Illustration by Rich Hauck
In Harrisburg, car space often is more valued than people space.
I’ve said this for years, my awkward way of pointing out that people often seem more concerned with parking than with adding badly needed housing to the city.
Every housing proposal seems to run up against “the ‘P’ word” (as I call it), as even projects that satisfy the city’s minimum parking requirements inevitably get slammed for not providing enough parking. And my sympathies to projects that don’t conform.
In late February, this parking obsession reached a new low when the city’s Zoning Hearing Board rejected limited parking relief for a proposed 144-unit apartment building, potentially endangering the project.
To be clear—the developer wasn’t asking for much. For a project of this size, the city mandates a large number of off-street spaces, 191, and the developer had 160 on two adjacent surface lots. So, it needed a special exception for the remaining 31 spaces. The zoning board’s answer: “no.”
At this point, I should offer some context.
The project’s location, at 320 Reily St., is currently a vast, sparsely used surface parking lot. It abuts other vast, sparsely used surface parking lots to the north and to the east. So, currently, there are acres of empty, abandoned asphalt, creating a massive dead zone for about five city blocks.
Currently, a stroll up Reily Street is about as welcoming as a stroll through an abandoned ghost town. Once, there were houses and other buildings on these blocks, but they’ve been gone for decades. In its place: blocks and blocks of blacktop.
Further context—back in 2021, the city zoning board gave this same project a much larger parking exception. However, the builder never proceeded with it, so needed to get the project reapproved after reviving the proposal.
So, what changed over the past three years? What made the zoning board refuse a special exception for 31 spaces when it granted an exception for 120 spaces just a few years ago?
Well, first, the personnel on the board changed, so different people with different viewpoints are making the decisions. And, secondly, I fear that, in this city, parochial parking concerns increasingly are overwhelming other, more important priorities.
We saw this two years ago when the city stopped work on badly needed safety and design improvements to State Street, specifically to preserve the parking status quo there. And now we see it on Reily Street, where blocks of empty lots cry out for housing and residents.
Harrisburg, which once had nearly twice the population it has today, has thousands of empty lots. So, there’s plenty of room to build. These buildings would not only add badly needed housing, but would help the city’s struggling businesses, strengthen the tax base and allow the city government to fund more and better services.
According to a 2023 study from the Housing Affordability Institute, parking minimums do the opposite. They reduce housing affordability and availability, as developers need to devote large sums of money and space to parking. Providing parking can dramatically increase a project’s cost, which leads to fewer and higher-priced units, if they’re built at all.
And an empty lot, especially when it’s not even being utilized for general public parking, as in this case, offers essentially no value to the city, its people, its businesses or its future.
At this point, I should lay my cards on the table. To me, a city is people, not cars, so I’m no fan of parking minimums. The world’s greatest cities share a common trait: they have human density, not parking density. To me, vast parking lots are blights on the landscape, making cities less livable, walkable and economically viable.
In fact, my biggest knock on the Reily Street project is not that it has too little parking, but too much. It preserves two enormous surface lots in order to approach the city’s parking requirement. I understand the need for this right now, but at some point, those lots should be developed, too.
At the zoning board meeting, one Harrisburg resident who lives near the site spoke in favor of the project and the requested parking relief.
“I think it’s better that we move in the direction where we can contribute to a dense, livable urban core and walkable neighborhoods that are safe for people who wish to walk places, to bike places, or for any other potential means of transportation,” he told members of the zoning board. “So, I think having a higher density of people compared to cars in the urban environment we have is going to be better for livability.”
I agree. And, according to an NPR story from January, some cities are reaching the same conclusion. Increasingly, they’re abandoning parking minimums in favor of density, walkability, convenience, affordability and access to amenities.
Harrisburg should consider following this lead.
Lawrance Binda is publisher/editor of TheBurg.
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