Less parking, more housing: two zoning proposals headed to City Council

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Mayor Jon Mitchell’s newest strategy to address the city’s housing crisis is a pair of proposals to slash parking requirements for new apartment buildings and make it easier to build on small lots. But skeptical city councilors may question his plans.

Current city zoning requires builders to set aside at least two off-street parking spaces for every home in a new project. That means a 10-unit apartment building would need a garage or parking lot with at least 20 spaces. Developers say it’s an unnecessarily high standard, and it contributes to higher housing costs.

The mayor’s proposal would reduce the minimum to one space per unit for apartments with less than three bedrooms. The current zoning would stay in place for those larger apartments, single-family homes, and duplexes. Commercial properties would also get significant reductions in their parking requirements.

Planners say lowering parking requirements is tied to economic development and solving the city’s housing crisis.

“That’s space that’s getting devoted to storing a car, as opposed to housing a person,” Assistant City Planner Michael McCarthy said.

Mitchell’s other proposal is designed to add more housing on vacant lots throughout the city. Many of these lots once had homes on them, but the buildings were lost to fires or abandonment and restrictive zoning made it illegal to rebuild what used to be there.

For more than a year, city planners have been rolling out a series of zoning reforms designed to spur new housing construction and economic development. They were originally promised in Mitchell’s Building New Bedford housing plan announced in 2023.

The city has created a simpler permitting process for small developments, cleaned up confusing parts of the city code, and set up “transit-oriented” zoning districts that allow for dense development near the city’s MBTA stations.

The two new proposals build on those changes, city planners say.

The City Council will decide whether to pass the ordinances, potentially with amendments. The ordinance committee is scheduled to take up the proposals on Nov. 20.

Councilors are likely to have concerns about the parking proposal. Some have said parking is already tight in the city and they would hesitate to pass significant city-wide changes.

Councilor Ryan Pereira, chair of the committee, said he supports the parking proposal, but expects the infill ordinance to be “heavily debated.”

The Planning Board gave a positive recommendation on both ordinances at its Nov. 12 meeting.

New Bedford is not alone in revisiting its zoning code, said Elise Rapoza, a city resident and housing researcher at the think tank MassINC.

“It’s a growing movement to try to address the cost of housing production, by right-sizing the amount of parking you need,” she said.

In the last few years, some Massachusetts cities have eliminated parking minimums for new apartment buildings. Most of the state’s gateway cities now have smaller zoning districts that only require one space or fewer per apartment, Rapoza’s research has found.

In New Bedford, where buildable land is limited, unused parking spots are an expensive waste of space, Rapoza said.

The case for lower parking minimums

City planners say high parking standards are an obstacle to addressing the city’s housing crisis. McCarthy estimated that one parking space can cost at least $5,000 to $10,000, an expense that gets passed onto tenants through higher rents.

The renovation of Holy Family High School into 15 new mixed-income apartments was slowed by the city’s current parking minimums, said Colleen Kavanaugh, chief operating officer of the housing developer CMK Development partners.

“If we’d had one space per unit, that building would have been done quicker and it would have been done cheaper,” she said.

CMK got a parking reduction from the Planning Board, allowing it to provide 22 parking spaces for the 15 units instead of 30 spaces.

Still, to secure all 22 spaces, CMK had to buy eight extra spaces from the church next door for $50,000, Kavanaugh said. Not all of the tenants have a car, she said, so many of the building’s parking spaces sit empty.

The mayor’s zoning proposal would reduce parking to one space per unit for many apartments, but keep two spaces per unit for single-family homes and duplexes.

“We feel it’s a moderate change,” Assistant Planning Director Anne Louro said.

Planners say the proposed standard came from a city study of existing multifamily buildings. It found that 46% of sampled buildings in the city had one parking space per unit, while 20% had no off-street parking at all.

That lines up with other statistics on car ownership in New Bedford. Rapoza, the MassINC researcher, cited 2023 census data showing that half of renter households in the city own one car. About 20% have two cars, but that’s “counterbalanced” by 26% with no car at all, she said. 

New commercial development would also face significantly lower parking minimums.

For example, a 5,000-square-foot office building would need 10 parking spaces, not 25. A 40,000-square-foot grocery store would need 133 spaces, not 200.

“We’re having developers come to us and say, ‘I know how much parking I need for my customers. I don’t need as much as your ordinance is requiring me to provide,’” McCarthy said.

Since 2023, the Planning Board has excused developers from building 658 parking spaces, according to city planners; 86% were for commercial development. 

Planners say lower parking minimums would address city councilors’ calls to cut red tape in permitting. Asking for a reduction from the Planning Board can take months, with no guarantee. 

The proposed ordinance would also create specific criteria that the Planning Board would use when considering whether to grant a further parking reduction beyond the zoning change. It would instruct the board to consider more creative strategies to manage parking demand and encourage other forms of transportation. It would also instruct board members to consider industry standards from professional organizations like the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

Planners acknowledged that some residents feel like there already isn’t enough parking in the city. But Louro said she didn’t expect enough new construction in parking-strapped neighborhoods for the proposal to make a significant impact there. Planners emphasized that the proposal doesn’t stop developers from providing more parking than required. 

Councilors may be skeptical

City councilors interviewed about their positions on housing policy ahead of the Nov. 4 election had concerns about lowering parking requirements. 

Naomi Carney and Joe Lopes said they would support a 1.5-space-per-unit minimum, which is higher than the mayor’s proposal.

