“Don’t is always seem to go. That you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
Jonie Mitchell
We agree with Jonie. It’s worth considering options before we go and pave paradise.
Some say there’s a parking problem caused when trying to reactivate upper floor housing on Main Street. We’d suggest that any perceived or actual need for parking is a symptom. Misdirected land use policy, a lack of creativity, and the gift of historic building stock are the causal factors.
Regulations requiring off-street parking in downtown neighborhoods for the more complete and mixed usage of existing structures is a misdirection. Insisting that more parking is the only way to reactivate vacant spaces isn’t creative. Holding valuable, historic buildings back from expressing their fullest, community contributions squanders a gift.
The core issue of filling in our Main Street corridor isn’t a parking one. It’s a matter of using what we have more fully. Revitalization should be focused on building capacity within existing structures and spaces. New construction more naturally comes second, where it’s encouraged by the organic expression of ecosystem growth.
If we flip our considerations toward using what we have, then parking, rightly, becomes secondary. The challenge to overcome is a straightforward gap in potential and opportunity. Upper floors can potentially be refilled with activity, energy, and uses but the opportunity to refill them is directly limited by regulations and the administration thereof.
Existing Parking where Buildings Once Stood - November, 2020 - Not a Reason People Live in or Visit Places
A lack of parking isn’t preventing the vertical revitalization of Honesdale. But, because project approval often demands it, insistence on providing parking is. If we reevaluate what we insist on, we address the issue. The limitations are not physical, they’re regulatory.
Tweaking our zoning ordinance and changing how we administer it opens all sorts of upstairs doors. It’s a direct fix and a simple solution that favors progress. An early focus on parking creates a false narrative that implies parking is a necessary building block of town life.
Parking is useful but it’s not necessary. Why? Because people don’t use automobiles everywhere within a town. They also walk and ride around without cars. Take a peek. It’s happening right now.
Another direct way to make a town more livable is to make it more walkable and therefore reduce the need to drive, which in turn reduces the need to park. There are numerous ways to accomplish this aim but, again, adding new downtown parking isn’t one of them.
Building a new parking garage is an indirect way to revitalize higher-up spaces. Using our existing parking more fully is a step toward direct action. Changing our regulations to simply allow for the redevelopment of existing buildings without unnecessary restrictions would yield immediate results. Re-imagining our spaces as places to live in that aren’t dependent on automobile use is something worth planning around.
Planning exclusively around parking is misguided, unless the thing you’re trying to create is parking or the opportunity for more people to drive around our otherwise walkable neighborhoods.
Parking spaces are practically useful. That’s easy enough to concede. However, from a value per unit of area perspective, they’re near the least productive use of space we’ve got, particularly in our downtowns.
Whether you’re using the metric of assessed value per acre or that of use potential, parking offers very little return on investment. This is because it’s typically designed around a single, non-human use and it often has no built improvements, aside from pavement.
When considering the inherent investment of infrastructure, utilities, cultural capital, and everything else already in place along our main streets, it’s worth creating, maintaining, and encouraging a maximum mix of uses. Choosing to build stand-alone parking is a misallocation of shared resources.
You wouldn’t build a quarry in the middle of productive farmland. You shouldn’t build a shopping-only center away from where people live. Building parking downtown, without a mixed-use component, feels like a similar misuse of space.
The suggestion that “solving” our parking “problem” demands building expensive, single-use garages represents a focus on a disconnected symptom. Promoting new parking as being of paramount importance disrespects less-car or car-less living arrangements. Such arrangements are desired and useful in livable places and for neighborhood resiliency.
When we plan, we guide development toward the image of our plans. Residential living without an automobile is worth designing around. Our planning constructs should treat people as principle users and automobiles as accessory. That’s one way to make a place easy to live in. The opposite approach applied to our village centers does not sound like revitalization.
To imply the only pathway toward more downtown housing is by first building parking is disingenuous and glosses over the fact that we can more cheaply address root causes by simply changing our zoning. Principally permitting upper-floor residential and mixed-uses downtown and removing off-street parking requirements for the redevelopment of existing buildings are turn key solutions. And, they’re equitable.
If parking is really everyone’s problem, which we’d argue as untrue, then holding building use hostage for parking ransom is a policy disproportionately disadvantaging the very buildings and building stewards we rely on most; namely, Main Street structures that partially belong to everybody who patronizes local businesses, works in the same, lives nearby, or drives through town.
The structural bracing for the character we cherish and the existence we desire to revitalize is our building stock. That framework is less able to be cherished and revitalized when its use becomes dependent on parking. We need to change our collective minds about this.
Existing Sidewalks that have Always Been There - November, 2020 - One Reason People Live in or Visit Places
In recent history, more buildings have come down in our downtown than have gone up. Are we leading by example for a better future if the next buildings that grow up are parking garages? If we champion low value construction in our downtown, does that tell a story of progress? Are we realizing local opportunity by celebrating structures that will at best simply store cars and at worst often sit empty?
A revitalization focus on parking feels like a design intent on making Honesdale more desirable to visitors looking in from the outside than a design intent on making Honesdale easier to live in while already here. We can do better than that.
Parking development isn’t a zero sum game when it comes to downtown life. It’s not one thing or another. And if it were, we’d submit that allowing the maximum use of existing buildings should come first. It’s cheaper and easier and, logistically, that’d give us a better sense of how much parking we actually need.
More thoughtfully, that’d allow the natural progression of our downtown ecosystem back into the productive, mixed-use environment it desires to be. A state it was once in, before our thought leaders and policy makers got blinded by the head lights of car culture.