Change of use and nonconforming parking

[SW MI Planner]

Most ordinances that I am familiar with, including ours, requires parking to be brought up to code with a change of use in the building. I understand the reasoning, but in older more urban communities this makes it makes redevelopment incredibly difficult because compliance with parking standards would be difficult if not impossible. In our case if we held hard and fast to this rule maybe 10% of the buildings in the older commercial corridors could change use, and the rest probably vacant.

Some thoughts:

• A variance? Problem becomes that they would likely not meet the standards for a variance and because of the amount of properties that would need them, it's not really an extraordinary situation.
• These are areas where public parking would not be an option - each already have a handful of spaces on their own property and the City doesn't have the funds to do this and a DDA or BID wouldn't be a possibility.
• If there is on-site parking, and it's laid out in a safe and orderly manner, do we care if they have five parking spaces or fifteen? Isn't that a concern of the future use, to have enough parking to make it work for their business? If they aren't worried about it, why should we?
  

I think an ordinance amendment to loosen this requirement up a bit but still allowing for some oversight is warranted. Maybe when the change of use results in an increase in parking requirements less than a certain percentage. Any other ideas? How does your ordinance address parking requirements at change of use?

[mendelman]

Well, let's see.

First - I would talk with the Administrative head of the City (CM, Mayor, etc) to understand the general feelings (subjective and objective) in the community as it relates to parking for such areas in the City. That will give you a good understanding of whether this is worth the bother.

Second - Do some simple parking studies of actual uses in your community and the parking generated by them.

Third - Make sure that formal/safe on-street parking can be counted toward the uses within a certain distance of the use. Now those spaces are going to be needed for all uses within a given location, so perhaps some proportionally is needed (such as every on-street space is worth half a required space, etc), or...

You could try a radical move of no minimum parking requirements for specified areas, with a caveat that all existing parking spaces be preserved in perpetuity.

I don't have any concrete examples for you, simply because I have not had the chance to try to get "no required parking" instituted.

[Seabishop]

Our interpretation has been that you don't need to provide extra spaces as long as you're not increasing parking demand. So a change of use without enough parking is OK as long as you're not increasing the non-conformity.

We did get rid of minimum parking requirements for existing commercial buildings in one area of town without any problems. This was backed up by a parking study that showed there's adequate public and on-street parking.