Desegregate CT
Parking-related zoning reforms designed to boost housing supply.
The city’s parking authority joined a statewide zoning reform campaign to boost housing supply by reducing minimum parking requirements.
The goal: lower the cost of creating new homes, and increase the appeal of publicly owned parking garages.
Thomas Breen pre-pandemic photo
Parking chief Hausladen: These will increase appeal of city parking garages.
New Haven Parking Authority commissioners took that unanimous vote Monday night during Park New Haven’s latest monthly meeting. The virtual meeting was held online via Zoom and Facebook Live.
The commissioners unanimously backed a motion that authorizes the New Haven Parking Authority to sign on as a supporting organization for Desegregate Connecticut. It also authorizes the parking authority’s executive director to participate and provide support for that advocacy group in his role as city parking garage chief.
The vote took place on the same day that the state legislature’s Planning and Development Committee held an hourslong public hearing on a comprehensive zoning reform bill—Raised Senate Bill 1024: An Act Concerning Zoning Authority, Certain Design Guidelines, Qualifications Of Certain Land Use Officials And Certain Sewage Disposal Systems—that incorporates many of the advocacy group’s specific proposals for how to change land use law to address Connecticut’s racial and economic segregation.
A core component of that proposed legislation, and of Desegregate CT’s platform as a whole, is reducing the amount of parking spaces that city and town zoning code’s require builders to include as part of new housing developments.
By reducing — or even scrapping — parking minimum mandates, advocates hope to encourage developers to use limited space and dollars on building housing, and not on currently-required places to park automobiles.
As Park New Haven Executive Director Doug Hausladen pointed out Monday night, such zoning reforms overlap with the overall mission of the city’s parking authority, which runs publicly-owned parking garages like Temple Street Garage, Crown Street Garage, and Air Rights Garage.
“Our parking authority was founded in the 1950s, when the issue of shared parking was really being promulgated,” he said.
“Our entire basic premise of the parking authority is to be a shared parking response for a market that needs a government actor to have this shared parking.”
Pre-pandemic photo
Parking commissioner Stewart (right) with fellow commissioner Donna Curran.
Park New Haven Commissioner Larry Stewart put the issue more bluntly.
“This is sort of like a windfall for the parking authority, I think,” he said. If zoning codes across the state, including in New Haven, reduce their parking minimums, then developers will not be required to build as many on-site parking spaces at their own properties — therefore increasing the appeal of parking garages that already exist, like the parking authority’s.
“This seems like a windfall for the parking authority,” he repeated. “Especially in the Downtown area.”
The city’s parking garages are currently seeing record low occupancy rates as the pandemic continues to keep commuters away from downtown office buildings, restaurants, and still-shuttered cultural venues.
Park New Haven Chief Financial Officer Brian Seholm stressed just how expensive it currently is to create new parking spaces.
The cost of new construction for a vertical structure, as opposed to a surface parking lot, is between $22,900 to $26,100 per space in New Haven, he said.
The cost of maintenance, personnel, insurance, and utilities to run such new parking garages also ranges between $220 and $283 per space per year, he said.
“The cost of new construction for a vertical parking space really been considerable.”
And if a developer comes to town and needs more parking than they want to or can afford to build onsite, can they reach out to the city for parking help? asked Stewart.
“That’s precisely the benefit of shared parking structures,” Hausladen said.
He gave the example of 101 College St., a planned new 500,000 square-foot bioscience lab and office tower that Winstanley Enterprises plans to build on the Downtown-Hill border.
The city was able to convince the developer to include only 114 space of new on-site parking as part of that development, Hausladen said. For a building so large, that’s really only enough to accommodate visitors.
“The rest of the parking is going to be through our parking structures next door” at the Temple Medical and Temple Street garages.
“The notion of parking requirements was created because of big traffic congestion downtown when single-occupant vehicles took over in the 1940s,” Hausladen continued. Reducing parking minimums at individual developments, and encouraging the use’s of the city’s current “shared parking system” — that is, publicly owned parking garages — “is a little bit better for the overall growth of downtown development.”
No Parking Minimums Near High-Frequency Transit
Desegregate CT
Member orgs, now including Park New Haven.
Before the parking authority commissioners took their vote to formally join Desegregate CT, a representative from the advocacy group — Michael Cuolom — described for the group the mission of the organization, and detailed the parking-specific recommendations.
He described Desegregate CT as a “coalition of Connecticut residents working together to make affordable housing more viable in more communities in our state, as well as working on things more pedestrian to our efforts, general parking requirements and how they affect development costs and the affordability of housing.”
The organization already has the support of such local entities as the New Haven Safe Streets Coalition, he said, as well as IRIS, CT Voices for Children, and the Urban League, among others. He noted that Mayor Justin Elicker submitted testimony in support of SB 1024 in advance of Monday’s public hearing.
The proposed bill includes three specific parking-related recommendations, he said. They are:
• Cap town-imposed parking mandates at 0 spaces for a multifamily property within a half-mile of a high-frequency public transportation station. The text of the proposed bill defines such a transit station as a rail station, bus rapid transit station, ferry terminal, or bus terminal.
• Cap parking at one park space for studios, one-bedroom apartments, or accessory dwelling units.
• Cap parking at two spaces for two-bedroom apartments or larger.
These proposed changes help get at the question of, “Are we prioritizing housing or are we prioritizing parking?” Cuolom said.
“As a group, we at Desegregate CT are trying to prioritize affordable and abundant housing.”
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch Monday’s parking authority meeting in full.
This is excellent and is following what other cities are doing as well to promote a return to human-scale city centers. All the parking lots and garages strewn around the city are not natural - they are largely the result of existing buildings being torn down to make room for empty car storage instead of room for people. In a dense (or what used to be dense, now hollowed out by parking) city center, asphalt lots are one of the worst land uses possible, and provide a minimal tax base, while creating a desolate and ugly landscape in what should be a walkable and liveable area.
Parking minimums are often overcompensatory, and guides such as the Institute of Transportation Engineers parking manual are only loosely based on pseudoscience. With this decision in place, it's not like developers will all suddenly stop building parking. If it's needed, they will build what's necessary. But often, parking requirements can severely hinder a design or outright kill it. Thank you for taking this step to prioritize the fabric of the city over personal vehicles.