Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

“Market Urbanism” refers to the synthesis of classical liberal economics and ethics (market), with an appreciation of the urban way of life and its benefits to society (urbanism). We advocate for the emergence of bottom up solutions to urban issues, as opposed to ones imposed from the top down.

Even a HUD project in a high-density Bronx neighborhood can’t escape the parking minimum

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This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s taken a look at America’s absurdly restrictive minimum parking requirements, but Streetsblog has come up with a really great example of really bad parking policy in action:

The HUD-sponsored project, located on Bathgate Avenue between 183rd and 184th Streets, was originally slated to be an 18-unit building. Under the zoning that used to govern the site, the parking minimums were low enough that fewer than five spaces were required, said Ferrara. With such a small number of required spaces, the project was eligible for a waiver, meaning it didn’t need to build any parking at all.

In October, however, the area was classified as a “neighborhood preservation area” by the Department of City Planning in its Third Avenue/Tremont Avenue rezoning. The new zoning, known as R6A, carries slightly higher parking requirements for affordable projects [PDF]. “When we went down to an R6A,” said Ferrara, “it put us in a position where we couldn’t get the parking waived.” In effect, the rezoning added parking requirements where there hadn’t been any before.

I’ve praised Bloomberg’s rezoning in the past while also worrying that the lack of parking minimum reform would hold back growth. It looks like I was too generous—in some cases, the rezoning has actually made the parking minimum problem worse.

And just for the record, I looked up the location on a map, and the specific location is about a 10 minute walk to the closest B/D local station on the Grand Concourse. Its zipcode is pretty poor – 10458’s average adjusted gross income has been in decline since 2000 when adjusted for inflation, and currently stands at only $23,781. And obviously it’s a HUD project.

There’s also this interesting bit:

Even though he reported that it’s “not uncommon” to subdivide a project into smaller buildings in order to receive a waiver for each half, Ferrara said even that “is a cost item.” If you subdivided a taller project to avoid parking requirements, you’d have to spend twice the money and space on elevators, he offered as an example.

I’m not exactly sure why New York hasn’t tackled this yet. Bloomberg seems like a reasonably effective mayor, and clearly he’s very pro-development, so why hasn’t he done this? Normally I’d chalk it up to community opposition, but as Streetsblog has pointed out before, Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston have all started to tackle the problem of parking minimums – surely New York can’t have that many more NIMBYs than those cities, right? How is it that the mayor who built Brooklyn’s waterfront, hired Janette Sadik-Khan, and is on his second street pricing push hasn’t kept up with his peers in parking reform? Anyone have any idea?

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  • Benjamin Hemric

    As a “Bronx boy” (who later grew up in Queens), and as a reader of Jane Jacobs (a person who had some very insightful things to say about the Bronx), here are some of my thoughts:

    1) Personally, I’m inclined to agree that IN GENERAL parking minimums stifle MARKET RATE development. And I think the insight that automobile usage in the U.S. is often the beneficiary of hidden subsidies is an important one. However, I think it would be a mistake to then assume that the development of additional parking is always bad for a particular “urban” (see more below) district, or for cities in general.

    2) Although many areas of the Bronx may be high-density (relative to the rest of America) and “in theory” have “good” access to public transit (relative to the rest of America), most of them are, nevertheless, not genuinely urban. In other words, you can’t really enjoy living in these areas without having a car. There are long walks (along desolate streets) to bus stops and subway stops. The Bronx, in particular, is very hilly and getting to a subway / elevated can be very difficult. And subway / bus service can involve long waits. Plus most subway service is to Manhattan and not to other parts of the Bronx.

    3) By the way, I’m not saying this is true of the neighborhood surrounding this particular development, as the development seems to be near Belmont, which is one of the more genuinely urban (and nicely so) areas of the Bronx. But, in general, you do not want to live in the Bronx (or much of Brooklyn or Queens) without a car.

    4) Personally I have very fond memories of living in the South Bronx, but my father operated a parking lot across the street from our apartment, and we drove virtually everywhere, even into “the city” (except for occasional wonderful trips downtown via the subway).

    5) The areas that I think of as being not genuinely urban, but “quasi-urban” instead, are called “gray areas” by Jane Jacob. They are, generally speaking, the areas that are one-time “subway suburbs” (or, in other cities, one-time trolley car suburbs) and they often have the problems of both cities (congestion) and suburbia (inaccessibility) without having the benefits of either.