Ian Abreu and Leo Choquette said they would prefer a more targeted, neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach. The mayor’s proposal applies citywide, except in neighborhoods zoned exclusively for single-family homes.

Maria Giesta said she opposed a one-space-per-unit standard, in part because her Ward 2 constituents have strongly opposed past developments because of parking concerns. 

Unofficial election results show Giesta lost to challenger Scott Pemberton by 17 votes. Her term expires at the end of this year. Pemberton did not agree to an interview with Light reporters.

James Roy, a newcomer who won an at-large seat in this month’s election, did not take a specific stance on parking minimums.

Shane Burgo, the council’s most progressive voice on housing, said he supports the one-space-per-unit proposal.

Pereira, the ordinance committee chair, also supports the proposal. He said he understands concerns about making it harder to park, but feels they’re outweighed by the need to build more housing to lower rents.

“I think we need to overhaul our parking ordinance,” he said. “It’s outdated and it doesn’t fit the current needs of the community.”

Filling in empty lots

The second proposed zoning change before the council is known as an “infill” ordinance. That’s because the proposal aims to make it easier to “fill in” empty parcels with buildings that match the surrounding neighborhood.

You don’t have to walk far in one of New Bedford’s triple-decker neighborhoods to come across a vacant lot where you’d expect to see a house. It’s often because a house used to be there, but it burned down and was never replaced.

It’s illegal to build new homes on almost all of those lots — or on most lots in the city, for that matter.

Current zoning only allows new buildings on large lots. In some parts of the city, 94% of lots are too small for new construction.

The homes now on these lots were grandfathered in when the dimensional requirements were introduced decades ago. In zoning speak, these buildings are “nonconforming.”

When a nonconforming home is destroyed, there’s a narrow one-year window to rebuild what was there. That’s hardly enough time for a homeowner to get their insurance payout and rebuild, or sell to someone else who wants to rebuild, planners say.

“We call them unbuildable lots,” Louro said.

The city’s side yard program allows some of these lots to be absorbed into abutting properties, but that doesn’t generate the same tax revenue that a new building would, she added.

The mayor’s zoning proposal would lower lot size minimums in multifamily zoning districts, allowing for development on those lots that better matches surrounding homes.

It would also roll back other requirements that don’t match the housing in the city today, like mandates that all new buildings have large, suburban-style setbacks.

This is why drugstores surrounded by a vast “moat of parking” get built in the North End, right next to triple-decker businesses that go right up to the property line, McCarthy said.

“When you have that sort of incongruency, it messes with the character of the neighborhood,” he said.

The proposal would also create a special permit process to build on lots that still fall below the revised minimum lot size requirements. Developers would need permission from the Planning Board to get the permit.

Planning Board member Shayne Trimbell supported the proposal at the board’s Nov. 12 meeting. He said his own home, built in 1919, would have to go through an intensive permitting process to be built under current zoning.

“It’s going to help us rebuild New England the way we like New England,” he said.

Pereira said the infill ordinance will probably take a long time to get through the council because it’s a new concept and councilors will probably have a lot of questions. He was arranging to meet with city planners to go over the ordinance before the Nov. 20 committee meeting.

A slate of reforms

The parking and infill ordinances are part of a zoning overhaul that started more than a year ago with the 2023 Building New Bedford plan, the administration’s roadmap to addressing the city’s housing crisis.

The city now has a leaner permitting process that allows small developments to get approval from Planning Department staff, skipping a more intensive, time-consuming Planning Board review.

Two “transit-oriented development” zoning districts now surround the city’s new MBTA stations. They’re designed to encourage denser development with a mix of housing and businesses. The city had to create at least one of them to comply with the MBTA Communities Act.

The city has updated its list of allowed uses of land, making room for modern uses like breweries and biotechnology manufacturing. That ordinance ran into trouble earlier this year when the city council realized they had inadvertently eliminated single-family zoning. They quickly reversed the single-family change in August while keeping the other updates.

The parking and infill ordinances are on the agenda for the council’s ordinance committee meeting on Nov. 20.

At the meeting, councilors will also review a proposed law allowing wider use of accessory dwelling units, or in-law apartments. Gov. Maura Healey signed a law allowing them by-right on single-family lots in August 2024. Since then, the administration and City Council have been working on a local ordinance to implement the state change.

Jen Carloni, the city’s planning director, has been on maternity leave during the latest round of proposals, but planners and Public Information Officer Jonathan Darling credited her with much of the work that went into designing the new ordinances.

So, what’s next?

The only promised zoning reform that the administration hasn’t formally proposed yet is form-based code. This type of zoning focuses on the appearance and character of buildings, and how they fit into the surrounding neighborhood, rather than how the buildings are used. It’s meant to create walkable neighborhoods with a mix of homes and businesses instead of separating different uses into geographically separate zones.

The city released its latest comprehensive plan this month, charting a course for economic development and land use initiatives over the next decade. But the plan didn’t announce major new initiatives or call for a significant shift in strategy. Instead, city officials characterized it as a continuation of past city plans, such as Building New Bedford.

At a press conference on Nov. 6, Mayor Mitchell highlighted certain corridors, like the transit-oriented districts, where his administration hopes to see new, transformative development. But not all parts of the city are slated for big construction projects.

“In single-family neighborhoods, there won’t be much of a change at all,” Mitchell said.

Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org

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