Thomas Breen photos
City Plan Director Aicha Woods (left) with neighbors on Greenwich Ave.
Parking problem on Howard Ave. sidewalk.
Cars, cars, cars, houses, and cars, on Howard.
City Plan Director Aïcha Woods walked past a car parked in the middle of the sidewalk on Howard Avenue.
She paused, turned around, pulled out her phone, and took a picture.
“This,” she declared, “is what I call a parking problem.”
Woods spotted that sidewalk-blocking sedan Monday afternoon during a zoning-focused walking tour of the Hill.
Joined by city Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli, (soon-to-be-former) city transit chief Doug Hausalden, and a half-dozen Hill South alders and community management team stalwarts, Woods led the tour as an opportunity to talk with Hill neighbors in their own neighborhood about a controversial rezoning proposal currently making its way through City Hall.
The rezoning proposal has two parts: The first would make it easier for owner-occupants to convert attics and basements and garages into apartments. The second would reduce the minimum lot size for new housing to 4,000 square feet citywide.
At City Plan Commission public hearings and community management team meetings, Hill residents have pushed back against that first half of the proposed zoning amendment — the part encouraging new accessory dwelling units (ADUs), sometimes known as “mother-in-law apartments.”
Their primary criticism has been that the new law might make the neighborhood’s current dearth of parking even worse. The rezoning proposal as currently pitched by the city does not require a landlord to provide new on-site parking to accommodate a new ADU.
Thus Monday’s walking tour.
Woods, her city colleagues, and Hill neighbors met up at the police substation at 410 Howard Ave. They spent nearly two hours walking along Greenwich Avenue, Arthur Street, Howard Avenue, Salem Street, and the residential blocks in between.
Along the way, Woods explained the details and goals of the rezoning proposal: To incrementally create more housing across the city. To legalize and regulate existing ADUs that already exist. To offer a potential new source of income for homeowners looking to stay put. To drive down the overall cost of rental housing by increasing the supply of affordable units.
Woods and Alder Kampton Singh.
“It’s very, very gradual,” Woods said about the proposed zoning reform. It’s not going to result in “a sudden influx of ADUs.”
This is about trying to find a way to use local land-use law to promote safe, affordable, and sustainable neighborhoods, she said.
Hill neighbors, meanwhile, consistently pointed out how they thought the new zoning law might cause more harm than good: By promoting greater density in an already-crowded section of the city. By exacerbating parking problems that already spill over into every nook and cranny of pedestrian life in the Hill.
“We want to look at it street by street,” Hill Alder Kampton Singh said, and not just apply this ADU ordinance as is across all of the Hill, let alone all of the city.
Portsea Street resident Roni Elliott agreed: “It shouldn’t be across the board.”
“Cars Definitely An Issue From Street To Street”
On Howard Avenue.
And what did the walking tour find?
Well … a lot of cars. Parked all over the place.
Some in driveways …
… some on front lawns …
Greenwich Avenue.
… some on the sidewalk …
Edgar Street.
… and some fenced in, alongside a dozen other stationary vehicles.
At the start of the walk, Woods told Elliott that part of the reason the ADU proposal is slated for neighborhoods across the city is that “a lot of neighborhoods have similar fabrics.”
That is, many of the residential neighborhoods across the city have two- and three-family homes that were built in the early 20th century, and could likely accommodate an extra housing unit.
\Woods lives in the Goatville section of East Rock. “It’s easy to live there without a car,” she said.
She also acknowledged that “there may be more barriers to being able to walk to work” in the Hill. “That may be a reason why there are more cars.”
Elliott added another reason: In Goatville, she said, “you’re going to have more Yalies. Here, you’re not.”
Elliott and Hill Alder Carmen Rodriguez.
Hill Alder Carmen Rodriguez described how she has seen neighbors on Carlisle Street and elsewhere use garbage cans to block off on-street parking spaces in a competitive attempt to reserve a place to put their car.
“We want to keep the peace,” she said. In the Hill, that sometimes means making sure that there aren’t too many cars fighting over too few parking spaces.
Arthur Street.
At the end of the tour, Woods said she was surprised to see some streets, like Arthur (pictured above), with more open space — and fewer parked cars — than she anticipated.
On other blocks, and on other lots, that wasn’t the case.
“The cars are definitely an issue from street to street,” she said.
She said she and her staff will take all of the feedback and observations from Monday’s tour and think about how to translate them into potential, proposed updates to the rezoning proposal as it makes its way from the City Plan Commission to the Board of Alders Legislation Committee later this summer.
“Housing Choice Citywide”
Side by side on Greenwich Ave.
Woods, city staff, and Hill neighbors didn’t see just parked cars during Monday’s zoning-focused walk through the neighborhood.
They also found plenty of houses — and vacant lots ripe for new places for people to live.
Every step seemed to present another opportunity to talk about what it’s like living in the Hill today, and what local land-use laws can and should do to promote a healthier and happier neighborhood.
Elliott pointed out two two-family houses standing just inches apart on Greenwich Avenue. Would the new ADU and minimum lot size laws allow houses to sprout up less than a foot away from where current houses already exist?
“You wouldn’t be able to build anything that close together” today, even if the rezoning proposal passed, Woods said. That’s because new housing and ADUs would still have to follow all of the bulk regulations around height and setback that already exist in the zoning code.
Woods spots a vacant lot, ready for zoning-encouraged housing.
“Zoning is setting rules,” she added.
Just because a zoning law changes doesn’t mean that every single ADU that can be built will be built. New housing production also depends on the availability of financing. Zoning reform could be one way that the city makes building more, affordable housing just a little bit easier, she said.
Why isn’t the city focusing on zoning reforms that add more affordable housing to exclusive, white wealthy neighborhoods like East Rock and Westville? asked City Point resident Andrew Giering. One of the explicit goals of zoning reform across the state and the country is to desegregate neighborhoods. Why pass a zoning reform that would treat East Rock and the Hill the same way, when the latter is already so racially and economically diverse?
“We’re trying to promote housing choice citywide,” Woods replied.
Woods (center) with Hill residents Claudette Kidd and Sarah McIver.
Woods later asked Hill South Community Management Team Chair Sarah McIver if the city should prioritize promoting more housing in the Hill South neighborhood, or if the city should focus its efforts elsewhere.
“I think we need opportunities for other neighborhoods,” McIver replied.
Martha Dye (right) greets the Hill walkers on Arthur Street.
At Arthur Street and Rosette Street, the group found Martha Dye sitting on her porch behind a front garden in full bloom.
Dye showed Woods a rental property that sits directly behind her house.
“It’s lovely back here,” Woods said.
How is it having a house so close to the back of your own home? she asked Dye. Is it tough?
Yes, Dye replied.
Why?
Because the home is owned by an “absentee landlord.”
Mandy, Mandy Everywhere
Mandy-owned properties on Greenwich Ave.
Throughout the walking tour, city staff and Hill neighbors marveled at just how many homes on nearly every block they visited bore the same dark-blue, white-lettered Mandy Management signs.
Look at that, Elliott said on Greenwich Avenue: “Mandy’s got every single one.”
Elliott made that remark while looking at a row of two-family houses on the western side of Greenwich Avenue between Third Street and Fourth Street. On that one-block stretch, companies affiliated with the local megalandlord Mandy Management own the houses at 312, 314, 320, and 324.
“How does Mandy buy so many properties?” McIver asked at the end of the tour.
“They are very aggressive in the marketplace,” Piscitelli replied.
The city has the money and the interest to invest in helping first-time homeowners buy properties across the city, including in the Hill, he said. “We often aren’t fast enough.”