The Soapbox: A roadmap to more housing for the Queen City

Check out our opinion piece published recently in the Manchester Ink Link! Here is an excerpt:

This summer, Manchester residents have engaged in community conversations about what we want the future of our community to look like through a revision of our zoning code. Across wards, residents resoundingly voiced a desire for more affordable, accessible, livable, walkable, and vibrant housing for all neighbors.

As members of the Manchester Neighbors Welcome Coalition, we know that Manchester needs more homes at different prices and sizes for our current and future neighbors. Manchester is short 8,500 homes to meet today’s needs, to say nothing of the future. Rent for 2-bedroom apartments jumped over 20% last year. The average house costs over $180,000 more than four years ago…

Acres of Asphalt: Part I

In this series of blog posts, we’ll explore the Manchester: Neighbors Welcome platform for the new zoning code proposed by the City. After months of public engagement about why we need more homes and walkable communities, the Steering Committee, appointed by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen (BMA), is getting to work. Their task is to explore the perspectives raised in the community meetings and recommend changes to the suggested code to the BMA. 

One of the potential changes suggested in the initial City draft is to prevent new surface parking lots from being built downtown. This is important - surface parking lots take up space that could be used to build walkable neighborhoods with businesses, restaurants, jobs, parks, and amenities, they’re expensive, and they’re dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists. 

While that’s a step in the right direction, the initial plan still retains onerous and unnecessary requirements for more asphalt outside of the downtown core. This is a mistake. 

For every new home built in Manchester, our city zoning code today requires 2 parking spots . Depending on how it’s built, that’s between 575 and 800 square feet of asphalt when you count the actual physical space for your car plus the entry and exit lanes for each space. 

Our recommendation is to remove all parking mandates for new homes across Manchester. In other cities and towns, such as Seabrook and Dover, the simple act of removing parking mandates has made significant numbers of new homes possible. 

What does parking have to do with housing? Parking drives up the cost of housing by adding expensive requirements to new homes:

• Excessive parking mandates compete for space with actual homes on the same piece of land, limiting the potential for more living space. 

• Many municipalities mandate certain levels of parking for each unit included in a new development. Manchester, for example, requires two parking spaces for every home. Each of these parking spots costs between $17,000 and $35,000 depending on the complexity of a structure — and they can take up as much space as a small, one bedroom apartment. 

• For every two parking spots required, you could be building another apartment. That’s a lot of asphalt that could be someone’s home.

Thanks to Parking Reform Network

• Parking dramatically increases the cost to a tenant to rent an apartment, regardless of whether the tenant owns a car or not. When developers are required to build parking, they add it to the cost of the rent, charging all renters for the parking they were required to build. Parking can add up to 17% - an average of $200 - to the rent every month.

• The costs and physical constraints imposed by parking mandates can mean that housing developments become infeasible. Allowing developers and residents to make choices about whether the want to add parking based on local circumstances is more effective and will result in more homes.

In order to allow more homes to be built, local leaders across the US are removing parking mandates, allowing property owners to choose for themselves whether to build parking and reduce the costs of the homes being built.

So how much parking exists in Manchester?

Plenty of parking exists in Manchester. Here is a map (thanks to the Parking Reform Network) of our surface parking lots in the downtown area alone. (Parking lots are marked in red.)

It’s important to remember four things about removing parking mandates:

1. All existing parking lots and spaces aren’t going anywhere. We’re talking about what happens moving forward.

2. Current mandates aren’t actually based on data. Across the Country, planners indicate that parking mandates in their community are based either on surveys of nearby cities or on a Traffic Engineering Handbook, not on actual data about our needs in Manchester.

3. New parking will still be built. Experiences from other cities show that parking lots and spaces are still being built, but it’s more connected to what is actually needed, rather than what is mandated. Studies from Washington State show that new housing being built has 40% less parking spaces than previously required. That correlates with data that show 40% of parking spaces sit empty at the most high demand times.

4. More housing is being built. Experiences from other cities and towns that have removed parking mandates show that more housing is being built. The housing now being built would likely not have been allowed under the previous rules but is now because the rules are more flexible, leading to more homes.  

Check back soon for the second part in this series about parking, where we explore our recommendations further, and share what happens when cities and towns remove parking mandates.