City Council

City of Salem, Massachusetts “Know Your Rights Under the Open Meeting Law, M.G.L. c. 30A ss. 18-25 and City Ordinance Sections 2-2028 through 2-2033.” The City Council Committee on Committee of the Whole____________________________________________ met in the Council Chamber on __Wednesday June 25, 2025________________________ at _______6:00 PM________ for the purpose of discussing the matters(s) listed below. Notice of this meeting was posted on ___June 18, 2025__________________________________ at _________11:47 A.M.__________________ (This meeting is being recorded) ATTENDANCE COW – Prosniewski (President), Watson-Felt, Cohen, Harvey, Stott, Jerzylo, Davis, Morsillo, Merkl & Hapworth. Planning Dept. - Elena Eimert, Senior Planner, Robyn Lee, Planner, Amanda Chiancola, Deputy Director. MACP – Julia Wallerce, Assist Director of Transportation, Alexis Smith, Principal Regional Housing and Land Use Planner, Conor Gately, Senior Land Use and Transportation Analyst (all on Zoom). – also, on the MACP team, but not in attendance are Adi Nochur, Senior Transportation Planner & Samantha Berlus, Community Engagement Specialist. ABSENT WERE: Varela SUBJECT(S) Meet with the staff of the Planning Department and The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) to discuss the current project to Right-Size Parking Requirements for future multifamily housing Chiancola – Along with the people on my staff and the MACP staff, we have been working with a lot of volunteers. I really appreciate how hard everyone has been working on this project. The materials that are being presented tonight, will be available at www.imaginesalem.org. Eimert – We are going to be looking at the connection between parking and housing. Parking minimums for off street parking requirements are established by the zoning ordinance based on the activity at the site. Eliminating mandatory minimum parking requirements is an important step in municipality developing affordable housing. Salem zoning ordinance section 5.1 shows the off-street parking minimums can be based on the numbers of housing units or the square footage of the attached space whether office, retail or commercial. Or it could be as arbitrary as the number of seats at a funeral home or the number of holes on a mini golf course. Our focus is on the multi-family housing/dwelling which requires 1.5 spaces per unit of housing. We need to right size parking and this will increase housing supply. A good parking policy can advance a myriad of positive goals, including supply of housing, affordability, walkability, economic development, sustainability. A bad parking policy, where we end up with an oversupply of parking, can hamper other efforts towards those same goals. It's critical to get parking right and part of getting parking right means making sure our parking policies don't encourage the provision of parking spaces that sit empty. In roughly the same square footage, you can fit a 2-bedroom apartment in 2.5 parking spaces. Survey in San Francisco shows that less parking leads to less car ownership. The minimum parking requirement of 1.5 parking per housing unit in Salem is from 1969. Per the MassINC report, Salem needs 2229 additional housing units in the next 10 years. When we right size our parking minimums, we unlock Salem’s housing supply. In Salem, there are about 45,000 residents and about 68% commute by car and 15% commute by public transit, walking or biking. Another 15% commute by taxi or motorcycle and 15% work from home. In Salem, 60% of households have access to one or fewer vehicles. If more than ½ of the households have one car or less and we are requiring 1.5 per unit, then some parking must be sitting empty. Lee – Parking Reform – per the parking reform network, parking reform is defined as the use of policies and activism to discourage the building of too much parking and encourage more equitable, efficient and sustainable management of existing supply. This can commonly look like reduction of existing parking minimums, the elimination of parking minimums, and the adoption of parking maximum, among other interventions. These efforts can also be paired with something called transportation demand management strategies (TDM) which can include shared parking or the unbundling of rents and parking. Crucially, we'd like to note that parking reform is not a ban on parking, but rather it creates additional flexibility for projects to provide parking that adequately meet the needs of their community. Eimert – National and Regional Context – Many jurisdictions across the country are removing parking minimums. Parking minimums can hinder residential construction. Transit rich areas don’t need parking minimums. Austin is the largest city that has removed parking minimums. Hartford CT was the first. Approximately 2885 cities the same size or smaller than Salem have eliminated parking minimums. In Massachusetts, the Unlocking Housing Production Commission recommended several zoning changes including eliminating parking minimum statewide for any residential use. Successful parking reform has happened in Metro Boston – Somerville, Boston, Cambridge, Everett. Beyond Metro Boston - Acton, Lowell, Framingham, Salem (Commercial). What are the benefits – more housing supply, lower costs to develop, housing growth with limited congestion, less air pollution. Also improved walkability and favorable state and federal grants. Lee – Perfect Fit Parking in Salem – MAPC – One of their goals is to invest in and expand public and active transportation systems to support more affordable, reliable and safer connections to jobs and homes. They have been conducting research on regional parking supply, demand and utilization at multifamily sites in Greater