Parking Ordinance Meeting No. 1

This post will be the beginning of a series regarding parking ordinances in general, and the review of its existing ordinances that the City of Houston is currently conducting. I’ll try to provide some reporting and feedback on the meetings I’m able to attend, as well as some background and commentary on the way these ordinances work (and fail to work).

I just got back from the first parking ordinance meeting, which, conveniently, took place within a few blocks of my home. It was an interesting meeting.

The meeting was held in the sanctuary of St. Stephen’s church at W. Alabama and Woodhead. At about 4:15 Marlene Gaffrick opened the meeting with a presentation outlining the issues that the city in concerned about. She spoke for about 15-20 minutes on the material that was covered in the flyer the city had published (more on that later). After this, she took a couple questions from the audience, and then she directed those present to write down the items they consider “issues” and “solutions” on large easels which were scattered around the room. This concluded the presentation, and from there the group began to mill about, discuss ideas, and write stuff on the easels.

The City’s Issues

The City presented 12 issues – in a flyer, and in the presentation – which they consider the primary problems with the existing parking ordinance. You can download the flyer (PDF) from the city’s website. The issues were:

1. Shared Parking – Why are current shared parking provisions rarely used, and what can be done to make them more useful?
2. Grandfathering – When should older buildings be forced to come up to code?
3. Occupancy – Why don’t the occupancy codes in the Parking Ordinance match the ones in the Building Code?
4. Parking Ratio Requirements – Are the requirements themselves working?
5. Definition of a Bar – Why doesn’t Houston’s definition match TABC’s?
6. Off-site Parking – Are people willing to walk more than 250 feet to park?
7. Valet Parking – Should valet parking count toward requirements?
8. Parking Management Areas – Can we do these on a smaller scale and make them more useful?
9. Intensity of Use – What does this even mean? Do we need this or not?
10. Tents – Do tents count as useable space, and should parking be required for them?
11. Parking Incentives – Should we do something to reduce parking requirements near transit stops?
12. Lifts – Are Houstonians smart enough to handle parking machines, or should we restrict them?

Citizen Concerns

The crowd at the meeting was overwhelmingly comprised of three types of people.

1. People who were mad that strangers were parking on the street in front of their homes and then walking to nearby businesses.
2. People who were upset that strangers were parking on the street in front of their homes and then walking to other homes or townhomes on the street.
3. People who were worried that the METRO light-rail on Richmond Ave. was going to create a parking shortage.

While those voices are pretty common, there was another case that I thought was much more interesting.

One person voiced concern that in his neighborhood (East Downtown) there were a large number of abandoned warehouses, and that vagrants were coming to these abandoned properties, setting up a hand-painted sign reading “Event Parking – $5″, ushering cars onto lots they don’t own and charging for it.

The Police Department refuses to take action to stop this, because it’s happening on private property and the owner is not available to complain or press charges – and has not filed a no-trespass order.

The neighborhood cannot get the absentee owner to respond to the problem, or even communicate with them, so they’re not getting any help from the public sector on the issue.

Now that is a real problem!

Initial Reactions

So the makeup of the meeting was about what I expected. I didn’t really see any developers, business owners, or store managers – it was mostly homeowners from the nearby neighborhood.

The presentation material was baffling to me, however.

In the speech (and in the flyer) Marlene Gaffrick specifically stated:
“As an auto-dependent city, we need to look to other auto-dependent cities for solutions.”

This meeting was held in Montrose – and has been specifically triggered by all the infill growth and redevelopment activity in Houston’s urban core! The problems with the parking ordinance are not – for the most part – occuring in the auto-centric majority of Houston, they’re occuring in the pre-1930′s pedestrian-oriented core.

Effectively the City is saying this:

“The only non-automobile-dependent part of our city is having trouble with cars, so we need to retrofit it to being more automobile-dependent.”

Why on earth are we not looking the other direction?!

Houston needs to look to other walkable urban cities to find better solutions for issues in its urban core.

The simplest solution of all? Meter the streets! This would quickly ensure that anyone with available off-street parking will use it (instead of being lazy and parking in front), and that “strangers” won’t leave their cars for too long on-street (as they are paying to do so). The funds raised by the meters should be used to accelerate improvements to the streets and sidewalks in the area.

As a political concession (which I don’t love, but I think is probably necessary to get something like this accomplished), offer one “exempt” parking pass to each household on every block. Residents can then park as many cars as they want on their own property, and can park one car on-street (on their block only). Additional guests, visitors, etc. have to pay at the meter.

Conclusions

Parking is an important issue. The parking ordinance is, in fact, one of the biggest ways the City of Houston regulates development… and that’s the problem. Research has shown that parking ordinances are among the least effective tools used by cities in the US. The last thing we need to do is make our parking ordinance bigger and more unwieldy, and I’m afraid that’s where the political pressure is leaning.

In the next part of this series I’ll take a look at some local examples of how the existing parking ordinance fails, and respond to many of the specific issues from the meeting in more detail.