New and old Boston are colliding on the crowded streets of Allston over longstanding problems — parking and traffic congestion — with the vanguards losing round one.
Architect Sebastian Mariscal had proposed building a 44-unit apartment building in Allston and replacing the parking spaces required by city code with bike racks, storage spaces, and other amenities, allowing him to build housing more suited for people than cars.
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2 parking spaces per unit is ridiculous. All it will do is prevent the creation of new housing and cause the prices of the existing stock to rise. It limits choices for new residents and slows the overall growth of the neighborhood. Until the administration has a comprehensive policy on housing for EVERY neighborhood, the city will produce housing in fits and starts.
2 parking spaces is lot. But the reality is that they are trying to get out of the parking requirement by green washing the issue.
Once upon a time I think these policies really were intended to guide developers towards improving the vitality of the neighborhood (in the misguided, cars-only model of the 1950s). But today I think they mainly exist to force developers to seek variances from the city. A process which allows the neighborhood to extract all sorts of seemingly unrelated compromises from the developer in exchange for allowing them to do the right thing for the neighborhood.
Recently completed projects which meet Boston's antiquated minimum parking requirements frequently have huge quantities of unused parking spaces. With almost half of residents not owning a car at all (something that should be encouraged), why do we need to pave all of this extra space?
And more broadly, why does on-street parking deserve some kind of special protection? Allston already has far too little unpaved open space, and far too many private parking lots that sit vacant during evenings and weekends. I don't think anyone has walked through Allston in the last 40 years and thought "if only this neighborhood had more cars." Why should the city punish developers seeking to reverse this trend?
And also I give you this: Let the market decide!!! If a shortage of on-street parking were enough to drive business and residents out of a neighborhood, huge swaths of Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and the North End should be economic dead zones. Instead these neighborhoods are some of the most coveted in the city. In fact I can't think of a single neighborhood in Boston that is said to be poor "due to lack of ample parking." It just doesn't happen anymore in Boston.
What's happening here is that current multi-car residents are enforcing laws to prevent a new generation of car-free residents from being able to move in and make better use of the space. And they're doing so at major public expense (living space is worth more than parking space and thus brings in more tax dollars). This money (MY money) could, and should, instead be used to improve facilities for walking and public transit. We get much more bang for our buck that way. And we get a nicer city to boot.
We are finally coming of age with respect to urban parking. Two spaces per unit is from another era. In Alexandria Virginia the standard is one per unit in areas near a rapid rail transit station and this is negotiable if the developer can demonstrate that parking reductions would not adversely affect neighboring streets. Zipcars or shared car use should be able to reduce required parking as one car can be used multiple times for different tenants. The developer could be required to set aside a fund in lieu of parking spaces for transit subsidies to provide an incentive to not own a car. There will come a time when urbanites will not own cars and will use prescribed on demand car service from Zipcar vehicles provided in the project. Downtown Parking garages will come atumbling down to be replaced by mixed use commercial/residential developments. People will flock to the cities for clean air and walkable streets. There will be no single purpose developments such as pure office buildings as vertical mixed use developments will be the norm. We need more imaginative developers who are not only imagining a better carless transportation future but are working to realize that future now.
I'm all for boosting bicyle ridership, but here is the stark reality: Young singles will be the tenants and they have boyfriends and girlfriends with cars who sleep over. If anything, this developer should be making sure that each of the units has a space for 'guest' parking, even as he provides space for bicycles. My neighborhood knows from experience. We have a four-unit building on our narrow one-block street. Each unit is stuffed with graduate students and young professionalswho split rent. We neighbors have counted up to 15 cars at this property, spilling onto our narrow street. When we wrote to the landlord, he blamed 'visitors'.
And so what? If the parking is available, people will use it. If parking is extremely scarce, people will say to their guests, "don't bother driving here, you'll never be able to find a space." If you require that all buildings have space for the theoretical maximum tenant car desire plus one, what you end up with is a city that is wasting gobs of what could be additional living space or green space just to make room for all of those cars. And you encourage the residents to own them because, of course, there will always be a place to store them (even if the market does not dictate such a need). It's not rocket science: When you make something free (or "apparently" free), people tend to use far more of it than they really need.
