(Opinion): Maybe you’ve struggled to find a spot at times in downtown New Haven. Maybe you resent having to pay to park near your favorite restaurant, the library, or even your house.
Certainly I’ve heard complaints about the lack of parking in downtown New Haven from the people I grew up around and still visit. So perhaps it’s no surprise then that city officials want to revisit the idea of building more downtown garages at public expense.
But here’s the rough, rough truth: New Haven has a lot of parking. Lots more than peer cities. And it needs less, not more, because the overabundance of parking is doing real damage to the city’s economy, not to mention the built environment.
New Haven’s flood of parking has been extensively documented by a research team based out of UConn in several papers. In one, submitted to the journal of the Transportation Research Board, the team examined parking policy and development in the Central Business Districts of six midsize cities, New Haven and Hartford among them, from 1960 to 2000. The results for New Haven:
• A 542 percent increase in off-street parking spaces, from 3,065 to 19,680.
• A 304 percent increase in parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of building area.
• A 296% percent increase in the percentage of land dedicated to parking.
• A 6 percent decrease in the percentage of land dedicated to actual buildings (and remember, 1960 New Haven featured a lot of empty lots, casualties of urban renewal. If measured from 1950, the loss would presumably be higher).
You can see how these numbers look in the context of New Haven’s peer cities at the link above. It’s not pretty.
Speaking of not pretty, here’s what provision of that level of parking looks like, in a 2008 satellite image:
From UConn research led by Chris McCahill, via Better Cities & Towns. Red coloration represents surface lots, while orange represents parking structures.
Chris McCahill, the lead researcher on the UConn team, wrote in a 2011 Register op-ed article that building parking in urban cores induces a vicious cycle of civic deterioration where “the more parking there is in a city, the fewer people are there. This can make cities less attractive, less safe and less economically viable.” Like many American downtowns, New Haven’s has often been accused of being empty, quiet, and deserted at times, and parking is a, if not the, primary culprit. To quote from another of the UConn team’s papers, as parking becomes more important to a downtown’s built environment, “both the heights and footprints of buildings become larger and parking becomes a more prominent feature. At the high end, buildings are sparsely situated and some blocks are committed entirely to surface parking and parking structures. This progression mirrors the changes that New Haven and Hartford, among others, experienced between 1960 and 2000.” Large surface lots and parking structures typically create “dead zones” on the street where the lack of storefronts or any other activity makes pedestrians feel fundamentally unsafe — a common situation in downtown New Haven.
Pedestrian perceptions, though, are “squishy ”— they’re subjective and hard to quantify. How about some hard data on the economics of parking? McCahill has found that parking lots return somewhere between 83 percent and 95 percent less tax revenue per acre to a host city than do occupied buildings. In Hartford, that amounts to nearly $22 million per year in lost revenue. Perhaps even more importantly, the city’s and region’s transportation choices contribute to the fundamentally inequitable outcomes documented in the recent report written by DataHaven for SRCOG, the New Haven NAACP, and Workforce Alliance. That report documented a “spatial mismatch” created by the sprawl of jobs out from urban centers. Increasingly, lower-income and lower-skilled workers lack the transportation access needed to reach employment opportunities in suburban areas that cannot be efficiently served by the region’s outdated transit system.
As I wrote in a previous commentary for the Independent, however, what the report frames as a transportation failure is really a land-use failure, the consequence of poor planning decisions made decades ago. And that leads to the flip side of the “spatial mismatch” challenge: as job access for poorer, disadvantaged New Haveners has become harder, access to high-paying jobs in the city has become easier for wealthy suburbanites, thanks to the city’s abundance of parking. As the report notes, most of the jobs concentrated in New Haven — and an even higher percentage of those that pay well — go to people who live in other municipalities. A useful Census product known as the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, or LEHD, allows tracking of inflow/outflow patterns — how many people work in the areas they live in, and how many commute in — across time. Currently, data from 2002 through 2013 is accessible through the OnTheMap interface, which allows data analysis by geographic specification. The results for New Haven are striking:
In 2002, an estimated 53,794 people, or 71.2 percent of the city’s workforce, commuted into New Haven from outside. By 2013 — even as New Haven was experiencing an urban renaissance and revived activity in downtown — those numbers had risen to 64,940, and 77.4 percent. Meanwhile, just 42.6 percent of New Haven residents could find work within the city in 2013, down from 45.7 percent in 2002. While, yes, correlation is not causation, it is hard to imagine that the city’s obsession with downtown parking has not contributed to the suburbanization of its workforce. Which is to say that even as the city comes to grips with its inequitable economic structure, public policy that favors lots of parking is still undergirding that very same structure. And as Charlie Gardner points out, one of the really remarkable results from the UConn research is the finding that substitution of parking for active buildings in these downtowns was and is largely a function not of market demand — as one might imagine — but of explicit public policy.
