City of Yes will have a tremendous impact on the city landscape. One of the most important changes will be the elimination of parking requirements for developers.
To better understand the impact and magnitude of this change let's examine a case study:
This site, located in an R7-1 district has a relatively high parking requirement of 50% of dwelling units. 100 units of density available mean up to 50 spots. At 300 square feet per spot that totals 15,000 sf or more of parking!
Here are the options:
A: Split the property into two lots
Shrink the lot size to a 'small lot' reducing the parking requirement to 30%. If the owner plans to go for 485X tax exemption, then the affordable units require no parking at all in a Transit Zone and 15 spots can be waived. The result is that no parking would be required and the first floor can be filled with retail.
B: Keep it as one building
Split the first floor between retail and parking with some underground parking in the cellar. This is more expensive than parking it all on grade, but you can still access some of the commercial floor area.
C: Put all of the parking on grade
No retail, but much less expensive to build.
What would you do?
We recommended to wait for City of Yes which will waive parking restrictions, provide no parking at all, and get all of his floor area in one building.
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