Four Hours on the Parking Minimums

The meeting was gaveled in at six and adjourned at ten past ten. The item under discussion was whether new apartment buildings on the Fourth Street corridor must include 1.5 parking spaces per unit, a requirement written in 1974 and unchanged since.

Ninety people signed up to speak. The clock was set to two minutes and enforced unevenly. Of the ninety, sixty-one spoke in favor of keeping the requirement, twenty-eight against, and one gentleman spoke for a hundred and ten seconds about a tree.

The arguments for keeping it were, almost without exception, about the street: that residents of a new building would park on it, that the street is already full, and that the people who live on it now cannot find a space after seven. These are real concerns and they were made honestly by people who have circled their own block.

The argument against it was made by a planner with a chart and by four residents under thirty, and it was that each mandated space costs somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand dollars to build in a structured garage, that this cost lands in the rent of every unit whether or not the tenant owns a car, and that the requirement is why the corridor has been discussed for eleven years and built on for none.

Council Member Duffy, who voted to keep the requirement, said he was not prepared to gamble the neighborhood's street parking on a projection. Council Member Osei-Bonsu, who voted to remove it, said the neighborhood had been gambling on the projection for eleven years and had lost every hand.

The vote was 4–3. The corridor remains a surface lot and a shuttered tire shop. The item returns to the agenda in October, which is what happens to every item.

A woman from the 400 block was cut off mid-sentence at one minute fifty-eight seconds while describing a specific intersection. She was thanked for her time.

An attorney representing the applicant, invited to respond to questions from the dais, spoke for what the recording confirms was eight minutes and forty seconds, in four segments, each of which began with a council member asking a question and ended somewhere else entirely.

This is not corruption. It is worse in a way, because it is nobody's decision: the resident is a speaker and the attorney is a resource, and the two categories have different clocks, and no one in the room ever agreed to that.

The tree is on Marchetti Avenue. It is, per the speaker, magnificent, and it is, per the speaker, in danger from a sidewalk project not before the council on Tuesday or any other night.

The mayor thanked him warmly and asked staff to look into it. Staff will look into it. Honestly, good.