Alex Wukman

COH wants more alcohol parking

Writer, Free Press Houston, Nov 09, 11.

Tagged with livability, parking, free market, sub-urbanism

Under the current ordinance the city defines a business that receives over 75 percent of its revenue from the sale of alcohol “a bar,” and since it is “a bar” and not a restaurant the city requires the business to have 10 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet. This has led many inner-loop club owners to lease parking spaces from surrounding businesses, and sometimes those leases are written on a year-to-year basis.

The subcommittee recommended that the City bring its definition of “a bar” in line with TABC’s. The TABC says any business that makes mover 50 percent of its revenue from alcohol sales is a bar. While clearing up confusion over what is and isn’t a bar is admirable, it’s the issue of how much parking a bar needs that has some local business owners worried. The subcommittee went on to recommend that any new bar needs to have 14 off-street parking spaces per 1,000 square feet and that any lease entered into in order to meet the city’s minimum parking requirements has to be, at a minimum, 5 years long.

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Surprisingly, the committee’s recommendations would not uniformly increase available parking across the board for every business. Regional shopping centers and drive-through/ take-out restaurants actually saw a recommended decrease in the amount of parking required. Instead of requiring a regional shopping center to provide 5 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet the committee recommends that the city only require 4 parking spaces. Under the proposed revisions to the ordinances drive-through/take-out restaurants would only be required to have 4 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet.

Scott Repass, owner of Poison Girl, Antidote and Black Hole, was not pleased with the proposed changes. In an October 5 e-mail sent to David Hawes of the Montrose Management District Repass wrote “the new parking requirements would undoubtedly discourage small business development and encourage regional and chain stores.”

Repass went on to state that, in his interpretation of the proposed changes, a “box store moving into a neighborhood has to provide one-third less parking than it did before, whereas the coffee house at the corner has to provide 25 percent more.” He attacked the proposal as an affront to the idea of a walkable city and characterized it as “suburb thinking applied to the city as a whole.” He concluded his e-mail by writing that he felt that “the planning and permitted process is already prejudiced against small businesses and towards the Wal-Marts and Trader Joe’s. This proposed parking ordinance feels like the city is coming after us directly.”

Repass isn’t alone in his concerns about what the proposed changes to the parking ordinance would do to effect the development of more pedestrian friendly areas, and the concern about walkability is not a new one. The Houston Chronicle reported that as far as back as 2006 business owners in Midtown were running into the problem of having to provide off-street parking in a community that was being redesigned around pedestrians. Ian Rosenberg, who rehabbed an abandon dry cleaner into the award winning European style war bar 13 Celsius, told Chronicle reporter Mike Snyder that the city was requiring him “to provide more off-street parking than he could create even if he tore down the building.” The city’s parking ordinances aren’t just drawing heat from small business owners; non-profits and NGOs have gotten into the fight too.

Groups like Keep Houston Houston and NeoHouston argue that requiring business owners in areas like Midtown and Montrose to have obey set back and parking ordinances prevents the city from developing into a pedestrian friendly city. Keep Houston Houston has gone so far as to recommend that Midtown “should be given a “special exemption” from any and all parking [regulations]. Period.” NeoHouston wants to prohibit the development of new surface parking lots in Houston’s urban areas and require parking garages to have first floor retail space facing the street.

Full Story: Parking Wars
Source: Free Press Houston, November 7, 2011

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