Boston since 2015. They aim to better understand what factors most strongly influence parking demand. The research found that overall parking is over built and underutilized. This parking reform will only apply to future multifamily that are 3 or more units. We picked several multifamily housing locations to study which included a survey sent to property managers. This study included overnight parking as well. We did the overnight parking counts last fall to determine how much parking was provided and how much parking was utilized. Project started in January 2024. We received a technical assistance grant to work with MACP. Eimert – Across the properties that were counted, there were 1.18 parking spaces per housing unit and 38% of parking were empty. That shows us that our parking minimums are too high. Average parking demand is 0.85 per unit of housing. Salem Model Findings – Parking minimums, encourage excess parking supply. Affordable housing units need less parking accessibility. Our conclusion is to support housing growth in Salem, which we know we need from that Mass Gateways Report, but also seeking to limit the negative externalities of excess parking, including traffic pollution. We would propose to reform our parking minimums to enable more car light and car free housing development. Lee – Community Engagement events. We held several community engagement events. The public process for this project is ongoing. There will be public hearings as well as zoning amendments as this project continues. All the info is available on Imagine Salem. We heard some concerns for street parking and parking for home health workers and visitors. Eimert - Policy options for Parking Reform – There are 2 options that we are recommending. The first is elimination of parking minimums for multifamily residential. This provides the maximum flexibility – largest opportunity for expansion of housing options for car lite and car free households. While we are focused on housing, we understand that there would improved walkability and pedestrian safety. Lee – The second option is the reduction approach. Use 0.75 instead of 1.5. B5 should go to zero minimum, it is already that way for commercial. Benefit for reduction is lesser than elimination. Eimert – Summary – The elimination of parking minimums for multifamily housing would yield the greatest flexibility and would most strongly advance the other public policies but we do see the merits of a reduction approach as well. Hopefully we will increase housing supply with parking reform. Discussion – Morsillo – My question is on inclusionary zoning – could we get more affordability for 21+ units. Alexis Smith – MACP – We want to be very conservative for smaller developments. Developers are still going to build parking so we don’t want to presume that developers will build less parking because that isn’t realistic. Morsillo – In my mind, I thought we would get more affordability. Do you see a difference between elimination and the 0.75? Chiancola – Elimination of parking minimums is the best option. It will create more housing. Morsillo – Who is helping the developers to get this information for parking? Chiancola – A development team will look at the project and the developers will not get financing if there is no parking. Depending on where the development is, there may be a need for parking if it is farther away from the transit/downtown. Merkl – Studio rents in Minneapolis fell 17%. The goal is to create more housing so flexibility is needed, and parking reform would help with that. It is an interesting point that you made about developers not getting financing for a construction project that needs parking if they aren’t proposing to include parking. Will creating more housing in general, create more affordability? Can we stabilize all the price points by just eliminating parking requirements? Chiancola- Developer needs to get a rate of return. We need more than 2000 more housing units in Salem in the next 10 years so if a developer doesn’t need to include too many parking spaces, then a 50-unit building can be 60 units with less parking. Watson-Felt – How many variances for parking in the last 10 years. I would be interested to see how many reduced parking allowances have been made because that could make a case for lowering the minimum parking requirements. Eimert – We don’t have the last 10 years, but we do have data for about 5-7 years, and we can try to expand that out to 10 years to make it available to the council. Harvey – The data you have for cars – why don’t we look at the info from excise taxes in Salem instead of asking residents. Developers and investors are trying to make money – what’s to say they are going to less parking for residents and then charge extra for parking. The rent is affordable but then they must rent a parking space. Other cities have a transit system, but Salem doesn’t have that. The people in Salem depend on vehicles to get around anywhere that is outside of going to Boston. Chiancola – We do have the info on excise tax. We looked at multiple data sources. We looked at American Community Survey. We did a survey of Salem residents as well and the results were reflective of what we found in ACS. We can get you the information on the excise taxes. In terms of the affordable rents. I do want to note that when we have an affordable unit in our inclusionary housing ordinance there is a max rent, or a max sale price based on their income level. If parking is unbundled in the unit, then the cost of parking is included in that max rent. If a person who rents an affordable unit decides I don't want that parking space, their rent for that space is deducted. It cannot exceed that max rent, so that is included in the consideration