BY ED FELIEN
The City Council, on Friday, July 10, may approve a plan to change off street parking requirements for high-density apartment buildings. A Council Committee recommended they eliminate the 1959 rule of one parking spot per unit minimum for developments within 350 feet of a bus or rail stop with 15-minute frequencies. Even a quarter-mile away, developments under 50 units would have no off-street parking requirement.
This is being sold as a way to reward people for getting on the bus. Providing off-street or underground parking adds at least $25,000 to the cost of each unit. “If people use mass transit to get to work, why should they have to pay extra for parking?” So the argument goes. Of course, many of those people who take the bus to work also own cars that they use for shopping, visiting friends and relatives and for taking trips.
Developers would like to build from the sidewalks to the alley and as high as they could go—the more units, the higher profits. Neighborhoods have an interest in preserving setbacks for housing development, and parking requirements provide open space that, up to now has been required to be landscaped.
With vacancy rates for apartments between 2.4% and 2.6% in 2014, there is a building boom. With new zoning to encourage construction, it’s only a matter of time before new apartment buildings will rise on Lake Street around the Midtown Market, in the Mount Olive parking lot at 31st and Chicago and on 38th and Chicago. If the City Council eliminates off-street parking requirements for these new developments we could easily end up with slums and a residential parking nightmare.
I should have clarified that the recommendation was that the parking was moved underground in many cases to allow for more creative use of the existing space. But, it would seem as Ed said that no parking standard would mean no extra space between mixed use and residential neighbors. Seems like this could create more bad neighbor issues.
Thanks Ed for raising several important issues regarding the new zero parking ordinance. If folks have concerns they should contact their council members NOW.
More discussion on this topic is at
http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/mpls/messages/topic/4a8qYHsliVtVFUodVOxcyC/
As an example of how parking space and setbacks could be used, see the bottom of page 17:
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/www/groups/public/@cped/documents/webcontent/convert_259658.pdf
This section of the Uptown Small Area Plan illustrates how valuable parking space can be to provide a buffer/transition from commercial to residential land uses. From my planning commission days it always seemed like the trick was to figure out how to add developments (including commercial right next to residential) in a way that incorporated mitigation strategies to make new developments good neighbors with the existing neighborhood. Setbacks from the property line are supposed to help but are commonly minimized.
Mitigation was not a term the planning commission liked all that much. But simply allowing the real estate market and the banks to determine what new development parking standards should be after the role they played in the last real estate (boom and bust) bubble seems very questionable.
In my opinion it is too bad we are not talking about leveraging possible parking REDUCTIONS in exchange for private developer investments in transit amenities (built in heated bus shelters) and pedestrian enhancements like wider sidewalks, trees, landscaping, better lighting, etc, to invite people to use cars less. The city needs to work for everyone: old/young, rich/ poor, able bodied or not. Zero standards appear to give developers a windfall that may or may not trickle down to the rest of us.