When rezoning for “transit-oriented development” — particularly at spots like Union Station, currently gobbled up by surface parking lots — be aggressive.
Thomas Breen file photo
Union Station.
White Plains Department of Planning Commissioner Chris Gomez offered those words of advice Tuesday afternoon during an hour-long “Station Area Planning” meeting hosted by the Union Station Partnership. The virtual meeting took place online via Zoom.
The Union Station Partnership is the newly formed state-city entity in charge of the current operations and future redevelopment of the city’s century-old transit hub on Union Avenue.
The group convened Tuesday’s online confab as a first gesture towards figuring out what might be built atop the capacious surface parking lots that currently lie to the east and west of the train station. The partnership agreement sets redevelopment goals for the station, including 600 new structured parking spaces, a new multi-modal transit hub, and new liner buildings containing retail and office space — but doesn’t go into any specific detail on what exactly should be built where, when, and with what money.
As state Department of Transportation Deputy Director (and New Haven resident) Garrett Eucalitto said at the top of the hour, Tuesday’s meeting was designed to “stimulate discussion on the possibilities of Union Station and surrounding areas” by looking at what types of train-station redevelopment is currently taking place across the country.
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White Plains planner Chriz Gomez.
Gomez, the top city planner in a 58,000-person municipality roughly 30 miles north of New York City, was one of three featured guests invited to weigh in on the work their outfits are doing to rebuild train stations and surrounding areas. The other featured speakers were Amtrak Planning and Development Major Stations Senior Director Gretchen Kostura, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Senior Executive Officer Jeanet Owns, and Regional Plan Association Vice President for Transportation Tiffany-Ann Taylor, who moderated the conversation.
“It all comes back to what are our parking requirements, what are the zoning parameters we put in place, and how far are we willing to go as a community to think outside of the box when it comes to transit-district zoning,” Gomez said.
“How much will the city incentivize certain components of a development program?” How can the city be most responsible to taxpayers when figuring out what to do with publicly owned land near train stations? Should the city sell that land outright to a developer? Lease it? Is it irresponsible to build any parking spaces at a time of ride shares?
Those were the questions his municipality has been wrestling with as they seek to redevelop the public parking lot-strewn area surrounding White Plains’ newly renovated Metro North station.
Rendering of White Plains planned train station-area redevelopment.
When Taylor asked him about what lessons from his experience in White Plains were most applicable to New Haven’s Union Station plans, he went right back to zoning — that is, in local laws that determine what can be built where, including how many parking spaces have to be built alongside retail, office, housing, etc.
“The power’s obviously in the zoning, in New York or Connecticut,” he said. “How far is the community willing to go to create and facilitate” a vision for redevelopment? “How much do we desire that open space? … How much do we want to reduce parking requirements,” and is there the political will to do just that?
That issue of just how much parking a redeveloped downtown train station needs came up again and again in other attendees’ responses as well.
Kostura said that, some of the key questions central to planned redevelopments of Amtrak stations in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia are: “What does parking look like in the future? What does ride share look like in the future? Do we need private car parking?”
Asked after the meeting for his key takeaways from the conversation, Park New Haven Executive Director Doug Hausladen (pictured) — whose organization runs the day-to-day operations of Union Station on behalf of the city-state partnership — said, “We have a lot of work ahead of us to make sure we have the best project” from the very start.
“That all starts with the zoning envelope and the broad plan for the area,” of which Union Station is a centerpiece, he said.
Hausladen said the parking authority will work with the city “almost immediately” later this year to start the process of changing the zoning of Union Station and the immediately surrounding area “before going out to bid for developers and concepts.”
Stay tuned for another Union Partnership-hosted info session in the next few months, he said, before that rezoning work starts in earnest.
Click on the video at the top of the article to watch Tuesday’s meeting in full.
Smart discussion. Does anyone know if the rezoning will affect the old Church St. South property across the street from the station? Is anything moving forward there?