Easing of city parking ban seen boosting housing

For real estate agents like Christopher Wall of Residential Properties, trying to sell or rent a house in Providence lacking off-street parking has always been a unique and often infuriating challenge.
“A dealbreaker – people will not even look at a place once they examine it and find out the parking is inadequate,” Wall said. “That is a major factor in their decision-making.”
While parking is a big deal in most cities, Providence’s 80-year old overnight, on-street parking ban – combined with its modest mass-transportation system – has long put a yard-paving premium on off-street parking.
Now that the ban is gone – or at least softened by the new permit system that went into effect citywide July 1 – Realtors hope it will eventually provide a boost to the local housing market.
“I think it will help every segment – single-family, rentals and condos,” Wall said. “The buyers that would come from out of town were always perplexed and mystified by the parking ban. They thought it was provincial and silly to devalue properties unnecessarily that don’t have as much off-street parking.”
Agents who specialize in Providence real estate said densely packed neighborhoods – such as College Hill, Fox Point and Federal Hill – should have the most interest in the new overnight-parking-permit system.
“I think for those properties on College Hill that suffer from the lack of parking, it would certainly increase sale prices for single-family homes,” said Gordon Dwan, managing broker for the Providence office of Lila Delman Real Estate. “And then rentability is always enhanced when there is more parking.”
Providence has been the only major metropolitan area in the country that prohibits overnight on-street parking. In a 2009 study for the city, consultants with Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc. estimated that each off-street parking spot added $200 per month to the rent of apartments in the Fox Point neighborhood.
Providence has been working on an overnight-parking-permit system for years and introduced a series of pilot programs before the current system and fee structure was phased in, first on Federal Hill in April, and then citywide July 1.
Residents can buy an annual overnight-parking permit for $100, with a maximum of two per household, and can get a guest pass for $25 that allows a car to park on the street for five nights per month. With the new system, the do-not-tag list that allowed visitors to park on the street temporarily by calling police has been eliminated. So far, interest in the parking permits has been modest, with between 6-7 percent of the registered vehicles in the April pilot neighborhoods getting overnight stickers, said Providence Parking Administrator Leo Perrotta.
The city used that purchase rate to budget its revenue from the program, $600,000 for the year, assuming 6 percent of the 100,000 vehicles registered in the city would get parking stickers.
“The interest has been light but the program wasn’t really promoted,” Perrotta said. “We will be doing some additional outreach to the public.”
Perrotta said parts of Elmhurst and the northern part of the city will likely produce the least demand for parking permits because of the abundance of driveways and lower density.
While reducing the value of properties without off-street parking is the clearest direct effect of the overnight parking ban, it has likely had other indirect effects that are more difficult to measure.
Although most of the city’s multifamily housing stock predates the ban, requiring off-street parking for every car in a city without a subway system acts as a limit on population density.
And to maximize off-street parking capacity, many city property owners have been encouraged to cut down trees and pave over yards so they can squeeze in more cars.
Assuming the parking-permit system isn’t considered too expensive, it could eventually allow landlords to take on more tenants and put some of the outdoor space now dedicated to parking to something else.
“A lot of the pavement with these houses is not in the best condition and it doesn’t show nearly as well to buyers as a lawn would,” Dwan said.
Wall, who also owns two multifamily buildings on the East Side, agreed.
“I don’t think it has been good for the cityscape, having so many trees taken down and lawns paved over for parking,” Wall said of the parking ban.
Karl Martone, owner of the Martone Group RE/MAX Properties in Smithfield, said properties without abundant off-street parking have historically sold at a discount, especially in Providence, but that may come down some with the parking permits.
“It could be advantageous for some,” Martone said. “For properties without parking, you have to entice with price and do your homework on where you could rent parking.” •

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