Allan Appel Photo
The proposed site looking northeast on Crown Street.
If you’re looking to get the best deal on a rental car from an outfit in close proximity to Yale University, your convenience and ease of comparison shopping just got better. In fact it doubled: Soon two outlets will be cheek by jowl on Crown Street.
That’s because on Wednesday night the City Plan Commission approved a special exception for the Crown Auto Center, a towing and sales operation, at 386 – 400 Crown St. between Park and Howe, to stop those operations and transform itself into an Avis Budget car rental outlet.
Another rental outlet, Enterprise, is immediately adjacent on Crown Street to the northeast.
The Avis Budget Car Rental proposal calls for the new outlet to have available on the site 15 to 30 cars and 10 box trucks. There would be interior demolition and changes to two buildings on the site currently used for the towing business, but no other visible changes.
Another building, a residence that abuts at 400 Crown St., would not be touched, according to the City Plan staff report.
While this section of Crown Street has had a history of auto-related use and car repair going back a half century, the recent rezoning of the area in 2011 as a BD zone, on the western edge of the central business district, makes car rental now a non-conforming, non-permitted use in the area, thus requiring the special exception.
But the towing business is also non-conforming. Problem?
Not really, the commissioners indicated that their decision: Substituting one non-conforming use for another without incurring any significant physical change to the site is appropriate and useful to the often non-car-owning student population of an area on the verge of transition and development.
“Is there not already an … Enterprise [car rental] to the north? Are we going to have two competing, or one?” asked the commission’s alder representative, Adam Marchand.
After clarification that Enterprise and Avis are different corporate entities and indeed would be competing, Marchand, “If the applicant wanted to buy or consolidate, would they have to come back [to City Plan]?”
“Only if it’s a different use in the way they operate,” replied City Plan Deputy Director Tom Talbot.
The vote in favor was unanimous.
No more Crown Towing?! AWESOME! There are no words to describe how much I loathe that company.