The theme today is … parking! Here’s Tom’s contribution from the New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman:
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Trading Parking Lots for Affordable Housing
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What is the solution to affordable housing in New York?
One number has been repeated over and over — 200,000 subsidized units, to be built or preserved over a decade. Mayor Bill de Blasio promised it, but has yet to explain how he’ll get there.
Here are two other numbers: 9 x 18. In square feet, that’s 162, smaller than the most micro micro-apartment.
It is the size of a typical parking space. That lowly slice of asphalt has prompted three young architects — Miriam Peterson, Sagi Golan and Nathan Rich, fellows at the Institute for Public Architecture — to come up with what could be an innovative way to ease the housing crisis.
I’m intrigued by their proposal, “9 x 18,” because it’s about more than apartment buildings plopped onto vacant land. It considers how parking spaces — mandated in outmoded zoning regulations, prolific at public housing sites — might be leveraged into something more ambitious, something that encourages a mix of housing in active neighborhoods with accessible transit, public services and lively streets. In effect, the proposal trades asphalt for housing and amenities.
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The “9 x 18” proposal capitalizes on an outdated and onerous zoning mandate that requires private developers to build parking spaces for new apartments in certain parts of the city.
The regulation clashes with Vision Zero, the mayor’s new pedestrian safety initiative. It’s also bad for traffic and the environment. And it forces developers to spend what a study by the Furman Center at New York University estimates is up to $50,000 per parking space, money inevitably charged to consumers, increasing housing costs. The mandate should be abolished, but dropping it would clearly force city officials to collide with car-owning voters, especially those poorly served by mass transit.
Instead, the “9 x 18” plan turns the zoning requirement into a kind of commodity.
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Full article here. Implications for Vancouver’s lane-housing infill program too.
Have you seen the wasted space around the Maclean Park Housing Project in Strathcona? Endless space for housing if the site was tightened up and reorganized.