A community less focused on cars might make more room for housing, but is Fayetteville there yet?

By NWA Democrat-Gazette

Housing in Northwest Arkansas is a hot topic and has been for a long while. It's made so because of high demand and a shortage of residential units considered affordable to people in the lower and middle incomes. If your income is on the higher end of the spectrum, you'll be fine.

With the still-strong flow of newcomers to the region, the lack of affordable housing is intensified, and not just for the new arrivals. Indeed, it's often residents who've lived here a while who find themselves increasingly priced out of the housing market, whether it's buying a property or renting one.

To say that's not a matter for public policy leaders would be shortsighted.

So it's not unexpected that advocacy groups -- people perhaps more certain than the average observer that they have it figured out -- would articulate and promote their own vision for how Northwest Arkansas ought to grow its stock of affordable housing.

Two such groups recently took over five public parking spaces in downtown Fayetteville for a couple of days. On those spaces they built a temporary structure not to provide housing, but to make a point. Fayetteville Strong and the Urban Land Institute view parking spaces as a barrier to affordable housing. Their lumber-and-plastic walls represented a studio and one-bedroom apartment in the space five cars might usually occupy.

In basic terms, their pitch is this: If you don't use a piece of land for one purpose, you can use it for a different one. And no, it doesn't take a physics degree to grasp that reality.

These groups view housing as the morally superior alternative. "What's more important: the storage of automobiles or the housing of human beings?" asked Clark Eckels, lead organizer for Fayetteville Strong.

There's another fair question: What about the human beings who need a place for their automobiles?

Oh, we get it. Advocacy groups are trying to make people think. Nothing wrong with that.

We suppose someone else might think green spaces or parks should win the comparative-use exercise. Or maybe retail space, so that local residents can have jobs to pay their rent or mortgages. Others might embrace establishing a permanent farmers market to ensure fresh and healthful food is accessible to residents. Oh, and how many parking spaces equate to a new aquatics center?

Gosh, this is a fun game to play.

The point, we think, of Fayetteville Strong and the Urban Land Institute was primarily to target Fayetteville's (and other cities') existing minimum expectations for residential parking spaces.

"We can never build affordable housing in the city if we don't get serious, and that means repealing or significantly reducing parking minimums," Eckels said. "And so, our ultimate goal is to see a full repeal of residential parking minimums."

It's a debate worth having. And it's been going on in Fayetteville for some time with various residential development proposals. A key question is often whether a new project should have to meet a calculated minimum parking standard or should it be able to provide fewer spaces? What would that achieve? The theory is more housing can be built and be more affordably priced if a developer doesn't have to account for "storage" of automobiles, or at least all of them connected to the development.

That certainly could prove true. But it assumes (1) residents won't need parking spaces and/or (2) residents can find parking elsewhere, such as on nearby public streets.

Convincing existing residents their city street should be lined with automobiles so a developer doesn't have to build as many parking spots is a big ask. Parking requirements have been a point of contention in several projects coming before city planners. The pitch is that it's wasteful and antagonistic to affordability to require new parking spaces when existing parking -- say, along public streets -- goes unused.

The free market is better at determining the need for parking spaces than a government formula requiring minimums, according to the groups.

Mike Wiederkehr, a member of the Fayetteville City Council, said in a recent story that Fayetteville isn't yet ready for what the advocacy groups propose. To eliminate parking minimums for new developments, the city needs a robust public transit system, no free on-street parking and significant parking enforcement, he said. The city has none of that.

"The question that I ask is, until you eliminate someone's need for a vehicle, is it appropriate to say they're not going to need to store the vehicle, even if they ride a bike some of the days, or walk some of the days, or take the bus some of the days?" Wiederkehr said.

He seemed to suggest the city's answer to the advocacy groups isn't no, but just "not yet."

In our view, the housing vs. parking demonstration envisions a city as the advocacy groups want to exist, but the City Council is busy dealing with a city as it does exist, and will for the foreseeable future. Is it the city's role to ignore today's realities or to, in essence, make living with a vehicle more difficult and therefore less attractive? It'll take a massive redesign of the city to eliminate or reduce the need to have a vehicle. While that may happen in 20 or 30 years, the city isn't there yet.

Particularly in a college town that invites students from far away to live in it, building residential properties that could flood nearby residential streets with vehicles doesn't sound like the kind of town Fayetteville is ready to be.