817 Jackson St. and How Zoning and Parking Minimums End Up Doing More Harm Than Good
The difficulties private property owners have faced trying to use 817 Jackson St. for anything – whether commercial space or a rental property – is a prime example of how traditional zoning and minimum off-street parking requirements can sometimes do more harm than good without actually solving the problems they are intended to address. Let’s examine the issues 817 Jackson St. has been facing for years.
817 Jackson St. is a two-story mixed-use building with commercial space on the first floor and an apartment above – think of Bob’s Burgers. It sits between W. 8th St. and W. 9th St. along Jackson St., a state highway. Facing the building, you’ll find Gym Dandy and Thibodaux Tire & Auto on the left. Directly to the right is a single-family home and an antique store. Across the street are more historic homes, some without driveways because they were built before the age of widespread automobile ownership. This is one of Thibodaux’s historic mixed-use areas outside the relatively new Central Business District (CBD). The Dansereau House is another historic property less than a block outside the CBD.
The area along Jackson St. has a rich mixture of classic late-19th-century homes and local businesses. These historic areas of Thibodaux are also some of the city’s most walkable. They were developed before Thibodaux adopted traditional Euclidean-style zoning and modern parking requirements. Instead of separating every use and surrounding every building with parking, development followed the street grid, with homes, businesses, sidewalks, and other destinations located close together. Today, off-street parking lots and curb parking are now part of the mix.
Compare that with newer development along places like North Canal, where large parking lots and greater distances between businesses make walking much less convenient and extremely dangerous in many cases. The grid layout, historic homes, local businesses, and sidewalks make areas like Jackson St. more pleasant to walk through – characteristics that tourists and residents alike tend to value. Think of the Garden District in New Orleans or other historic, walkable neighborhoods throughout the country. That walkability benefits local businesses, too. But it creates a problem that has apparently been going on for years: parking.
As the May 19 City Council meeting illustrates, residents, visitors, and customers park along the curb. Some people park illegally and block driveways. Parking spillover is a real concern in Thibodaux, particularly in these older neighborhoods where many properties were built before the automobile became dominant. And 817 Jackson St. is a good example of what happens when we try to solve that problem primarily through zoning and minimum off-street parking requirements.
Traditional zoning attempts to prevent conflicts between different land uses by deciding in advance what can and cannot happen on a particular property. In the B-1 zoning district, for example, some uses are allowed by right. Others require a special exception. Still others are prohibited altogether. Then there are the parking requirements.
Parking minimums give each land use a minimum number of off-street parking spaces, usually based on a square footage or characteristics of the use. For example, Thibodaux requires 4 off-street parking spaces for every hole at a golf course (FORE!). These formulas are often one-size-fits-all. A 2010 Thibodaux zoning review acknowledged that these formulas have many issues.
The basic idea is understandable: if a business brings more cars, require the property owner to provide more parking so those cars don’t spill onto surrounding streets. But this approach has its own set of tradeoffs and issues. A business can be required to provide a certain number of off-street spaces, while customers, residents, or visitors can still park illegally on the curb and block driveways. In other words, we can require private property owners to spend enormous amounts of money providing parking without actually solving the underlying problem of how the limited public supply of curb parking is managed.
This is where parking minimums can create unintended consequences. Imagine a local resident wants to reuse 817 Jackson St. as a small coffee shop. They may first have to determine whether the use is permitted. If it isn’t, they may need to pursue a zoning change or special exception. Then they may have to meet the required parking ratio. If the existing property cannot physically accommodate the required number of spaces, the project may become financially or physically impossible. At any stage, the project can be delayed, modified, or rejected. Meanwhile, a large chain can often enter the market with a completely different set of options. It can purchase multiple lots, demolish existing buildings, build a new building, and surround it with a large parking lot designed from the beginning to satisfy the city’s requirements. That creates an interesting unintended consequence: the regulations intended to protect neighborhoods can make it easier to build new, auto-oriented development than to reuse an existing historic building.
Over time, that can favor larger developments with enough land to accommodate mandated parking while making it harder for small businesses and property owners to reuse existing buildings. And it can slowly erode the very characteristics that make historic parts of Thibodaux unique. The CBD is essentially an acknowledgment of this problem. It is a small area where the city has chosen to allow a different development pattern with fewer of these restrictions. But why should walkable, historic development be confined to such a small area?
Obviously, there should be reasonable rules governing development and businesses. Parking safety, accessibility, drainage, traffic circulation, and other legitimate public concerns matter. But requiring every property owner to provide parking based on a one-size-fits-all formula is a very different thing from managing the public parking supply. Jackson St. will continue to have parking issues even if every property owner complies with the city’s minimum parking requirements. People will still park along the curb. Some will still park illegally. Some will still block driveways. The fundamental issue is that curb parking is a limited public resource. If the city doesn’t effectively manage that resource, requiring every private property owner to build more parking cannot completely solve the problem. So why should every property owner bear the cost of preventing a problem that only some properties may create? Wouldn’t it make more sense to let property owners determine how much parking their particular business or property actually needs while the city focuses on managing the impacts that occur in the public right-of-way?
Cities across the country use other tools to manage parking without relying on minimum parking requirements. Those tools can include residential parking permits, time limits, better enforcement, towing where appropriate, and shared parking agreements. Shared parking could be particularly useful in historic mixed-use areas like Jackson St. For example, St. John’s Cemetery is only about a block from 817 Jackson St. and contains a large gravel parking lot that appears to be underutilized during peak business hours. Two blocks down the road, Moses Baptist Church has an even larger asphalt parking lot. Even the nearby property owned by Representative J.D. Richard contains roughly 13 off-street parking spaces. Instead of requiring every individual property to build its own parking lot, the city could make it easier for businesses and property owners to establish shared parking agreements that allow customers and employees to park in existing nearby lots and walk to their destination. That’s a much better use of the parking supply we already have. And if curb parking is still creating problems, the city can address that problem directly instead of outright blocking a project.
If 817 Jackson St. remains vacant, the building could eventually fall into disrepair. A vacant or deteriorating historic building doesn’t contribute jobs, customers, or economic activity to the surrounding neighborhood. It also hurts surrounding property values. There is also an opportunity cost to the city. Every year a potentially productive property remains vacant is another year in which the city forgoes potential sales-tax revenue, jobs, and other economic activity. And if the eventual solution is for the property owner to purchase the adjacent home and replace it with an asphalt parking lot, we have solved one problem by creating others. We’ve eliminated a home. We’ve increased the amount of impervious surface leading to higher flash flood risk in the area. We’ve increased the heat-island effect. And we’ve made the neighborhood less walkable. The parking problem is real. I’m not denying that. But parking minimums and restrictive zoning have costs of their own, and those costs need to be part of the conversation.
The goal shouldn’t be to pretend parking isn’t a problem. The goal should be to solve the actual parking problem without creating bigger problems in the process. 817 Jackson St. is a good example of why Thibodaux should reconsider whether requiring every property to provide a predetermined amount of off-street parking is really the best way to protect our neighborhoods.