density and a dependence on mass transit, we?re seeing a return to the way cities were built before the automobile?s dominance. But it will be worthless if it?s not met by an equal investment in alternative transportation modes.
?You have to also beef up the bike lanes and sidewalks, the general public policy of buttressing public transit,?? argues Kairos Shen, the BRA?s chief planner. ?You can?t simply say, ?Don?t let them build parking.? ??
Paul McMorrow is an associate editor of CommonWealth magazine. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
source: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/e...king_maximize_the_city/?p1=Well_Opinion_links
PAUL MCMORROW
Minimize parking, maximize the city
By Paul McMorrow | October 23, 2010
SOUTH BOSTON has a well-earned reputation for obsessing over parking. In the old neighborhood, where the supply of cars eclipses the number of spots in which to park them, the automobile is at once a birthright and a constant source of angst.
Things are different on the neighborhood?s waterfront. In a cruel twist, Southie?s emerging frontier has long been plagued by an overabundance of parking lots, and a dearth of buildings and people.
So it?s appropriate that this part of the neighborhood is at the forefront of a new, forward-looking way of building. This public policy change is responding to a dramatic shift in the way citizens relate to their cities, but it also threatens to exacerbate pressures on the region?s already-strained transit system.
When Boston development officials recently handed permits to the developers of Waterside Place, they did so despite neighborhood concerns that the developers wanted to build far more apartments than parking spots. On A Street, the Boston Redevelopment Authority is close to green-lighting a 21-story residential tower. The tower?s developer had originally planned to build one parking spot for every two residential units, an abnormally low supply; BRA officials are pushing the developer to push that ratio even lower by replacing a whole floor of parking with innovative workforce housing units.
These permitting decisions are not happening in a vacuum. Government-imposed floors on the number of parking spots required at new developments are falling across the city, and beyond. Somerville, for instance, is increasing zoning density and lowering parking requirements along the route of the planned Green Line extension, with an eye toward spurring new transit-oriented development. But the change is especially pronounced in the Seaport, where developers are working with as close to a blank canvas as you?ll find in any major American city.
City planners are in the middle of an extensive re-thinking of Boston?s zoning codes. As they work, neighborhood by neighborhood, to update the code, they?re flipping the conventional thinking about parking on its head: Instead of mandating that minimum levels of parking accompany new developments, they?re pushing to establish maximum parking caps.
Minimum parking requirements are relics of a time when urban vitality depended on developers? ability to draw suburbanites into the city to work, shop, or live. As the suburbs boomed, cities imported suburban-style infrastructure and grafted it onto a decaying urban fabric. The result wasn?t just a landscape scarred by highways and pockmarked by monolithic concrete parking garages; this postwar shift also left reams of zoning code built on the assumption that the world revolved around the automobile.
Patterns of living, and travel, have evolved. Residents now work and shop in closer proximity to their homes. The city is no longer at the automobile?s mercy. But zoning hasn?t caught up to this new reality. Until now.
Environmental officials imposed flat parking caps downtown during the 1970s, but this new approach is surgical. The old parking cap made wide allowances for automobiles at residential developments. City planners are now arguing that residential developments should be given less leeway, not more, since many urban residents don?t need a car to get to work. That?s true in the Back Bay and downtown, and especially along the waterfront, where the BRA is trying to create a critical mass of technology and innovation firms by pushing small business incubators and cheap live-work space.
Developers aren?t huge fans of large parking requirements for urban apartment buildings, since parking garages are expensive to construct. Often, the cost of building parking spaces can make or break a project. Developers are also finding that renters aren?t demanding as many parking spots as they used to. Archstone?s Chinatown tower, for example, was built with a glut of excess parking; the last two residential towers to enter permitting in that neighborhood have been designed with dramatically lower quantities of parking. And the envelope can be pushed even further.
With planners and architects favoring density and a dependence on mass transit, we?re seeing a return to the way cities were built before the automobile?s dominance. But it will be worthless if it?s not met by an equal investment in alternative transportation modes.
?You have to also beef up the bike lanes and sidewalks, the general public policy of buttressing public transit,?? argues Kairos Shen, the BRA?s chief planner. ?You can?t simply say, ?Don?t let them build parking.? ??
Paul McMorrow is an associate editor of CommonWealth magazine. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
source: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/e...king_maximize_the_city/?p1=Well_Opinion_links
