Parking rules choke growth of apartments

CHRISTOPHER HUME
Toronto Star

There are many ways cars destroy cities. Some are obvious, others less so.

In Toronto, one of the subtlest ways the automobile has inflicted major
damage to the city is through parking bylaws. Though these otherwise obscure
provisions are usually overlooked, if not ignored, by municipal politicians,
they have had a profound effect on the built form of the city.

One result is that the low-rise main-street development the city has sought
for the last 20 years has never happened — and never will unless changes
occur.

As it stands, there are different parking requirements in different areas.
They dictate the number of parking spots that must be included in new
buildings. These figures vary roughly from .75 to 1.0 parking spot per
residential unit, but are usually closer to 1.0.

That's fine for larger projects, when excavating underground garages makes
economic sense, but not for smaller buildings of, say, three to six storeys.

In these cases, the parking would have to be provided at ground level, which
typically means one whole floor of the building, the most financially
significant floor, must be left open, undeveloped, to make room for cars.

The irony, of course, is that the streets where intensification is
proposed — Yonge, Queen, Bloor, St. Clair, the Danforth, for example — are
already well served by public transit. In other words, these are the very
arteries where cars are least necessary.

"The parking issue is a red herring," insists Toronto architect David
Oleson, author of a main street housing feasibility report for the city.

"We haven't dealt with the automobile very creatively in Toronto. We don't
need to be able to park cars in our backyards, just in the neighbourhood.
The city has reduced parking requirements in some areas, but even so on
small sites they are prohibitive. City policies don't lead; they follow."

But as city Councillor Joe Pantalone points out, at a time when Toronto is
fighting for its fiscal life, issues such as parking aren't part of
political consciousness.

"Changing parking bylaws requires strong political will," Pantalone says.
"And it's not high on the priority list these days.

"But the existing requirements make it impossible to build low- and
medium-rise development. If we deal with it on a case-by-case basis, it
becomes a NIMBY issue and nothing happens."

Developers will tell you that demand for parking downtown is declining; some
suggest that .5 would be adequate. That means the number of parking spots
would be half the number of apartments.

Other cities take a more inventive approach. In Vancouver, some condo
builders now include a fleet of cars that owners can rent hourly or daily.

In New York, where real estate is too expensive to be wasted on parking
lots, you find stacked parking, which allows one spot to accommodate two or
three cars.

For us in Toronto, the challenge is to take maximum advantage of the
existing infrastructure, much of which is now woefully underused. Even our
much-vaunted subway, especially the Bloor-Danforth line, rarely operates at
full capacity. But because of our absurd and deeply anti-urban parking
policies, we're nowhere near that yet.

"You could get more density on the Danforth and Bloor St. W. than even on
King or Queen, the standard main streets," Oleson argues.

"These should be the primary focus for mixed-use intensification, because
they are the subway routes. The city's still thinking about this, but so far
our land-use patterns and transit planning aren't in sync. The two must be
more closely connected.

"The parking requirements are a good example of how dysfunctional city
policy has become. It's pretty fundamental. It's the other side of the
infrastructure, the invented infrastructure, that has started to get in the
way.

"The city, to its credit, has begun to talk about it, but it still hasn't
managed to come to grips with the issue."

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Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca