In Aisha Samuel’s neighborhood, street parking is a nightmare. Often cars are squeezed so tightly on Highland Terrace that they block her driveway. Her only choice is to have them towed. But it happens again and again.
The problem, she fears, is only getting worse as her city is witnessing a surge in new construction. Samuel lives in the Central Valley Redevelopment Zone. In this zone, the municipal government encourages the construction of multi-story apartment buildings.
A block away, two new developments – one at 416 Highland Avenue and another at 415 Highland Avenue – will bring hundreds of new residents, but neither building has set aside on-site parking for each unit. Another nearby building at 621 Scotland Road was approved last year that provides only 58 parking spots for 78 units, the Four Oranges reported.
“How can you build new apartments and not have enough parking for tenants – not street parking, but parking in the building?” Samuel said.
One of Samuel’s strongest allies on this issue has been Councilwoman Tency Eason who frequently warns the Planning Board about the street parking situation.
“You know I’m always concerned about parking,” Eason said at a board meeting last year. “I thought we were trying to – if we were going to do development – offer extra spaces to offer some to the community.”
The problem has gotten so bad that the City Council passed an ordinance in December requiring a greater number of parking spaces for new projects. It’s unclear how effective this new law will be because redevelopment zones don’t have to adhere to local parking ordinances and it is within these zones where most of the construction is happening. The state still allows a developer to reduce the number of total parking spaces in a building if they designate some for electric vehicles.
When it comes to parking, Eason stands at the conservative side of this issue. She wants ample parking for those living in apartment buildings while also setting aside some spaces for others in the community.
But there is another way of looking at this issue.
A Rutgers Center for Real Estate study released last year warns that building too much on-site parking will increase construction costs that could later be passed on to renters, making neighborhoods less and less affordable.
Meanwhile, urban planners have been cautioning that strict parking requirements only make a neighborhood’s dependency on cars worse in the long run.
Tim Evans, director of research at New Jersey Future, wrote the essay “If You Pave It, They Will Park” that argues that parking requirements create neighborhoods that are too spread out.
“Parking requirements take up land that could be used for other stuff,” Evans said. “Putting buildings closer together reduces the need to have parking at every single destination.”
In the past six years, the Nishuane Group, the firm hired as the municipal planner for Orange and West Orange, has authored the city’s master plan and created a series of redevelopment zones that allow for larger buildings. Their hope is to build high-density neighborhoods centered around public transportation to encourage the use of buses and trains while creating communities where food, jobs, shopping, and nightlife are within walking distance.
If the plan works, it will create the sort of communities that most of us want to live in. Think of places like downtown Montclair, which wouldn’t exist if there had been strict parking requirements when it was built.
But Samuel’s neighborhood is a far cry from downtown Montclair. Residents of the Valley only have a couple of bus lines and the nearby Highland Avenue station doesn’t have enough daily stops to connect people to their daily needs and convince them to go car-free. In order for a redevelopment zone to function, public transportation has to improve.
“It’s hard to expand the public transportation network – we’re lucky that we inherited one from an era before the car was dominant everywhere,” Evans said.
Imposing fewer parking requirements might have more success in other neighborhoods, namely in Orange’s downtown corridor. Last April, during a Planning Board meeting, Gerard Haizel, a senior associate at the Nishuane Group, fiercely defended the proposal for a five-story building at 85 Main Street where a developer wants to allot 46 parking spaces for 51 dwelling units.
“This area of the city is within feet of a train station, it’s on a main thoroughfare where there is a lot of bus transit available – the sense is that this type of development is designed to encourage alternative modes of transportation,” Haizel said. “At some point, behaviors will have to change.”
Eason, a Planning Board member, responded with a joke. “It’s gonna be a problem – we’re going to get calls asking, ‘Where do I park?’” Eason said. “I’m going to send them all to your driveway.”
Residents in West Orange and Orange are becoming more vocal at Planning Board meetings. Opposition has knocked down out-of-scale development at 492 Conover Terrace last year and threatens another ongoing proposal at 512-522 Scotland Road. In West Orange, residents along Park Drive are rallying against a three-story 12-unit apartment building at 410 Main Street and they have been successful. The Planning Board convinced the developer to add an additional parking space, bringing the total to 14. The project is still 11 spaces short, according to the local ordinance, and requires a variance.
“The assumption that fair-market renters will have just one car in West Orange is ridiculous,” M.K. Adams, a resident on Park Drive, told the Four Oranges. “The parking variance would absolutely increase the demand for street parking in a large radius around 410 Main Street.”
Perhaps Haizel is right. In order for his vision to work, behaviors will have to change.
The question is whose behavior. Our society has become so dependent on cars. Who will be the first to trade in their SUV for a monthly bus pass, a bike or e-scooter?
Evans believes that it would be more prudent for townships to focus on luring more affordable housing developments whose tenants are less likely to be a multi-car household, he said.
“Before we focus on getting rid of cars altogether, we should try to build places where a household can get by having one car instead of two,” Evans said. “That alone would be a big win.”
Did you know you can watch recordings of recent Planning Board and Zoning Board meetings on our website here?
