ATL Urbanist

City of Atlanta parking requirements could stand to be reduced

A post on StreetsBlog today pointed me to a great graphic that shows the amount of office parking required by city governments across the US. From the post:

Architect Seth Goodman is on a mission to illustrate the absurdity of parking requirements…showing mandatory parking requirements for office buildings in different American cities

See the full graphic here

The cities with the best policies — by which I mean those that require the least amount of parking for offices — include: Seattle, Chicago, DC, Denver, Portland and Pittsburgh.

Atlanta falls in the not-so-cool end of the list, with about 330 spaces required for every 3250 sq ft of office. Things could be worse; we could be Austin or Albuquerque, which appear to be dead set on paving their entire cities.

But things could be much better, too. Atlanta appears to be the only city with heavy rail transit in that lower third of the list, and one of my biggest peeves is the way MARTA is put at a disadvantage by policies that give giving cars such an edge over alternative transit.

Reducing parking requirements is an elemental part of making better urban spaces. According to the EPA (and common sense), high parking requirements:

…can deter compact, mixed-use development and redevelopment in older neighborhoods. Furthermore, large expanses of surface parking and stand-alone parking structures can discourage walking and make driving the only viable transportation between destinations.

A good mix of people helps neighborhoods and cities

As a downtowner with a kid, I liked reading this call for family-friendly urban places from writer Kaid Benfield in a post about building a smarter smart growth:

Make urbanism more family-friendly, too.  We are building better cities with smart growth, but for whom?  Do we really want to keep turning a blind eye to such a major segment of our population? …I believe we need to change that and, for planners, that means better schools, better parks and playgrounds, and at least some moderate- (rather than high-) density housing with a little yard space.

Walkable, compact urban places are not the exclusive domain of young creative people. They’re great for everyone; singles, couples, families with children, retirees — and all income levels. It’s important to have a good mix of residents from all these groups in a neighborhood because they each bring strengths that benefit not only individual neighborhoods, but overall cities.

Sometimes those strengths and benefits might not be obvious. For example: what strength do you lose when low- and medium-income residents are pushed out due to gentrification and rising home prices? You lose an important, opposing voice to NIMBYism.

As was recently reported by Reuters’ Felix Salmon in a piece titled “Why America’s population density is falling:”

As urban areas become increasingly affluent, filled with wealthy politicians and their wealthier donors, it becomes harder and harder for developers to procure the zoning changes and construction permits they need in order to keep on producing new residential inventory.

When new developments can’t be built, prices skyrocket and low-income people get priced out (and end up in car-centric suburbs, an issue for another post). The problem snowballs as both rising property values and the NIMBYism of affluent residents work together to prohibit anything but more affluence, depleting a neighborhood of diversity and the strengths that come with it.

And obviously, you see a converse and equally stifling effect when a neighborhood has only low-income people.

Good urbanism requires a good mix of residents: renters who allow new developments nearby without shouting “Not in My Back Yard”; owners who keep an eye on long-term livability; singles who are happy to see the new nightlife spots; and families with kids who push for a new park with a playground.

With that kind of diversity, you end up with a healthy neighborhood and a healthy city.

Photo of Streets Alive from Flickr user Atlanta BeltLine

Entertainment districts are dying, but better urban neighborhoods are growing

The Atlanta History Center blog offers another great entry in its Then & Now series, showing the 1890s activity around what is now Underground Atlanta.

Take a look at the number of people in this spot 120 years ago versus what we see regularly today. Despite the city pumping $8 million annually into Underground Atlanta, a development designated as a state Entertainment District, the area is relatively slow much of the week. On weeknights, as I saw recently, it’s downright serene.

Which proves a point made on the Strong Towns blog this week in a post titled Let’s End “Entertainment Districts.”  It explores the failures of the downtown entertainment zones, produced by 1970s urban-renewal efforts to bring suburbanites into cities that were emptied by White Flight and disinvestment.

With Underground Atlanta, we offered people in the metro a variation on a suburban mall, but more nightlife-focused. We accommodated suburbanites’ needs by providing behemoth parking decks nearby where grand downtown buildings once stood. It’s been a failure. One that has resulted in dead zones where there should be none.

Strong Towns director Charles Marohn writes this in the comments of the post:

…every area where there is people should be an “entertainment district”, or at least a district where one can go to a coffee shop, get a bite to eat and enjoy the trappings of urban life. Only in the Suburban Experiment do we take cities where this is happening along subsidized highway strips and then try to establish a competing, auto-oriented cluster in a target renewal area and call that great planning.

But a better scenario is occurring all over downtown and other intown neighborhoods. Instead of focusing heavily on the needs of car-bound suburbanites, we’re building new and better urban neighborhoods with an eye on livability.

My family lives downtown and we walk to restaurants, bars (<— not with the child), parks and stores. People in Midtown, Old Fourth Ward and elsewhere are increasingly doing the same — living near places where they have entertainment and other amenities nearby.

The old model of single-use districts — separating purely residential areas from purely commercial ones — still hangs on stubbornly in many intown areas. But in others, it’s visibly disappearing and being replaced with something more sustainable: places where people want to live, not just visit; where residents can get around to “entertainment” and more without getting in a car for every trip.

Atlanta’s skyscrapers and good urbanism

Atlanta’s office towers are impressive looking, but they haven’t always been an example of ‘good urbanism’ in the city. Evolving residential patterns, however, could bring a change for the better.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports on a slowing of demand in intown Atlanta office space, which is not necessarily bad news. The slowdown reflects a continuing change in the live/work commuter model of the metro — a change that I like.

For decades, these office towers benefited from a system that relied too heavily on suburban commuters driving in from subdivisions many miles away. A car-centric separation of land uses like this is not good for the urban core. Though suburban commuting will always be a part of the picture, cities truly thrive when they focus primarily on a mix of uses that encourages alternative transportation modes.

This quote from the article shows the changes underway, ones that point to a more sustainable model for the future:

“A rise in multifamily demand has brought the return of cranes to the skies of Atlanta,” Jones Lang LaSalle said. “Midtown has several new apartment projects on the way, which brings much needed increased population density to Atlanta’s most vibrant urban area. This should benefit office landlords there in the long term.”

The days when the skyscrapers of intown Atlanta served chiefly as the office park for suburban car commuters are fading, and good riddance. Continuing to build a more varied urban core, with an increased density of residential and commercial uses mixed together, will serve Atlanta well in the long run — assuming we build places that are attractive to a wide range of residents and that are built with walkability in mind.

Photo of Atlanta commuter traffic from Flickr user Full Circle