How to Enrich Developers, Kill Off Green Space, and Ruin Neighborhoods

The amNY Op-Ed column by City Council members Erik Bottcher and Jennifer Gutierrez (Eliminating ‘parking minimums’ in NYC can help ease the housing crisis, Oct 13) perfectly makes the case for why the City of Yes behemoth is so wrong for New York. They represent neighborhoods in the West Village, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Ridgewood – neighborhoods that are very different from the communities in eastern Queens where residents have been such vocal opponents of the proposal. The differences in our neighborhoods are exactly why the City Council should vote a resounding NO on City of Yes.

Developers build for profit, period. They have no interest in what they tear down, what they put up, or how a neighborhood changes as a result of their work. Why in the world would we abdicate our right to manage our own neighborhoods to profit-driven builders who have no stake in the outcome of their work?

It's easy to deride the parking mandate as a prime culprit in our crisis of affordable housing, and easy to make it sound as if a bunch of overprivileged Boomers are just trying to protect their free curbside benefits. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll see that eliminating the parking mandate citywide may be a lot more painful in some neighborhoods than others – and cause a lot more harm. It’s all right there in the column Bottcher and Gutierrez wrote, if you look for it.

Developers make more money when they build apartments than when they build parking – agreed. Freed from the requirement of providing parking, they will create another apartment or two, or more, in each developed property – agreed. In the most urban sections of our city, in neighborhoods where residents have easy access to public transit and don’t need cars (and have access to commercial garages if they do need them), it makes sense to consider reducing or eliminating the parking spaces required as part of their development.

Low-density neighborhoods are a different animal altogether. Homeowners in low-density neighborhoods have cars, just as surely as developers have that profit motive. We are not hopping on subways to zip down to the theater district, or to visit friends across town. We are walking down Bell Boulevard in Bayside or Springfield Boulevard in Queens Village for restaurants and shopping, but getting in our cars when needed to get out to Long Island or up to Connecticut. We are a lovely hybrid of urban and suburban, and cars are a fact of life.

So what happens here when new apartments and multifamily homes go up without space for new residents’ cars? It would be nice to think new folks would move in and immediately start living an urban life, no cars needed, but that is some magical thinking indeed. The truth is that those new residents in our neighborhoods will have cars, but nowhere to put them. The developer, who has already walked away with his profits, does not care about the result.

But those of us who live here can easily predict the results – residents with nowhere to park on their property will park on the streets. The streets will fill up, and homeowners will pave over their lawns to create additional parking spaces. So by not requiring off-street parking for new construction, those paved-over lawns become the de facto parking lots that Bottcher and Gutierrez say “disrupt the visual harmony of the building and its surroundings” and “create big gaps in our streetscape.” More importantly, the paved-over lawns disrupt drainage and eliminate green space, issues that have been well documented for more than a decade. (See The Problem With Paving Over Lawns, from 2014.)

Parking is just one small part of the City of Yes, but it’s symptomatic of why this one-size-fits-all proposal does not work. For all the reasons Bottcher and Gutierrez state, we must kill the City of Yes and start over – we need a zone-based solution that addresses the needs of each area separately. We can build more affordable homes, but City of Yes is not the way to reach that goal.

Roseann Henry is a founder and the immediate past president of the Bellcourt Civic Association in Bayside, Queens