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Zero Parking Means More Affordable Housing for Fort Greene

by Noah Kazis on October 26, 2010 Last month, builders broke ground on Fort Greene’s Navy Green project, which, when completed, will add 458 homes between the Navy Yard and the BQE. A full three-quarters of the project will be affordable to families earning between 30 and 130 percent of the area median income, and 97 of those residences will be supportive housing, offering social services in addition to shelter.

Such affordable prices for housing wouldn’t have been possible had Navy Green been subject to the area’s parking requirements. Nor would the 32,000 square feet of open space included in the project. Without an exemption granted by the city, said the project’s developer, parking would have replaced a playground and increased the cost of each unit.

Developer Martin Dunn explained that each parking space came with a direct tradeoff in terms of open space and affordability. “To meet the parking requirements that would normally be required,” he said, “if we made half the open space parking, we’d still have to build structured parking.”

Structured parking is expensive to build. Nationally, the average construction cost of a single structured space is $16,000, and in New York it is almost certainly higher. Building a garage, said Dunn, would have required either increasing rents or asking the government for extra subsidies. “So not having structured parking made it more affordable,” he concluded.

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