200 Parking Spaces Down. 4,800 To Go?

The city’s ready to create 200 long-promised off-site parking spaces for a downtown office tower. Now it has to figure out how to meet a projected need for 5,000 more spaces overall by 2025 — or face a $180 million tab.

City transit chief Doug Hausladen laid out that long-term challenge to a parking and transportation working group meeting at City Hall Thursday night. The challenge stems from New Haven’s continued growth.

To build 3,000 of those spaces would cost the city and private developers about $93 million, Hausladen said. But he confessed that that was a conservative estimate.

“We’re actually building at $55,000 to $60,000 per space,” he said. ​“Imagine those 3,000 parking spaces is really $180 million.”

The working group, which consists of alders, community members and major employers such as Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, is tasked with looking for ways to ensure that the expensive future Hausladen outlined never happens — that New Haven addresses its parking crunch without having suddenly to spend all that money creating needed new spaces.

The good new for the alders, Hausladen said, is that ​“the city is well planned.” It has been studying parking in tandem with mobility since 2003 and started coming up with some proposed solutions — which both make parking easier and promote alternatives to driving and parking in town.

Some of those solutions include installing meters that take both credit cards and coins, institution cell phone technology for parkers, bringing in Zipcar short-term car rentals. CTTransit has been promising to introduce using GPS technology on its buses to offer real-time information and promote more ridership— and idea that came out of these New Haven studies, along with the forthcoming New Haven bike share program.

Also, the city has been promoting transit alternatives and including new garages in plans like Hill to Downtown, Complete Streets, and a garage planned for a surface lot at Elm and Orange Street.

That latter plan stems from a long-term, undelivered promise New Haven made to create 200 parking spaces for the former New Haven Savings Bank building at 195 Church St. (pictured at the top of this story). Built in 1974, it was acquired by First Niagara in 2011 and more recently by developer Paul Denz. In the original deal with the developer, the city agreed to find nearby parking somewhere else instead of having the parking underneath the skyscraper

City development chief Nemerson said the previous owners never pushed the issue of the parking. But the new owner, Denz, discovered the parking requirement in the original agreement when he bought the 18-story building, and it’s time to pay the piper with the planned new Orange-Elm garage, to be built on a city-owned lot and two private pieces of property owned by the Ahern family. The garage is now in the design phase.

Meanwhile, the city also approved the development of The Union, a high-end apartment complex in the former Union Trust Bank building at 203 Church St., without parking. Nemerson said a similar agreement was made to provide 100 spaces somewhere else, possibly in the Orange and Elm street garage. More parking might also go into the garage once the former Webster Bank branch has sold.

“It’s not free,” he said of the parking that will be developed. ​“They have to pay the market rate.”

Alternatives To Garages

That said, the city is running out of viable space to build parking garages and must find alternatives. Hausladen said the city’s looking to the working group for ways of helping everyone look at parking. He said the city needs flexible parking for full and part-time employees, retail parking, resident parking that’s free. New Haven recently did away with its cost for resident-zoned parking, while other cities like Cincinnati and Chicago raised the cost for residential zoned parking.

Hausladen said the city has explored doing away with a rule that requires people to move their car 500 feet every two hours when they park at a high-demand downtown meter. Instead, it might allow someone to stay parked at a metered spot downtown longer, but require them to pay more every hour after the first two. He also spoke of raising the cost of metered parking in high demand areas, but giving people a discount if they’re willing to walk a few blocks because they parked farther away from downtown.

“After three hours, we really want you to go into a parking garage,” Hausladen said.

“There is a challenge for medium sized cities that don’t have subways,” Nemerson added. ​“It’s one thing in Boston where you can have people go downtown where there is no requirement to build parking, and parking is available for $40 a day, $400 month and people say ​‘I’ll take the T.’”

Nemerson cautioned against raising the price of parking too high on people who have no other way to get to New Haven without driving here. It also can’t forget people in city neighborhoods who need surface parking because they don’t have a driveway, he said.

But the city can also look at ways to innovate and offer people an opportunity to formally rent out their driveway to people who might park in their neighborhood when they’re not home, like an Airbnb for parking.

“What it means is rather than spending $90 million, as a society we can spend $40 million,” he said of the many different ways the city could reduce the need for parking over the next eight years. ​“With better transportation, you could create the equivalent of $90 million to $100 million in parking benefit if the society is willing to invest in better bus lines, light rail, and in more trains going to North Haven, which we are.”