City of Pittsburgh has a parking crisis brewing (Liberty, Canton: rental car, transplants)

[Hopes]

Originally Posted by Moby Hick

Affluence does tend toward more cars, but also more crap and bigger cars. Many of my neighbors with garages park on the street because they can't get their car into their garage as it is either too big for the garage or the garage is already occupied for the storage of whatever it is they own that is too important to trash and not important enough to keep clean.

When parking becomes so overcrowded that they can't find a place to park, they'll clean out their garages and park in them.

[UKyank]

Originally Posted by Hopes

It's not just the affluence, it's the doubling of property via splitting single family homes into two units or more. Zoning should address that via requiring X number of off-street parking spaces per unit when people renovate these single family homes and convert them to multi-family buildings.

This more then anything. All the areas mentioned are popular with young people thus developers have been buying up th properties & cramming as many students or recent grads into them as possible. Each own a car. The city does not enforce occupancy laws at all.

[pman]

Originally Posted by Hopes

And I'm saying that zoning laws should be changed to prohibit that.

I don't think so, tight parking is a way of life in city popular city neighborhoods. there is no crisis. if parking is tight it's because people want to live in the neighborhood not a sign of imminent demise. changin zoning so everyone has to have a garage makes building more expensive and the neighborhood less urban.

[eschaton]

I've lived in Lawrenceville just about as long as you - moved there in the summer of 2007. I'm pretty sure, from what you've said before, I live about a block from you. My own thoughts.

1. Parking has definitely gotten worse on my street. We never had issues finding a space on our block until the last two years. Admittedly, we might have had an easier time, because we're across from one of the only small apartments in Lawrenceville, which has its own off-street parking for residents. Lately if we get back at the wrong time of night, we frequently need to park the next block down.

2. I think the reasons for the increased car density are broadly similar to what other people have noted. Poor people and retirees who had no car are being replaced by people who invariably have at least one. More important, I think, is the vacant houses are getting occupied. On the cross street from me I'm aware of at least three formerly vacant houses which now have people living in them, and there's at least another two mostly vacant properties which still have not been occupied.

3. I disagree pretty strongly about splitting up houses into multiple units being a big issue. There's a small scattering of this, it's true. But the norm in Lawrenceville these days seems to be to restore the grand houses which were chopped up into rentals for poor people. There's at least enough of this going on that it cancels out any (re) subdividing, particularly because zoning in Lawrenceville doesn't allow the division of any houses which were not formerly divided.

4. I think that nothing can be done to fundamentally solve parking problems, and more importantly, nothing should be done. Oh, if they want to put a garage on/near Butler, that's fine. Walnut has one, as does Murray. But if you look nationwide, all successful, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods have awful parking problems. Parking is a nightmare in the trendy parts of places like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and DC - even with much better mass transit systems than we have. Still, it doesn't stop the neighborhoods from being desirable. In contrast, there are many examples of cities which tried to "solve" parking issues by putting abundant surface lots near amenities, and ended up screwing up a neighborhood's fabric, resulting in a languishing area where no one walks anymore.

5. The way these things generally work is once parking becomes bad enough, people begin going on a "car diet" locally. Our family went down from two to one car, for example, since mine was all-but-useless (I don't need it to get to work, and we only need one car for shopping, so it sat there 95% of the time). Admittedly this might not be possible for many families, but if at least the trolley through the Strip District is built, if not the AVRR line as well, it will be more feasible to live with minimal car transportation in Lawrenceville.

[FreightTrainRunning]

Originally Posted by Hopes

It's not just the affluence, it's the doubling of property via splitting single family homes into two units or more. Zoning should address that via requiring X number of off-street parking spaces per unit when people renovate these single family homes and convert them to multi-family buildings.

I don't know about Lawrenceville but I know that here on the Northside, it's actually gone in the opposite direction. Houses that used to have eight or ten units are now single family residences with two or three people. Not that parking isn't a big issue due to the various institutions and stadiums in the area but population often decreases when a neighborhood gentrifies.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by GeneW

I don't know about Lawrenceville but I know that here on the Northside, it's actually gone in the opposite direction. Houses that used to have eight or ten units are now single family residences with two or three people. Not that parking isn't a big issue due to the various institutions and stadiums in the area but population often decreases when a neighborhood gentrifies.

As I said above, I think this is just dead wrong. The student/20something rentals are concentrated in alley rowhouses and the most beat-down looking of the small rowhouses on main/numbered streets. The houses which are somewhat large/grand which were chopped up into poverty rentals are generally getting restored for yuppies. You can most clearly see this on Main/Fisk, but it's also the case elsewhere in the neighborhood. The only cases I know of where houses got extensive work and stayed multi-unit were ones where the houses were turned into two-unit condos.

[LIRefugee]

Originally Posted by eschaton

In contrast, there are many examples of cities which tried to "solve" parking issues by putting abundant surface lots near amenities, and ended up screwing up a neighborhood's fabric, resulting in a languishing area where no one walks anymore.

Isn't that part of what did in East Liberty, besides constructing that hulk over Penn, making that street pedestrian-only, encircling it with a pedestrian-unfriendly one-way street, etc?

[gg]

Originally Posted by I_Like_Spam

When I moved to L'ville, one of the houses adjacent to me had a multigenerational poor family with 4 adults between 18 and 80 and not a car between them. One of the other homes had a single woman in a big house and just 1 vehicle. Now they are both 2 units, with 5 cars belonging to the same 2 properties. The new tenants are definitely more affluent, and affluence means more cars.

It really is that simple. Well said and even if there aren't more units, the young people that are living there are working people with need to get to work, so they will need a car. Lets face it, Pittsburgh public transportation, isn't all that great, unless you are on a busway.

[pman]

Originally Posted by h_curtis

It really is that simple. Well said and even if there aren't more units, the young people that are living there are working people with need to get to work, so they will need a car. Lets face it, Pittsburgh public transportation, isn't all that great, unless you are on a busway.

Originally Posted by eschaton

5. The way these things generally work is once parking becomes bad enough, people begin going on a "car diet" locally. Our family went down from two to one car, for example, since mine was all-but-useless (I don't need it to get to work, and we only need one car for shopping, so it sat there 95% of the time). Admittedly this might not be possible for many families, but if at least the trolley through the Strip District is built, if not the AVRR line as well, it will be more feasible to live with minimal car transportation in Lawrenceville.

in addition to the examples above, people start thinking twice about taking their car out for a night on the town and giving up their space, they begin using transit. transit might not be greatin Pittsburgh but there are certainly worse places for transit than lawrenceville and it's easy to add extra late night/off peak servce. i suspect this trend will also favor downtown as it's easier to get downtown via transit than the south side from lawrenceville. and eschaton is right that overcrowded buses are good reason to lay rails. (the utility of the AVRR might be a bit diluted depending on the routing it ends up taking)

[UKyank]

Originally Posted by pman

in addition to the examples above, people start thinking twice about taking their car out for a night on the town and giving up their space, they begin using transit. transit might not be greatin Pittsburgh but there are certainly worse places for transit than lawrenceville and it's easy to add extra late night/off peak servce. i suspect this trend will also favor downtown as it's easier to get downtown via transit than the south side from lawrenceville. and eschaton is right that overcrowded buses are good reason to lay rails. (the utility of the AVRR might be a bit diluted depending on the routing it ends up taking)

I think this pretty much happens already - most people who live in these neighborhoods don't use their cars & go out at night in those neighborhoods the majority of the time. I disagree that downtown would benefit though as its not leaving your car & going elsewhere but leaving your car & staying local. It doesn't help that as bad as the day transit is, night is much worse.