Parks, not parking

There are a lot of things that New York City needs more of: accessible subway stations, efficient transportation options between Brooklyn and Queens, new affordable housing construction (rather desperately). What it doesn’t need is lots of additional parking to add to our streets’ congestion and use up space that could be used for apartments or retail.

As city rents lurch up after a pandemic dip, we need smart ways to incentivize cost-effective residential development, including upzoning where it makes sense, particularly around transit hubs. As things stand, developers seeking rezonings that would allow higher densities of residential units are forced to build expensive and unnecessary off-street parking, sometimes as much as one or more parking spaces for every two housing units created.

Though city formulas are supposed to incentivize parking development mainly in areas without easy transit access, research has shown that upzoning around hubs still leads to the building of just as many parking spots as everywhere else. Given the enormous cost and complexity of constructing underground parking, much of it ends up filling street-level lots and ground floors that should otherwise be adding to a neighborhood’s cultural and economic vibrancy.

There’s a solution. As pushed for by Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Councilman Lincoln Restler, developers should routinely apply for, and the Department of City Planning should routinely grant, waivers that would allow parking requirements to be axed from the beginning of a land use review process in areas near ample train and bus options.

Parking requirements might make sense in lower-density neighborhoods and transit deserts, where upzonings could bring in lots of new residents with no way to get around except personal vehicles. Yet it’s never really made sense citywide. Compelling developers to generate dozens of new parking spots in neighborhoods that neither need nor want them functions as a deterrent to producing housing at the lowest possible price — which means it drives up the cost of construction, and ultimately rents. Send this policy to the junkyard.