New York City - Transit News

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Transit Zones with respect to Affordable Housing:

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Parking Reform Gains New Future Enemies: Affordable Housing Advocates


Where in the city parking requirements would be dropped (but only for subsidized units). Map by the Department of City Planning.

A few weeks ago, the Department of City Planning announced its intention to tweak the city’s zoning rules to encourage the production of affordable housing. The most important change is a reduction in the city’s parking requirements, which up until now have required off-street parking throughout virtually all of the outer boroughs and Upper Manhattan – generally around one space for every two units, with exemptions for small buildings.

The requirement for developers in dense, transit-oriented neighborhoods to provide expensive parking spaces will, however, only be waived for those building subsidized housing units. All market-rate apartments – the vast majority of new construction in the city – will still need parking, with a discretionary exemption for the unsubsidized units in buildings that have set aside some units to be rented at below-market rates.

In isolation, this is a good thing – parking is an unnecessary luxury in a city as dense and costly as New York, and the requirements are especially absurd when taxpayers are footing the bill and the tenants are relatively poor.
But given the politics of affordable housing in New York City, the move also has the unfortunate side effect of ensuring a fight down the road between affordable housing advocates and those supporting more general parking reform.

Assuming City Council approves the measures, it would add parking relief to the list of benefits that developers get in exchange for building affordable housing (a tax abatement and sometimes a meager density boost are the others). But just like the tax abatement doesn’t incentivize 80/20 buildings beyond the gentrifying fringe, where all new buildings get a tax break, so too would the parking benefit disappear if reform was passed more broadly.
This would make private developers building on land already entitled for development marginally less likely to include below-market units. It’s therefore logical to assume that affordable housing interests – politicians and advocates whose sole goal is the production of subsidized units, and who are indifferent to New Yorkers who rent and buy on the market – might oppose reform for purely market-rate projects.

The de Blasio administration essentially denied the dynamic to Streetsblog:
This provision is designed not to offer the carrot of lower parking minimums in exchange for adding affordable units to a market-rate development, but to simply improve the balance sheet for mixed-income projects. “It’s not bargaining for affordable units,” said Eric Kober, director of housing, economic and infrastructure planning at DCP. “It’s really a matter of enabling the city to use its affordable housing resources as efficiently as we possibly can.”

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http://www.yimbynews.com/2015/03/par...advocates.html