WHEN A CITY APPROVES HIS CONCEPT
PlusUrbia Design championed relaxed parking for Little Havana and
other core areas of Miami where small infill development was stalled
because of existing Miami 21 structured parking requirements.
CURBED.com wrote about our concept being adopted by a City Board:
http://miami.curbed.com/archives/2015/07/30/it-may-finally-be-feasible-to-build-small-infill-buildings-in-miami.php
This
is the editorial, published more than half a year ago, where
PlusUrbia's Juan Mullerat made a case for waiving parking for infill
development on small, infill lots.
BY JUAN MULLERAT
juan@plusurbia.com
The
average American uses 900 square feet for parking each day. The average
apartment is 982 square feet. That means North Americans use almost as
much room for cars as for homes. Miami’s gluttonous parking habit, and
the way the city’s zoning code deals with this problem, discourages
small-scale development that could greatly improve its many
neighborhoods.
Miami21, the city’s zoning code, regulates
development with sequential intensities assigned to zones. Simply put:
The less intense the zone, the smaller the development allowed — Zone 3
allows only single family houses, while Zone 6 is assigned to areas such
as Downtown and Brickell. Miami21 allocates all the ingredients for
development: density, open space, building size, street frontage and
green space sequentially depending on its zone.
But it does not do this with parking.
Parking
requirements are determined by building uses, not by a zone’s
density/intensity. That means that generally, a five-bedroom home in
Morningside (Zone 3) has the same parking requirements (1.5 spaces) as a
studio apartment in Brickell (Zone 6). However, the Morningside mansion
can typically accommodate six cars in driveways and garages, while the
Brickell studio may use only one or none.
While Miami21 encourages
urban infill redevelopment, we currently see few small-scale buildings
that long defined the city. Few neighborhood-scaled mid- and low-rise
projects are being developed, largely because of their parking demands.
Intense super-block developments dominate the real-estate market because
they can exploit their super size to cover their parking structures’
building costs.
Miami’s code rewards these behemoths by applying a
use-based sharing ratio that exponentially reduces required parking as
the building gets larger.
Additionally, a required driveway
consumes about 25 percent of a small parcel’s frontage. On a superblock,
it may be less than 1 percent. This difference alone can kill a
small-scale project. Small property owners will often wait to be bought
out by developers assembling land for mega developments, as it is rarely
feasible to develop small buildings because of their parking
requirements.
The result is dozens of neighborhoods blighted with
vacant lots and dilapidated small buildings. There is no incentive for
small-scale development, which arguably weathers real estate’s cyclical
booms and busts better than mega developments that crash to a halt when
the economy slows.
Cities are living, breathing organisms made up of distinctly unique neighborhoods. They cannot survive on a diet of superblocks.
To
promote the healthy evolution of diverse places, the Miami21 code
requires constant attention. Surgical amendments to the code address
local conditions and enable growth addressing land use, open space,
accessibility and infrastructure conscious of its context.
Wynwood,
for example, a warehouse district undergoing significant change, has
required district-specific code modifications to facilitate its
transformation into an arts hub. Every district and neighborhood
requires different calibration to remain unique. The code needs to be
adjusted to address the different nuances and shifting market trends of
each area. Zoning must be an enabler, not a hindrance to the evolution
of a city.
Miami21 establishes a strong framework code for the
city of Miami to guide growth. But its parking requirements must be
revisited to build human-scaled developments on thousands of vacant lots
that should be brought to life with housing, jobs, services and
activity.
Miami’s parking blues can be fixed by applying several
methods at the city’s disposal, including better public transportation
and especially the expansion of the fee-in-lieu program that allows
developers to pay into a parking fund.
That system, already used
in parts of the city, builds garages that serve multiple developments —
in lieu of the burden of creating onsite parking. Miami needs to
revisit, with precision, ways to encourage development opportunities for
these small urban parcels.
The first major fix should be to base parking requirements and sharing ratio reductions by both land use
and
its increasing density and intensity (from the suburban Zone 3 up to
the Brickell skyscraper Zone 6) allowed in the Miami21 code.
Juan
Mullerat, an urban designer with two decades of international
experience, is principal at PlusUrbia Design in Coconut Grove.
