Parking issues stem from bad city planning

To the editor:

As a fellow planner, I appreciate the contribution of Martin Zelnik to the never-ending discussion about parking in Riverdale (The Press, Letters to the editor, June 18). That said, I could not disagree more with most points made in this letter, with the notable exceptions of 1A (an excellent idea to convert an inefficient and overlyenforced private facility into a shared, public facility serving all area businesses, 2 (an absolutely brilliant and long-over due remedy to the worst of current development patterns). 1B would be so fantastically expensive that I can’t believe it’s offered even half-seriously.

And if you want to see what the development patterns resulting from the zoning requirements proposed in 3 and 4 would look like, take a look at some of the blindingly ugly residential buildings housing Manhattan College students on Riverdale and Cambridge south of 235th Street and the Yonkerslike parking wasteland fronting the Skyview shopping center.

My counter-suggestion: Two sides of the same zoning coin are largely to blame for the continuing decline of retail in Riverdale.

The fact that developers seem to be limited to two options — single-story commercial strips or exclusivelyresidential projects whose ground-floor commercial space is strictly limited to some kind of medical office — makes it a lot more lucrative to build big residential projects. Conversely, it makes commercial space astronomically expensive, as it has to make up for all the lost 2nd-7th floor development area opportunity.

This antiquated strategy has long been discredited as economically counter-productive, environmentally unsustainable, and corrosive to good, pedestrian- friendly urban design.

Worse, it has created in Riverdale a city neighborhood in which dozens of high-density apartment buildings lie beyond reasonable walking distance from basic daily goods and services. Tenants, understandably, have become overly dependent upon their cars and obsessed with parking.

TOM BROWN SENIOR PLANNER NELSON\NYGAARD CONSULTING ASSOCIATES

This is part of the July 2, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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