Council to set public hearing on proposal
The Beacon City Council is expected on Monday (Nov. 27) to schedule a public hearing on code amendments that, if adopted, would eliminate minimum parking requirements for new developments or projects involving the reconstruction or substantial alteration of a site. The council will also refer the proposal to the Planning Board for its review.
Planning Consultant John Clarke told the council on Nov. 6 that more than 200 municipalities nationwide — including Hudson, Buffalo, Boston and Burlington, Vermont, in the Northeast — have dropped minimum parking standards as a way of encouraging affordable and walkable cities. The idea, Clarke said, is that cities such as Beacon have continued to rely on outdated standards set in the 1970s and ‘80s that require a set number of parking spaces for various land uses.
For example, Beacon’s code currently requires at least one space for every four seats or pew spaces in a place of worship, theater or athletic field. But those standards, in addition to almost always overestimating the need for parking, cause the cost of development to rise significantly, Clarke said.
For residential developments, parking represents 10 percent to 20 percent of the total cost of development and adds 17 percent to the average apartment rent, said Clarke. “And there’s a lot of people who don’t have cars, or don’t need cars, who can get by with walking and public transit in places like Main Street in Beacon,” he told the Planning Board in August.
In parts of Beacon, parking requirements have not been updated in decades, yet households in the city are 26 percent smaller now than they were in the 1970s. “If you require less parking, you can lower rents, in theory,” Clarke said, “because developers don’t have to spend so much on land or upkeep.”
Kingston also recently dropped its minimum requirements and goes a step further by delineating in its code 10 automobile demand-reduction strategies, such as creating bicycle parking spaces, promoting ride-sharing and mass transit, supporting free or subsidized transit-to-work shuttles and encouraging “live near your work” programs.
If Beacon were to drop minimum parking requirements, Clarke suggests adopting maximum requirements in their place. For example, an apartment complex would require a maximum of one space for each dwelling unit, plus a quarter of a space for each bedroom, plus half a space for each live/work unit containing a retail area.
The Planning Board, rather than relying on “arbitrary” standards set decades ago, could review site-specific conditions such as comparable uses, location, walkable access to public transit and the size of the parcel during its review of each project.
“Right now the Planning Board is hamstrung by minimum parking requirements as a starting point,” Clarke told the council. Dropping those requirements would allow the board to “look at the size of the parcel, whether there’s a historic building on it or not and give extra consideration to a variety of factors.”
Freed of the burden of parking minimums, the board could “be providing alternatives and working with applicants to give them a whole range of transportation options,” he said. “This is a new and different way of looking at the world.”
Sounds like a ruse to me. Has anyone tried to get around the Hudson Valley by public transportation? How have Hudson, Buffalo, Boston and Burlington, Vermont, fared after dropping minimum parking standards for developers? Have rents come down? (I lived in Boston ages ago — it’s not a parking city.) Are parking garages coming to Beacon next? [via Instagram]
Progressive communities that are thriving are realizing that developers and investors won’t risk a project if they think (after careful research) they won’t be able to sell or rent units without parking. I hope Beacon makes this happen and that communities like Peekskill with a surplus of parking follow suit. [via Instagram]
Parking, like everything else, is a complicated issue that everyone seems to have an opinion on but few understand. There are two types of people in this context: those for whom car is king and those for whom walking is a way of life.
In the Hudson Valley, the latter is much smaller in size than the former and usually with much less of the desire to consume. We can eliminate parking minimums for some types of developments but not for business, which is the biggest user of parking resources and the entity with the most to gain.
Parking requires planning, something most municipalities don’t want to do because planning for parking simply is not sexy. It’s about as uninteresting as trash, another thing that is often an afterthought. What we need are stewards of the public realm who would oversee parking facilities, dead space, potential public spaces, sidewalk life and homelessness as it manifests onto the use of our public spaces for living arrangements. Parking is psychological above all else and does not have a one-size-fits-all answer. [via Instagram]