In a sense, New Haven’s parking policy can be understood as one of the last active policy vestiges of the urban renewal era that devastated the city in the 1950s and ‘60s. The defining characteristic of urban renewal in New Haven as elsewhere was, of course, its obsession with roads and parking as the way of the future. And while New Haven has, I think, largely come to grips with the destructive legacy of urban renewal in an intellectual fashion, giving up on its perks — especially parking! — seems hard for the middle class and those who aspire to it. The same largely white middle and upper classes that, as Douglas Rae documents in City: Urbanism and its End, loudly cheered on urban renewal now benefit from the devalued downtown land and abundant parking that it provided. Indeed, where those voices often lived in the city of New Haven during the urban renewal debates, they are now largely suburbanized.
Parking is a deeply personal, emotional issue, probably the single most talked-about topic in planning meetings.
Hyperlocal website fusion: All Over Albany’s punchy take on parking debates.
But the understandable instinct to say “I want” — to want convenient, free, and abundant parking in the places that you need it — ignores the structural problems that prioritizing parking creates for planning, and indeed for social and economic policy generally. And New Haven’s public officials — elected, appointed, and civil service — need to re-orient their priorities toward solving the city’s fundamental inequities. Surely, making parking slightly less convenient won’t solve all of the city’s problems — but it can be a start. Rather than pushing for employers to provide free parking, officials should work towards a comprehensive solution to reduce overall car usage and need for parking. And yes, that means both commuters and residents will have to sacrifice. But short-term agreements based off of citizen complaints cannot balance out decades of public policy that has essentially hollowed out the city’s own employment base and accommodated (even accelerated) job sprawl. To put it baldly: parking isn’t economic development. In New Haven, it’s been more like economic degradation.
Luckily, New Haven has a chance to take a different tack with its upcoming comprehensive rezoning, and to their credit many city officials clearly recognize that opportunity. There are lots of ways to move the parking conversation from simply “more” to “more efficient,” most of them laid out in the works of the nation’s acknowledged leading parking expert, Donald Shoup (a Yale undergrad and PhD alum, for what it’s worth!). Parking policy will always be a challenge in a downtown that is still recovering from 60 years of urban renewal, and that is dominated by a few large (some might say domineering) employers. But there are ways — performance pricing of on-street spots, central control of parking structures, substitution of parking maximums for minimums in the zoning code — to bring some measure of order into the process. Indeed, parking does not have to become more difficult even if the city manages to reduce supply. Center City Philadelphia has 7% fewer parking spots open to the public now than in 2010 — but occupancy rates have actually gone down by 1.7%. The exact way forward will certainly take significant communal will and work to define, but it is abundantly clear that past methods have done, and continue to do, more damage than good. For the good of the New Haven, overall, please don’t build more garages.
Sandy Johnston (pictured) spent ten years of his childhood in New Haven and comes back to visit every year. He is a graduate of Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary and a master’s student in Regional Planning at SUNY Albany concentrating in transportation. He can be found on Twitter @sandypsj. He writes the Itinerant Urbanist blog.
Previous Sandy Johnston stories on New Haven transit:
• Never-Built Path Could Link Rockview To Buses
• Houston Could Point The Way For City’s Buses
• All Aboard? Define “Streetcar” First
I think what the writer fails to realize is that we are and will continue to fill in surface level parking lots (that i agree are awful for all the reasons mentioned) and so we will need a place for cars to park. Its much better to do that vertically so that we can have more ground floor retail and high-rise construction. Its more of a shift in the location of parking the building more.
Just as examples there the Colosseum site, college and crown, and the novella all were parking lots.