DOES CITY NEED MORE PARKING — OR LESS?
The answer depends on whom you ask
STAMFORD — Preliminary changes to Stamford’s rules have reignited both discussion and frustration on the city’s prickliest problems: parking.
The Zoning Board last week discussed a slate of potential changes to Stamford’s zoning regulations on parking, known as the omnibus text change on mobility. In turn, some members of the community rejected the proposed regulation.
Residents from both the South End and West Side claimed that the new rules would only exacerbate the precarious parking situation in the
two neighborhoods and beyond. But downtown, city officials fear the new regulation could add more parking to a neighborhood that doesn’t need it.
“There’s many, major parking issues in many parts of Stamford. The West Side, East Side, South End — they all struggle with parking problems. The Cove and Shippan suffer during the beach season,” said Sue Halpern, vice president of the South End Neighborhood Revitalization Zone.
“In the South End, multifamily homes — especially older homes, many without driveways — need to accommodate at least three or four cars, maybe more. And these people depend on street parking,” Halpern said.
“I’m hoping that you will consider the needs of the people who have to park their vehicles. Because when I go to the Ferguson Library, or when I go down to Bedford Street, or I go to downtown Stamford, it is not easy to find a ... space to park,” said West Side resident Cynthia Bowser. “I think as we plan for the future, we have to also plan and take into consideration the people who are currently here.”
The mobility rules would overhaul the state of parking, walking, and biking in Stamford, but street parking falls outside of its purview. (The Transportation Bureau handles street parking and its enforcement.) And while large parks of the omnibus focus on parking requirements for residential uses, most of the parking in Stamford remains untouched.
Residential parking requirements receive a boost in the mobility omnibus in general, according to the Land Use Bureau. Overall, current zoning regulations require 1.67 parking spaces per residential unit; the text change ups the figure roughly to two spaces per unit.
Required residential parking downtown gets a boost too. The new mobility omnibus requires that multi-family developments create parking according to the mix of apartment units. Under the proposed rules, for each one-bedroom apartment, developers must build a parking space; the number of spaces required fluctuates up and down, depending on the type of apartment.
But the bulk of the changes hinge on the longawaited parking study, which the city undertook back in 2019. Traffic bureau officials said the study remains unfinished, largely due to the pandemic’s impact on traffic patterns.
But while complaints of insufficient parking are common in other neighborhoods — something the mobility changes likely will not fix — the Downtown Special Services District said that may be too much.
“I don’t think we have the demand demonstrated to justify an increase requirement like that, given the significant cost that that places on development,” DSSD President David Kooris said.
The DSSD claims that Atlantic Station — one upscale apartment building downtown — would have had to build 10 percent more parking under the proposed rules. The Smyth, another building currently under construction, would have to build 13 percent more parking.
“I’d ask us to take a closer look at that and make sure that we’re not solving for a problem that doesn’t exist. We do have adequate parking in the downtown, and we find that the ratios that the buildings have been required to provide these last few years of development have been adequate,” Kooris said.
Some housing research shows that, oftentimes, parking drives up costs for renters. Research from the University of California Los Angeles estimates that “the cost of garage parking to renter households is approximately $1,700 per year, or an additional 17% of a housing unit’s rent.”
While the current changes would boost parking for new construction, the problem’s roots extend back to the early 1900s.
“A lot of the issues that we have in areas like the Cove, like the West Side, like the South End, is that we have old buildings that were built before parking requirements were in effect,” Blessing said. Older properties come with lower parking requirements, since they’re grandfathered into the current system.
Even if the city enacts the current iteration of the new rules, more changes could be on the way once the parking study is completed. Blessing told The Stamford Advocate the mobility changes are meant to be a paradigm shift, not a final solution.
“As we know in Stamford, it’s not that our zoning text is written in stone and cannot be changed if necessary,” Blessing told the zoning board Monday. “This is a very comprehensive rewrite of the regulations. I would honestly be surprised if we got it right the first time.”