Fayetteville parking shift wouldn't be unprecedented

FAYETTEVILLE -- A major change to the city's parking philosophy is brewing.

Planning commissioners late last month recommended eliminating the city's minimum parking standards for commercial projects. That means business owners would no longer be required, as they have been for decades, to provide a set number of parking spaces for their customers.

The City Council is scheduled to take up the issue Sept. 1.

Fayetteville wouldn't be the first U.S. city to do away with minimum parking standards. It'd just be the first in Northwest Arkansas, and perhaps the state, to do so.

Parking Minimums

Minimum parking standards are a hallmark of mid-20th century land use policy.

As cities' footprints grew and America's car culture took root in the 1950s and 1960s, municipal officials viewed it as their responsibility to make sure people had a place to park and to prevent that parking from bleeding over onto neighboring properties.

Troy Galloway, Bentonville's community and economic development director, said, especially in suburban, automobile-centric parts of town, "The thought is that you need some place to park your vehicle when you're visiting an establishment."

Patsy Christie, director of planning and community development in Springdale, put it this way: "One of our concerns is making sure that, as development occurs, it doesn't create burdens on adjacent pieces of property or create congestion problems along the street network.

"Off-street parking is required so that we don't have those congestion issues."

But as downtown areas and commercial corridors scattered with parking lots age, Fayetteville planners -- and officials in a growing number of cities throughout the country, including Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, and Portland, Ore. -- are turning that argument on its head.

It's precisely because cities require a minimum number of on-site parking spaces that large parking lots are built, they say. The parking lots make it easy for people to drive everywhere they want to go, thus, adding to traffic congestion.

The large, often unused parking lots, planners argue, take up valuable real estate and make it hard to develop, or especially redevelop, what would otherwise be available land.

"If you have really rigid, inflexible parking requirements, it really holds up urban infill development," Greg Sandlund, acting infill coordinator for the city of Sacramento, Calif., said in an interview last week. "If you want your downtown to start turning over and picking up and development to get in there, you need to look at your parking requirements."

Sacramento, Calif.

Large parking lots and garages near high-rise office buildings and government agencies often sit empty in downtown Sacramento, a 100-square-mile capital city with nearly 480,000 residents.

"Right now, in the middle of the day, there are 17,000 vacant parking spaces," Sandlund said Wednesday.

The city eliminated all downtown parking standards in 2012 to encourage development.

Sandlund said the city was constantly granting parking waivers to developers who wanted to provide less on-site parking than required. The requirements were especially burdensome for someone who wanted to turn an old warehouse or office building into a restaurant, apartments, retail shops or other use where more parking was needed. Granting parking waivers became a costly, time-consuming process, and, for developers, it was just one more regulatory hoop to jump through, Sandlund said.

"When you place a parking requirement on an existing building that takes up most of the parcel, you're making a parking requirement that's physically impossible to do, and it hampers the reuse of the building," he explained. "So people go, 'Whoa, wait. I wanted to turn this into a restaurant, but if I have to wait six months or more for a parking waiver and pay all this money, forget it.'

"(The parking standards were) a disincentive to redeveloping our commercial corridors."

Sacramento planners opted for a "context-sensitive" approach instead of abolishing parking minimums citywide.

In urban areas, the minimum requirements have gone away or have been reduced. But in more suburban settings, the requirements have remained largely intact.

"We have areas where people are going to be using a car every day," Sandlund said. "And when they go out shopping, they're going to be needing to park."

Sandlund said it's hard to say for sure, but he thinks the changes are having an effect, at least downtown.

He pointed to several new restaurants and the Ice Blocks project, which will add 142 multifamily units and 31,000 square feet of commercial space in a collection of old warehouses.

"Prior to the code update, this project would have required a major parking waiver that would likely have generated significant controversy. Instead, the project was approved with little to no opposition," Sandlund said.

He also noted an eight-story apartment complex called i15 that's planned with no vehicular parking whatsoever. Tenants will have access to a nearby parking garage, or they can use 48 stackable bike spaces.

"(The developers) are trying to cater to people who really want to work and live downtown," Sandlund said. "They don't have cars and can bike around. And, really, we want that."

Buffalo, N.Y.

A complete revamp of Buffalo, N.Y.'s zoning and development codes that's been underway for several years would eliminate minimum parking standards altogether -- not just downtown.

John Fell, a senior planner in Buffalo's office of strategic planning, said Friday that, in the past, parking lots were designed for the "worst-case scenario": a flood of drivers, one per car, commuting to work or descending on a shopping center all at the same time.

"When your goal is to have a compact, urban area that's sustainable, that's walkable, that's transit supportive, then that doesn't work very well," Fell said.

In commercial districts in particular, the parking standards don't take into account how people often park in one place and visit several different stores, he added.

"In that case, each store doesn't need its own parking space," Fell said.

Buffalo officials have been able to get serious about removing parking standards, in part, because the city has a Metro Rail system.

"If you're building along our Metro corridor, where every 10 minutes there's a train coming by, you're going to have a great opportunity to not have to provide parking, because that infrastructure's in place," Fell said.

He added that having plenty of off-site parking garages and a good grid of walkable sidewalks helps, too.

However, in some areas of town, like Elmwood Village, where a commercial strip borders older, established neighborhoods, residents are nervous about the changes.

When the restaurants and bars on Elmwood Avenue get busy, cars tend to spill over into residential areas, where many houses don't have driveways, Fell said.

