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A new ordinance that will slash parking minimums for new buildings, including apartments, passed a final City Council vote on Thursday night.
The body voted 8-3 to send the ordinance to the mayor’s desk to be signed into law. Councilors Derek Baptiste, Leo Choquette, and Brian Gomes voted against the ordinance, saying it would cause cars from new housing developments to overflow into surrounding neighborhoods.
Current zoning requires developers of new buildings to set aside at least two off-street parking spaces per housing unit, a standard that most existing multifamily buildings don’t meet — a triple-decker built today would need a driveway or garage with six spots. The Planning Board often grants exceptions to this rule, though it’s a costly and time-consuming approval process for developers.
The ordinance the City Council passed would reduce the minimum to one space per unit for apartments with fewer than three bedrooms. The two-space minimum will stay in place for larger apartments, single-family homes, and duplexes. The ordinance also reduces and clarifies parking minimums for many types of businesses.
City planners say they wrote the ordinance based on a data-driven analysis of current conditions in the city. Census data shows that about half of tenant households in New Bedford have only one car, while about a quarter don’t own a car.
Councilor Shane Burgo, the council’s most progressive voice on housing, said the city needed to lower parking minimums to address its severe housing shortage.
“Parking is a concern — it is something that we haven’t seen in the past, where homes have a whole fleet of vehicles,” he said. “But at the same time, too, we cannot just cater to these individuals that have a fleet of vehicles and say to those people sleeping on the street, ‘Sorry, continue sleeping on the street, because I need these people to have a parking space.’”
Gomes pushed back on that. He said the developments currently being built in New Bedford weren’t going to house the city’s homeless or improve the quality of life in neighborhoods.
“This is not for the less fortunate,” he said. “We keep B.S.-ing that and I can’t stand it.” He also said he thought the ordinance would allow developers to keep “shortchanging” the city.
Baptiste, Choquette, and Gomes say the ordinance is unrealistic because they think apartment-dwellers will bring more cars than city planners expect.
Choquette, who represents the suburban Ward 1, said he supports growing the city’s tax base with new development, but said it would have been more reasonable to start by lowering the minimum to 1.5 spaces per unit instead of just one.
“Yes, we want to make this developer-friendly and commercial business-friendly, but at what cost and what speed?” he said.
A senior housing development in Ward 1 with 48 apartments and 42 parking spots has caused headaches for his constituents, he said. Some Ward 1 residents have strongly opposed preliminary plans for a three-story development at the empty New York Chinese Buffet on Ashley Boulevard.
Residents of Ward 4 have raised concerns about a nine-unit development in that part of the city. Baptiste, the Ward 4 councilor, said it’s already hard for residents to find parking spots and “you gotta be crazy” to think that tenant households will only have one car.
Choquette has been outspoken about his opposition to the ordinance for months, but Baptiste and Gomes’ comments came late in the council process. They had not spoken against the proposal in the three previous meetings where the council heard feedback on it from the public and voted to advance it.
The parking proposal first came before the ordinance committee, of which all councilors are members, in December. Fifteen people spoke at the hearing, all urging the council to adopt the proposal. They said it would help to address rising rents by building more housing and lower property taxes by growing the tax base. Several councilors said they agreed.
The council took the rare step of holding another special hearing in January after residents of Ward 1 came forward to oppose the proposal and said they hadn’t known about the December committee hearing. Residents at the January meeting echoed Choquette’s concerns about parking overflows.
Gomes and Baptiste did not attend hearings on the proposal held in December and January. At a council meeting on Jan. 8, both backed Choquette in a failed motion to send the proposal back to committee for more public feedback after the Ward 1 residents came forward. The council then took its first vote on whether to advance the proposal. The motion succeeded on a voice vote rather than a roll call, so individual councilors’ positions weren’t recorded.
Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org.
