Patrick Ward’s neighborhood has gone through some upheaval in the last year, and he says the City of Providence’s parking policy is to blame.
That’s why he’s fighting for the city to allow its residents to park overnight on the streets.
Ward is the founder of Citizens for Resident Permit Parking, an organization dedicated to changing the city’s longstanding ordinance banning parking on almost all city streets during the overnight hours.
“There’s a hundred good reasons to eliminate the overnight parking ban,” Ward said last week. “But I can’t think of a lot of good ones to maintain it.”
In the last 18 months, he and other volunteers have circulated petitions, organized rallies, put up lawn signs and talked to neighborhood groups.
Now the efforts appear to paying off.
City officials confirmed last week that a pilot parking permit program will be established for a four-block section of Mount Pleasant surrounding Ward’s three-unit apartment house that is particularly starved for parking spaces.
According to City Councilman Terrance Hassett, the densely populated neighborhood with limited off-street parking joins an area of Washington Park in which cars have been allowed for about a year to park on the streets overnight with a permit.
Hassett said it will take another 60 to 90 days for the new program to start, allowing for signs to be printed and installed. Acknowledging he didn’t support the permit plan when it was first suggested last year, Hassett said he was swayed by the success of the Washington Park experiment.
“We’ve discovered it can be done with few problems,” he said.
The victory for Ward’s group doesn’t end there. Kari Lang, executive director of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association, said there are plans to add a pilot permit program in that neighborhood, too.
The details haven’t been hammered out yet, Lang said, but it will be a welcome change for many residents just the same. Because of the lack of off-street parking surrounding many of the multi-family homes, Lang said many property owners have been forced to pave available spaces in their yards.
“That leaves no grass, no green space,” Lang said. “Instead, you have wall-to-wall parking.”
David Peck said he would like to see the scope of permit parking spread even wider. The owner of Rent Prov Realty, which finds renters for apartment owners, said the parking ban scares off many potential renters. “A lot of people won’t live in Providence,” he said. “They have no place to park. And they can’t afford to pay $15 to $100 a month to rent a parking space.”
In one case, Peck said, he’s trying to find renters for a four-bedroom Victorian on the East Side, but one of the downsides is that it only has one off-street parking space. “It’s absolutely gorgeous,” he said. “But we can’t rent it.”
Currently in most areas of the city, cars cannot legally be parked on the street between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. Violators face a $15 fine. City officials said the ban, which has been in place since the 1930s, keeps the streets clear for public safety vehicles, street sweepers and snow plows during the winter.
An overnight ban for on-street parking is unusual among municipalities, large and small. New York City and Boston allow parking with a resident permit. Closer to home, Newport allows overnight parking, with resident permits required in some areas.
Pawtucket allows on-street parking with no need for permits, but the width of the roadways determines whether it’s allowed on one side of a street, or both. Parking is prohibited between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. in neighborhoods the day after trash pickup, according to Randy Wunschel, an aide in Pawtucket’s traffic department. That allows for street sweeping, he said.
When Ward first purchased his three-unit apartment house on Health Avenue in August 2005 he rented three spots in a nearby lot, paying $25 a month for each space. He had no room for a driveway on his own property.
But in 2006, the 14-space lot was sold to a developer who had a two-family home built on the property. Ward and his tenants had nowhere to turn.
“When we lost that parking lot, that was huge to us,” Ward said. “It tore the fabric of the community. Five good families had to move out of here.”
Ward said he decided to push for permit parking after researching the issue. “If you look at cities of our size, they all allow it,” he said. “Providence is one of the only cities in the United States that has an overnight parking ban.”
Ward said he found that about 80 to 85 percent of the residents in his neighborhood were supportive of permit parking, but that was not the case everywhere. Members of a neighborhood group in Fox Point he visited earlier this month were skeptical, in part because a fear that cars owned by college students living in the area would clog the streets.
Hassett said the pilot program in Mount Pleasant will affect an area bordered by Academy Avenue, Regent Avenue and Huron Street. Permits will cost $25 each and each household will be allowed a maximum of two.
The City Council also extended the one-year pilot program in Washington Park into 2009.
While Hassett said he supports the permit program, he still has one worry: snowstorms. He said there hasn’t been a bad one since the Washington Park permitting started last year, so officials still aren’t sure how that will play out. “It’s definitely one of my concerns,” he said.
Still, the permits can’t be issued soon enough for Ward and his tenants.
Right now, he rents a spot at $50 a month for one tenant, a single mother with two small children. “She’s had to walk a block to get to her car, in the snow, rain and sleet,” he said.
Ward’s other tenant parks at a nearby auto repair shop, but there’s a catch: The shop owner has any cars in the lot after 7 a.m. towed away. “My tenant gets up every morning at 6 a.m. and hustles over there to get his car out,” he said.
Isn’t that unusual? “No, it’s kind of standard in Providence,” Ward said. •
