News Information and Media Site: Upshot: The powerful effect of parking minimums

October 25, 2024

What a Giant Hole Can Tell Us About a Problem With Parking

	By Emily Badger

To construct The Dime, a 23-story mixed-use apartment and office building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the developer Charney Companies first had to dig a spectacular hole. It was about 30 feet deep, which is a perilous proposition in the middle of crowded New York. The neighboring properties included private homes and a 110-year-old bank building, which, it turned out, was resting on a foundation of stacked stones.

What it took to get a two-story underground garage. Charney Companies LLC

All the surrounding properties had to be underpinned. All the dirt had to be trucked elsewhere. All this to construct a two-story underground parking garage that the developer believed was entirely unnecessary.

"I think no one has built as much parking when it was not needed on one site than I did with The Dime," said Sam Charney, the principal of Charney Companies.

We learned about this (possibly unnecessary) hole while reporting on New York's effort to end parking requirements on new housing. The proposal — part of a larger package of zoning reforms and the subject of a contentious set of City Council hearings this week — follows a growing movement nationwide to end mandatory parking minimums on new buildings that are dictated by city zoning codes.

New York, unlike a number of other cities, is proposing to end the rules only on new housing, not all building types and uses. In an alternate universe where The Dime were built under such reforms, the building would no longer need 124 parking spaces for the residences. But it would still require 104 spaces for the offices, 61 spaces for the retail and 12 spaces for community-facing facilities in the building like a health clinic or library.

The building is one block from the M, J and Z lines on the subway, and one stop on those lines from Manhattan. It's also about one block from the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza Bus Terminal. It's hard to imagine 104 people driving to work at the building every day.

The Dime, in short, illustrates a broader problem than the one New York is trying to solve: Parking requirements, in all of their forms, can be counterproductive and illogical.

Mr. Charney, if left to his own devices, would have built the project with no parking at all.

"The neighborhood did not need it — there was no demand for it," he said. "I was screaming at the top of my lungs to anyone who would listen: 'Look, the M.T.A. is crumbling, they're in massive amounts of debt. Take my money and put it into an M.T.A. fund — literally, the money I'm going to spend going two stories below grade to build a parking lot here.'"

Unfortunately, that is not how mandates work. So Charney spent an estimated $10 million excavating that hole and filling it with 301 parking spaces, adding an additional six to nine months to the project timeline. Then when the building opened in the summer of 2020, with colossally bad pandemic timing, no one wanted the office space — let alone the office parking. Today, most of those spots are in use only because the electric ride-share company Revel stores and charges its 200-car fleet there.

Without the parking requirements, Mr. Charney says he could have built a better building — better for his bottom line, better for investors, better in affordability for the tenants, and better for neighbors who pass by the building on the sidewalk.

"Ground-floor retail is what makes New York great, what makes it feel safe," he said. "Instead, we have 100 feet of two parking gates and loading docks."

The City Council may ultimately opt to keep the city's parking requirements in place; they are among the most politically controversial elements of the "City of Yes" zoning reform package. But if the city ultimately does concede that parking requirements make little sense for housing, the question logically follows: Why not get rid of them for other types of buildings, too?

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