    6) One of the major reasons for the Bronx’s precipitous decline, in the opinion of a number of knowledgeable people, was the fact that a great many Bronx neighborhoods were built before WWII as as subway/trolley car suburbs and, after WWII, people “with choice” (to use a Jane Jacobs phrase) just didn’t want to live in such neighborhoods anymore. In the Bronx, you really couldn’t conveniently get anywhere without a car — but the neighborhoods were very densely built up when very few people owned cars — so parking (particularly off street parking) was very difficult to find.

    7) What’s the “solution”? Briefly (since it’s getting late) the solution is to find ways to make these areas more genuinely urban, along the lines mentioned by Jane Jacobs in “Death and Life . . .” It should be noted that this doesn’t automatically mean that parking and cars are the enemy as Manhattan, for example, actually has plenty of both.

    Benjamin Hemric
    Friday morning, Feb. 25, 2011, 12:56 p.m.

  • Roberta Gratz

    The staff of the NYC Planning Dept clings to the 1970s planning mindset of accommodating the car at the expense of urbanism.

  • Do you think it’s really the planning department staff? I always got the impression that most big city planners more or less understood how harmful anti-density policies were, but that local community/NIMBY groups pushed back on any sort of densification or lowering of parking minimums. Is that not your experience? Perhaps planning departments are more backwards than I thought…

  • But Roberta, what if the development (like this one) replaces a parking lot?

  • Benjamin Hemric

    As a “Bronx boy” (who later grew up in Queens), and as a reader of Jane Jacobs (a person who had some very insightful things to say about the Bronx), here are some of my thoughts:

    1) Personally, I’m inclined to agree that IN GENERAL parking minimums stifle MARKET RATE development. And I think the insight that automobile use in the U.S. is often the beneficiary of hidden subsidies is an important one. However, I think it would be a mistake to then assume that the development of additional parking is always bad for a particular “urban” (see more below) district, or for cities in general.

    2) Although many areas of the Bronx may be high-density (relative to the rest of America) and “in theory” have “good” access to public transit (relative to the rest of America), most of them are, nevertheless, not genuinely urban. In other words, you can’t really enjoy living in these areas without having a car. There are often long walks (along desolate streets) to bus stops and subway stops. The Bronx, in particular, is very hilly and getting to a subway / elevated can be very difficult. And subway / bus service can involve very long waits (especially outside of the rush hours). Plus most subway service is to Manhattan and not to other parts of the Bronx.

    3) By the way, I’m not saying this is true of the neighborhood surrounding this particular development, as the development seems to be near Belmont, which is one of the more genuinely urban (and nicely so) areas of the Bronx. But, in general, you do not want to live in the Bronx (or much of Brooklyn or Queens) without a car.

    4) Personally I have very fond memories of living in the South Bronx, but my father operated a parking lot across the street from our apartment, and we drove virtually everywhere, even into “the city” (except for occasional wonderful trips downtown via the subway).

    5) The areas that I think of as being not genuinely urban, but “quasi-urban” instead, are called “gray areas” by Jane Jacob. They are, generally speaking, the areas that are one-time “subway suburbs” (or, in other cities, one-time trolley car suburbs) and they often have the problems of both cities (e.g., congestion) and suburbia (e.g., inaccessibility) without having the benefits of either cities (e.g., vitality) or suburbs (e.g., quiet).

    6) One of the major reasons for the Bronx’s precipitous decline, in the opinion of a number of knowledgeable people, was the fact that a great many Bronx neighborhoods sprouted up all at once as subway/trolley car suburbs before WWII and, after WWII, people “with choice” (to use a Jane Jacobs phrase) just didn’t want to live in such neighborhoods anymore. In the Bronx that was built up all at once, you really couldn’t conveniently get anywhere without a car — the neighborhoods were very densely built up when very few people owned cars — but parking (particularly off street parking) was very difficult to find.

    7) What’s the “solution”? Briefly (since it’s getting late) the solution is to find ways to make these areas more genuinely urban, along the lines mentioned by Jane Jacobs in “Death and Life . . .” It should be noted that this doesn’t automatically mean that parking and cars are the enemy — as Manhattan, for example, actually has plenty of both.

    Benjamin Hemric
    Friday morning, Feb. 25, 2011, 12:56 p.m.

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