for the affordable units. In terms of the transit system, we are different than San Francisco, but that's the reason we shared that study. We really like that study because it controlled for so many variables. There are suburbs outside of the downtown San Francisco that are like Salem, that don't have the same access that are included in that study, and, as Elena had said, it looked at participants who were in the inclusionary Housing unit lotteries, and so they have a high cost of living there $118,000 for a 2-family household. and then it controlled for all these other items. So, looking at when you're controlling for transit, walkability, and bike accessibility, we thought it was a relevant study to share. That's why we shared so many different examples in this presentation, because we wanted to show you, we're not just looking at cities like San Francisco. We're trying to look at small communities, large communities and places closer by. Then again, in terms of transit, Salem has invested so much in micro mobility. Keep into consideration things like the skipper, the bike share. In terms of jobs. we do have a lot of jobs in Salem, like Salem Hospital and Salem State University, and we also have quite a few jobs on Highland Avenue. Hapworth – I don’t think renting parking spaces is an allowable use in Salem except in October. And yes, we are not San Francisco, but there are a lot of places on the map that are as car centric or more than Salem, like Austin. They have lowered rents with a parking reform. Did you see any cities where they had negative impacts from eliminations of parking minimums, and they had to change the ordinance back? Is there a reason to consider option 2 with just a reduction in the parking requirement? Eimert – We didn’t see any communities that had a negative impact from parking reform, but we can do a deeper dive into it to find the worst-case scenario. Cohen – There have been several new developments that have received variances from the current parking requirements. The new buildings where Bertini’s has parking at 1.2 per unit and more spaces for bicycles as well as EV charging stations. That location is walkable from our 2 biggest employers – the hospital and the university and will be walkable to the new T station when that is built. We do need to find a way to make it easier to get around the city. We have the Skipper, but that is typically only one person, and we need to find a way to better move people around the city that will significantly benefit the environment. Jerzylo – What time at night did you do the parking study? A lot of people in a lot of those areas work second or third shifts. Did you consider the street parking? What about visitor parking? Eimert – The parking counts did not start before 11pm. There is a possibility to have shared parking too when it comes to some that need it during the day and others that need it at night. Chiancola – We did not look at street parking. We just looked at off street parking because we are looking at the parking that is required to be built for a particular project. We did consider visitor parking, but we don’t want to build extra parking just for the occasional party or visitor. Jerzylo – One of my biggest complaints from constituents is regarding parking. Chiancola –Public parking on the street is important and we are concerned about that so we have been discussing it with the transportation department to figure out what would be best. Davis – I support this and had the privilege to be part of the working group on this. We should eliminate the minimum parking requirements. We want to encourage those that are not car dependent to move into the city. I think that developers will be building a lot less parking with this change. Public transportation is a concern, and we need more of it. Merkl – I support this too. Having fewer parking spaces, means we get rid of extra cars. I know that from personal experience. We moved here from the suburb because we could take public transportation and we had 3 cars but didn’t have enough parking so we eliminated the extra cars. Stott – I am in support of option one and I think we could go bolder and not just remove the requirement for multifamily with 3 or more units, I think we should include R1, R2 and R3. I agree that we do get mostly parking complaints, but we are not taking away the existing parking, so this is just for future projects. Harvey – Some of the areas that are R3 are also R1, so the parking issue could be a problem because they are using street parking because we don’t have off street parking. The bike share and Skipper programs are eventually going to fall on the taxpayers because there will be no funding for those programs. Prosniewski – When was the MassINC report done because we have a lot of current construction that may put us over the 2,229 new units that it says that we will need. Chiancola – It was done in 2024. It didn’t include conceptual projects, like the Bertini’s project which wasn’t included. We haven’t gotten close to the 2200 housing. The 2200 is based on our growth and growth trends, so to keep up with our growth trends, we will need 2,229 more housing units in the next 10 years. Prosniewski – If developers are building then we have more push to get more affordability in those projects. I agree that Salem lacks public transit system other than the train. Public comment – Katelyn Holappa – 70 Boston St. – The parking laws are archaic, and they should be eliminated. When these requirements were put in place, they were really a guess as to how much parking we would need. Having parking requirements increases the cost of the construction project and leads to more cars which creates more traffic, pollution and greenhouse gases.