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An article in today’s Dispatch showcases the concern that some University District residents have with the growing size of apartment complex parking lots in the area around Oakland Avenue. Residents who have lived in the area for years are complaining that with more students driving, more apartment complexes are expanding their parking lots and contributing additional congestion and blight to the neighborhood.
The full Dispatch article can be found here.
This shows we need to start thinking public transportation more..we cant be the city we are forever if we want to grow into a large metropolis. Bring on the light rail!!!
A lot of OSU stick to the the vicinity, so really there is no need for lots more parking.
Most of the cars sit until needed for occasional roadtrips. I think it has more to do with permanent residents lamenting the changing nature of their nieghborhood. The alternative would be more students parking on the street and I would imagine they would be against that too.
Personally, I hope the young people raising families set up shop in Weinland Park.
I sympathize with the more permanent residents, but I don’t know what they think should be done. I agree that the parking fight is really just a proxy for a hopeless desire to return to more golden times. Those duplexes are far more likely to have 8 unrelated students living in them than 2 families anymore. That means up to 8 cars to deal with, whether through turning backyards into parking lots or unleashing chaos in the on-street category.
Their best hope is that Gee can successfully force sophomores to live on campus, thus knocking out lots of potential neighbors. Otherwise, there is no turning back the clock. W. Oakland is a closer walk to many academic buildings than living on Indianola.
The parking lots in lieu of back yards creates more storm-water run-off too, which leads to the city spending billions to build giant sewers. Maybe more car-sharing or bike-sharing would help?
I’m a bit surprised that the UAC picked parking as the issue to press instead of the lack of code enforcement in the district. On my walk to work through the student ghetto I can count dozens of violations in plain site. The city has turned a blind eye on slum lord violations (to the great profit of slum lords). Why not just get the city to enforce its existing codes before trying to push through knew ones, especially when parking is just a symptom of the overcrowding violations?
Yea, I think the easiest way to accomplish all the above would be to force sophomores to live on campus. There are too many student rental houses that always look like shit. Combine them with the ghetto Weinland Park residents and you have a perfect recipe for blight. Why would anyone invest in an area who’s two types of residents have no class and don’t know how to behave? Get rid of or at least reduce the amount of student and section 8 housing and you might actually get a neighborhood.
StowCbusCleveland Says: I sympathize with the more permanent residents, but I don’t know what they think should be done.
I think their whole push is for apartment complex to provide fewer parking spots and make it less convenient for students living there to own cars. The only reason that we see every student with their own individual car is because the growth of the parking lots have made it easy to accommodate.
I’ve said it before, and I still think it holds true…. parking and driving will have to get harder throughout the entire region before mass transit development becomes a more attractive option.
If it really is common that people are living 8 to a house, then having sophomores live on campus will not hurt landlords since there appear to be too many people living off campus and things can redistribute into a more appropriate density for the neighborhoods.
If Memphis can have a pretty train then a city of almost 800,000 can have one too
I attended the Nov 18 UAC meeting and thought I’d post an update about this issue.
A property owner (though not the one from the Dispatch story) came before the commission to seek a permit for a gravel lot on his property (4 spaces). The lot was already there, he just wanted to get a variance. All the other houses on the block were also described as having unpermitted lots. He agreed to do some things the Commissioners requested, such as putting up barricades to prevent additional cars from parking on game days, but was unwilling to pave the lot if his neighbors weren’t required to do the same. In the end, they denied the variance.
I didn’t get the sense it was the UAC’s motive to make the area less friendly to parking. Several commissioners encouraged the landlord to petition to make the block permit-parking to secure the street parking for his tenants, which they insisted was a fairly easy process. I thought that was a reasonable request, and it does make me wonder why more of the district is not permit-based for this reason.