FROM THE MIAMI HERALD OP-ED PUBLISHED JANUARY 25, 2015
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.