"When that happens, people who use the street to park may have to park a couple of blocks away (from their homes)," he explained. "That can be problematic."

He said the city plans to address the issue by adding on-street parking in some areas and by requiring certain developers to submit "transportation demand management plans." Under the plans, someone building a more than 10,000-square-foot building would have to find creative ways to encourage biking, transit or carpooling.

Fell acknowledged there's no perfect solution for dealing with parking.

But, he added, "To have a parking problem is often a good thing."

"What you want to do is get people out of their car and force them to walk a few blocks," he said. "There's more visibility (for businesses) that way. ... But at the same time, there are side effects. So what's the right amount of tension there?"

Columbus, Ind.

It's not just big cities like Buffalo and Sacramento that are doing away with parking minimums.

Officials in Columbus, Ind., a town of 46,000 residents about an hour's drive south of Indianapolis, decided in 2008 they needed to take similar action.

Columbus, home to the Cummins Engine Co., a Fortune 500 company that manufactures and distributes power generation products, had been going through several years of redevelopment downtown.

Cummins and other businesses had been building office space, and an apartment complex occupying an entire city block had recently gone in.

Coupled with the addition of three new parking garages, "we got to the point where we thought it was better to let the market control the parking than for the local government basically to impose some standard," Jeff Bergman, city planning director, said. "The concern was the situation was more dynamic than any standard could reflect."

Like in Sacramento, minimum parking standards still exist outside Columbus' downtown area.

"We haven't been brave enough to try it on a larger scale," Bergman said.

But, he added, removing downtown standards may have had a role to play in several recent developments, including an apartment complex that was built around one of the city's parking garages.

At the very least, Bergman said, the removal of the parking standards was one less thing for developers to worry about.

"If there's not enough parking, then that's probably a limitation on any development that's going to occur," he added. "So they have their own incentive to provide the necessary parking."

Fayetteville

Fayetteville planners had some of the same things in mind when they came up with the parking proposal.

"The intent is to encourage infill on some of the more difficult lots along commercial corridors and in our downtown area," Quin Thompson, a city planner, told planning commissioners last month.

"Several times each year, planning staff denies a business license or has to discourage a prospective business owner from moving into an existing building because the location cannot meet the minimum parking requirements," Thompson wrote in a staff memo.

The regulations are a hodgepodge of rules depending on how a particular property is used.

The rules don't take into account whether a business is on Dickson Street, the downtown square or the outskirts of town.

Most commercial properties' parking requirements are based on square footage.

A 4,600-square-foot McDonald's must have at least 46 parking spaces -- one for every 100 square feet of gross floor area. For retail stores, it's one space for every 250 square feet. That means a 220,000-square-foot Walmart Supercenter requires a minimum of 880 parking spots.

Several planning commissioners called the requirements arbitrary, saying they're based on the busiest day of the year rather than the other 364 days.

"Designing parking lots for the day after Thanksgiving ... is probably a bad idea," Commissioner Tracy Hoskins said July 13 when the proposal was first discussed.

In downtown Fayetteville zoning districts, requirements are waived for any building built before Oct. 1, 1995. But if a downtown business owner wants to add on to his building, more parking is generally required.

Under existing law, developers can reduce the number of parking spaces they're required to build by installing bike racks, substituting motorcycle or scooter spaces for full-size spots or coming up with a shared-parking agreement with an adjacent property owner. Further reductions are allowed if a property lies within a quarter-mile of a bus stop.

All those considerations would go away, however, if the minimum parking standards are abolished.

"In my opinion, business owners know much better how much surface parking they need to make their businesses viable," Andrew Garner, city planning director, said, adding, "We're not concerned it's going to be a significant problem for the community."

Only one planning commissioner, Tom Brown, voted against the proposal July 27.

Brown said he feared removing parking minimums would cause problems for adjacent landowners -- especially in areas where commercial parking might spill over onto residential properties.

"If there are situations where a developer can't develop ... I'm all for modifying the parking regulations," he said. "I just think we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."

Northwest Arkansas

Like Brown, representatives of other cities in Northwest Arkansas say they aren't quite ready to take the leap to abolish parking requirements.

However, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville have all made changes applying to their downtowns.

In Downtown Core zoning districts in Bentonville, no parking spaces are required for a commercial property with less than 3,000 square feet of gross floor area. Just one space per residential dwelling unit is required downtown, compared to two spaces per dwelling unit in other areas of the city.

"The thinking is that when you're in a downtown, the last thing you want is a parking lot being a predominant feature," Galloway, Bentonville's community and economic development director, said. "Parking lots present gaps in the downtown tapestry."

But, he added, "When you start talking about suburban areas, it's very automobile-centric ... and people use predominantly vehicles to get to and from those areas."

Springdale officials tweaked their parking standards in March 2014 to allow greater flexibility dealing with specific uses, such as restaurants and churches, planning director Christie said.

Springdale has identical requirements to Bentonville in its downtown district. Christie said city planners are in no hurry to extend those standards to the rest of the city.

"We tweak them as we go along," she added. "There's no discussion about doing away with them completely."

Galloway was more open to the idea.

"I will tell you there will be a lot of us watching with great curiosity to see how it works out (in Fayetteville)," he said, "because there's no doubt that we have to commit a lot of land to provide surface parking in order to meet these typical standard parking requirements."

NW News on 08/09/2015