I think unless you can show that lack of parking will actually cause genuine economic harm to the neighborhood, these minimum parking policies are indefensible. The argument that existing residents deserve a designated public space (on street parking, provided for free or at very low cost by the government) for their own cars is nepotistic and does not make for good governence.
I live in a neighborhood of illegal 3 families...every tenant has a minimum of 2 cars, most 3...the neighborhood can only hold so much. Eliminating parking requirements for new developments is like making airline seats smallerto fit more in a plane. The reality is that butts are getting biggerand tenants have multiple cars and rent units with no parking andtake over the street. Besides, try denying a rental application becausethey own a car and wait for the ACLU or someone to sue you...then the neighborhood will be filled...just like people with leaded apartments are forced to delead when tenants become pregnant even though they said no kids when they rented. Tenants have more power and will get medical reasons to have cars or that they need them to cart children or elderly parents....and on and on...
Unlike basically every other group you've mentioned, car owners are not an officially protected class. You simply cannot sue a landlord for refusing to rent to you because of your car. And your statistics about the number of car owning tenants is a very common misconception. There simply isn't enough on-street parking that so many people in a three-family building could all own cars and park them on the street.
And I still do not understand why the free market cannot be allowed to dictate people's behavior here. If a neighborhood has a shortage of parking already, people for whom parking is important will avoid moving there (Why do you think "on street parking" is a line item in so many real-estate listings?). This helps to keep already sky-high rents a little lower for those of us who don't own cars. Let the car owners move to the suburbs where there's plenty of open space and you need a car for everything. Let the rest of us live in the city and make the best possible use of the smallest possible amount of space.
What do illegal families have to do with parking?
It's interesting that an article on no-car apartment buildings and the dismal condition of mass transit appear in the same paper. Less cars is the future. Ignore the improvements to the "T" at our own peril.
Absolutely. They shouldn't be talking about cutting service, they should be talking about INCREASING service. The buses and trains should run more often, then more people would ride as it became more convenient.
Here here. Instead of buildings being required to provide "minimum parking" they should be permitted to provide an "in-lieu" tax payment to the city for public transit development in the neighborhood.
Good idea...but we don't like good ideas...and we love our cars!
It is a nice vision, like the one that everyone will be healthy forever and the weather will be nice enough to SAFELY bike all year long. It is also impossible to force the people who say theywant thisdream to never get a car if anythingin that perfect vision changes or they get a job that is not T accessible.
If people want to take jobs that require a car to get to (and the number of those dwindles with the dwindling car ownership rate), those people should not be taking up space near transit facilities that they are not going to use. Why should I, as a non-car-owner, be forced to pay even more for an apartment near the T so that someone who drives everywhere can have a free parking space in any part of the city, no matter how illogical?
Require 2 spaces for unit. Common Sense instead of longterm headaches. What a scam!!!!
Paving over open space to make room for cars that will never materialize is "common sense?" Especially in Allston where, quite frankly, there is already far too much unused pavement and too many people trying to drive everywhere. Even on a Sunday afternoon the traffic is insane!
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I admire the idea of going carless and prefer to live that way when I can.
But what happens when...your cambridge startup fails and your next job offer is in Waltham?
I have friends in Brookline who live in a Brownstone with no parking available. They use the T or walk most of the time, but they keep a car a few blocks away by renting a space in a parking garage. That's a long-term solution.
For those who only need a car occasionally, Zipcar is great. I've used it for years now.
The common refrain from the long-time comatose residents in many Boston neighborhoods:
"New ideas? Who wants new ideas? The old ideas were bad enough!"
Just do what Brookline does and prohibit all street parking at night. Rent some parking space for tenant's cars in Waltham or Framingham and provide a shuttle service for folks that want to usen their car for a long trip every now and then.
If it's only every now and then, it would probably be more economical to rent a car, rather than having the expense of maintaining one that's not used often. I haven't owned a car in decades, but rentals are not very expensive nowadays.