Housing scarcity an artificially created problem in Portland

Joe Lewis, the chair of our city’s Planning Board, ought to personally deliver some words of comfort during this holiday season to the homeless hordes that gather every evening on Oxford Street. Because in spite of all the recent budget cuts and the increasing difficulty of finding an apartment here, his colleagues and the planners in City Hall are working damned hard to make sure the increasing number of families who struggle with chronic poverty will have a free parking spot if they want one.

That’s because Joe Lewis’s Planning Board, which approves and denies new construction projects, requires every new home and apartment built in our city to also build one parking space. Want to build a triple-decker on Munjoy Hill? You’ll need to make it a quadruple-decker for a three-car garage on the bottom floor. Want to build studio apartments for college students? They probably don’t drive, but you’ll still be forced to build a parking lot that’s bigger than the building itself.

The parking requirement is particularly onerous for builders who would like to build smaller, less expensive apartments, since it requires them to set aside nearly as much real estate for automobile storage (whether or not it's needed) as they do for rentable living space.

That’s the major reason why the nearly every new apartment building constructed here in the past decade has either required public subsidies, or been targeted and priced for the wealthy. The Planning Board’s obsession with building free parking literally makes it illegal for a private-sector builder to create affordable homes for the city’s thousands of non-motorist households.

That’s been a challenge for organizations like Community Housing of Maine, a local nonprofit, which is currently trying to build a new apartment complex on Danforth Street with 38 units.

The project has been the subject of some controversy: at a cost of $10 million, each apartment will cost more than $270,000. The price tag is justifiably raising eyebrows in Augusta, where the state government is being asked to provide $800,000 in scarce affordable housing funds to help finance this project.

Part of the reason the Danforth Street project is expensive is because it’s going into a historic building. Preservation work can be more expensive up front, but these buildings provide better value to the community and more dignity to the tenants (they also bring in federal tax credits), so those costs can be justified.

But there’s another big reason this project is so pricey. In addition to 38 apartments, Community Housing of Maine is also proposing to build an underground parking garage for 11 cars. The average construction cost for one underground parking space is $25,000, which means that this project’s parking will cost over a quarter-million dollars.

This is at a site within easy walking distance of thousands of jobs and nearly all of the city’s bus routes. According to Census data, even well-off households in this neighborhood are unlikely to own an automobile, and it’s a safe bet that not even the richest 1 percent of West Enders would spend $25,000 to store a car in an underground vault.

So why do the theoretical cars that poor people theoretically want to park in downtown Portland deserve a Bruce Wayne treatment? More importantly, why are we spending a quarter million dollars of our city’s too-scarce affordable housing money on a parking garage that houses mute machines, instead of spending a quarter million dollars on apartments that house living, breathing, cold and destitute people?

This problem isn’t limited to this particular project. I live next door to an apartment building for seniors on Smith Street in East Bayside. It was another expensive project, funded by PROP, one of the city’s most vital social service agencies, and completed in 2008.

My neighbors who live there are great, and it’s a handsome building. But in the two years we’ve lived here, we’ve never seen more than six cars parked in the building’s outscaled, 20-space parking lot (and the on-street spaces in our neighborhood are also generally empty). 

So because of the city’s arbitrary parking quotas, PROP, an agency that ought to be spending its money to help desperate families, was instead forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on real estate it didn’t need, in order to build a parking lot nobody uses.

Today, thanks to the Planning Board, PROP has less money to spend on childcare services for single working parents, or to keep frail seniors from dying alone in frigid homes where the heat’s been cut off, and they’re spending more money to plow and maintain a quarter-acre of empty pavement in East Bayside.

This month, Congress Street’s Walker Terrace, another newish apartment complex subsidized with public funds, is seeking city approval for new gates and higher fences around their city-mandated parking lot. This is because homeless vagrants are spending more time in the building’s ground-floor garage than auto-owning tenants.

Which demonstrates that, one way or another, the destitute will find a way to shelter themselves. And that’s why Joe Lewis and his colleagues on the city’s Planning Board need to meet some of the people who sleep on the crowded floors of the Oxford Street shelter, or talk with some of the families who sleep in cars because it’s easier to find free parking in our city than it is to find an affordable home. Our honorable planners need to acknowledge the consequences that their own addictions to free parking have on people who struggle with darker addictions for lack of a stable home.

And when they get back to their comfortable chambers in City Hall, those same planners need to stop telling our underfunded social service agencies to spend millions of dollars on empty parking garages, and liberate them instead to build more of the affordable housing our city really needs.

(Christian MilNeil is a blogger at "The Vigorous North: A field guide to the wilderness areas of American cities," www.vigorousnorth.com.)