Study doesn’t convince there’s ‘ample’ parking if Leggat McCall gets a 30-year lease on spaces
The proposed developer of the East Cambridge courthouse, Leggat McCall, seeks a lease for 420 parking passes in the city-owned First Street Garage to move ahead. The City Council will consider approval of the garage lease shortly. Residents and city councillors asked the city manager to provide a parking study to determine if this lease would affect parking in the neighborhood adversely. That study is now available.
A summary provided by the city manager says “there is ample parking within the study area to accommodate the anticipated 336 new daily parkers (based on 80 percent utilization of 420 parking passes) at all times of the day” and that analysis of existing parking supply “within the study area is significantly higher than parking demand, even if parking capacity at the CambridgeSide mall is reduced in the future due to any redevelopment of portions of that site.”
But Figure 2 of the summary indicates that this is true only if people, including residents, pay to use commercial lots. In that figure, utilization of garage parking on a typical workday in February is shown. Between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., there are fewer than 400 available parking spaces. In fact, between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. there usually are fewer than 300 available spaces. In an hour when today there are only 188 free spaces, a future with 336 new users occupying spaces means some current users will have to park elsewhere suggests 148 drivers could be looking for on-street parking.
And how many on the street spaces might be available? The summary does not provide hour-by-hour figures, but does say that at 11 a.m. on weekdays, 81 percent of on-street spaces are occupied. There are 1,001 on-street spaces. When 81 percent of these spaces are occupied (810 spaces) there will be 191 unoccupied spaces on the street – but with the proposed garage use, that suddenly goes up to 96 percent of spaces being occupied. And the report does not include data on the parking needs of employees and patrons of the Leggat McCall development who will need parking but do not have parking passes. How can the report conclude that there will be ample parking?
Further, the report is based on 2019 data, while the lease is for 30 years. Nowhere in the summary of the report are there data on projected parking needs in East Cambridge over the terms of the lease.
Contrary to its stated conclusion, the parking study indicates that leasing 420 spaces to a private developer will adversely affect parking for residents and all visitors for the next 30 years. Based on these data, the city should not approve this lease.
Henry H. Wortis, Berkshire Street
Henry Wortis has been a respected member of the East Cambridge community for many years. I thank him for his comments. He is right that we have no certainty about parking needs over the next 30 years. Much of that will be decided by the future of mass transportation in Cambridge and the region. Does this uncertainty indicate that we should negate the more than $77,000,000 in economic benefits that would be gained if we move forward with the garage lease? Should we risk having to live with the crumbling vacant asbestos filled former courthouse for years to come? Should we continue to live with a vastly underutilized garage which was built to supply parking for the now vacant courthouse? There is no likely hood that the courthouse could ever be developed into a significant affordable housing site due to the per/unit costs, nor has there been any indication that the community would support enough affordable units to make the project cost effective for affordable housing….million dollar units would not be feasible, so the community only speaks in general terms about affordable housing, community space and a park with no commitment and no plan going forward. Many residents of East Cambridge and the broader Cambridge community have voiced the opinion that some uncertainty about parking over the next 30 years is a risk worth taking considering what is at stake: a loss of $77,000,000 in community benefits, including 24 units of permanently affordable housing, and the opportunity to redevelop a crumbling asbestos filled building.
Actually, Mr. Wortis is far too kind about the parking “study”, which, by the way, is required by the city’s disposition ordinance and is therefore not some magnanimous gift from the City. In order to make its numbers work, it ignores the fact that many spaces are reserved for the exclusive use of certain current lessees for whose use the garage was built (and none of those were the courthouse, by the way; do your homework, area4, and read the documents). Those spaces are counted as available by the “study” even though they aren’t.
Additionally, the “study” depends on the use of commercially available spaces that don’t exist. It gets really creative when it tries to cope with the effects of the loss of parking at CambridgeSide mall, which is currently under review and will likely go forward in some fashion. The “study” goes outside the study area to find 326 parking spaces about which it has no availability data if the above-ground CambridgeSide garage is demolished and not replaced (pretty much a certainty I would bet). If the mall’s underground garage ceases to be available to the public in order to accommodate the additional hundreds of thousands of square feet of development they want to do, the “study” assumes that LMP will miraculously use only 66% of its parking passes instead of 80% and the City of Cambridge will change its on-street parking regulations so that people displaced from the First Street Garage can park all day in the neighborhood.
That $77,000,000 sounds sweet until you look at what it actually is (again, do your homework) and remember that it’s spread out over 30 years (what do we figure the present value of that is?) and comes with huge costs to the neighborhood, which are never even mentioned. Eastern Cambridge and, to a growing extent, Alewife fund this city, but they don’t think we should get any of the benefit of that, just the detriments: disappearing open space and sky, soaring rents and home prices (not a benefit if you actually want to stay here, only if you want to cash out and flee), constant construction, noise and lights. Fifty years is more than long enough for us to have to host a middle finger of a monument to greed and contempt for ordinary working people. Time for the people who run the City to advocate for the residents instead of catering to greedy developers and enabling DCAMM’s refusal to maintain its property. No more billionaire bailouts; let Leggat McCall figure out its parking itself without taking ours away.