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West Roxbury parking wars: On two streets, homeowners battle apartment dwellers for spaces
By adamg on Mon, 01/11/2016 - 9:57pm
Homeowners on DeSoto Road and Willers Street in West Roxbury have filed petitions with the Boston Transportation Department for resident-permit parking on the streets.
At a meeting of the West Roxbury Civic and Improvement Association tonight, homeowners said their streets are so clogged with cars from the neighboring Georgetowne Homes complex - many parked for days or weeks at a time - that buses, emergency vehicles, plows and sweepers have trouble getting down them. One resident said a hearse couldn't get to her house when her father died a few years ago.
Homeowners said Georgetowne residents get a free space per unit; the problem is that many have more than one car and rather than pay for an extra space, park outside the complex for free. But they're often slobs who leave behind trash and abandoned cars - and particularly ornery. One resident said his Lexus was keyed from one end to the other the day after the city towed a car across from his driveway.
A BTD representative who bore the brunt of homeowner complaints at the meeting cautioned that should the department approve the petition, Georgetowne residents could apply for permits, too.
Residents said that was fine with them. Many of the cars from Georgetowne have New York, Connecticut or Maine plates, which would make them ineligible for Boston permits in general, they said, adding that even more important, Georgetowne is actually part of Hyde Park, which would make its residents ineligible for West Roxbury permits.
The BTD rep added that if the city did approve the request, it would likely be for 6 p.m. to 8 a.m.
Nobody from Georgetowne attended the meeting.
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Comments
Isn't Georgetown low income?
Isn't Georgetown low income? They have multiple vehicles?!?!
What exactly is the definition of low income?
You can unwad your panties
Affordable housing, not low-income. These are people with fulltime jobs who otherwise couldn't afford the Boston area. Georgetowne income requirements (scroll down a bit).
I support affordable housing
I support affordable housing because people working shitty underpaid jobs that make the rest of our lives easier should be able to live, but it sounds like something here's gone awry. People living in affordable housing are supposedly contributing to society, which makes it more palatable than low income, but cheating on your excise taxes, keying cars and leaving trash all over your neighborhood sounds more like Bromley Heath than West Roxbury. Maybe it's the size of the complex - concentration of poverty never creates healthy communities, whether people are working or not.
I think those comments say
I think those comments say more about the people at the meeting than they do about the people who live at Georgetown. I go through Georgetown all the time, and I don't see trash or whatever. It's a fairly well maintained, reasonably attractive apartment complex.
They should still register
They should still register their cars.
Too many free permits are given out.
^
The whole resident permit
parking system is nothing more than a glorified entitlement program. Public streets should be available for ALL members of the public to use without arbitrary restrictions that benefit a small group at the expense of others.
oh, really?
When I lived on a permit-free street, there was nothing I loved more than to come home from work to no spots because NH plate excise evaders packed the block. I'm all for putting a cap on permits issued per household, but what's so wrong with a system that makes people register their cars to their real address and pay MA insurance?
Remember that the "small group" is the people who actually live there.
Lots of towns have restrictions
Boston is bordered by a number of towns that have parking restrictions, e.g Brookline bans overnight parking all the times, Newton from November to April. Parking permits prevent residents of those towns from flooding Boston streets with their cars
Free/cheap is the problem IMO
I don't have a problem with Boston on-street parking permits. I just think that they're far, far too cheap.
The streets belong to all the people of Boston. Why should a 7'x16' piece of property be used to store a private automobile for free? Why shouldn't the users pay the public for private, exclusive use of public property?
And yes, the limit that Boston can charge is the total cost to run the parking program, because it's a fee governed by state law. But why not at least do that -- why do people who don't own cars pay taxes to pay for all of the bureaucratic parking infrastructure necessary to allow Bostonians to store their private property in public?
Totally agree! Lived in
Totally agree! Lived in Somerville for six years where a permit was 30$/year (and then 10$/year for a visitor pass, which were limited). Cambridge is 25$/year and comes with one visitor pass. It blows my mind, with all the parking issues Boston has and the likely cost of running the permit program, that they're free and unlimited. Charge 20$/car (and double it for every additional car, so 40, 80, 160) and put the money towards snowplowing!
not good
If people are having problems with their neighbors, I feel for them, but I can think of a thousand things that are wrong with this story so I will choose just one to comment on. I think resident parking stickers are just legalized space saving. The fact that the residents (taxpayers) who live on or near a street would not be able to get a sticker to park on that street because of some imaginary neighborhood line shows one of the major flaws with the current system. This is a city of neighborhoods but it is one municipality; any resident should be able to park in any space that is open to any other resident with a few obvious exceptions (handicap...et al.) The reason any resident should be able to park in any legal space is because their tax dollars pay to maintain that space. We pay taxes to Boston, not West Roxbury or Hyde Park.
I think this is a little different
I got the impression from the residents asking for resident parking that their problem was a little different. From what they said, Georgetown has restrictions on parking, sort of their own resident parking, and people are either living there who are officially non-residents, and so have no resident parking, or there is a fee for them to park at Georgetown if they are not official residents.
The streets in question are quiet side streets, where normally no one but people who live there would want to park overnight.
The residents also said that
The residents also said that many of the cars that are parked for days or weeks in front of their homes have out of state license plates.
There are laws against that
There are laws against that already.
And nobody who owns a single-family home would ever do that?
There are laws against it,
There are laws against it, and one person said when they reported it, they got their car keyed.
not enforced
Yeah, but try reporting it to the RMV's I PAY TAX system. I've filled out dozens of forms for those a-holes with zero results. There's a reason people do it...they can keep getting away with it.
Permit system makes neighborhoods liveable
It's not perfect, and it's broken at the edges as you point out, but a policy of favoring local residents is not completely insane.
I live in a neighborhood with fewer than 2,000 legal on-street spaces, and an 8,000 employee facility at one end of the neighborhood (MGH) and a 7,500 employee facility at the other (State house). The resident sticker parking system makes it possible for a resident to have at least a fighting chance of finding a space within a quarter mile of his or her house; without the sticker system commuters would have all the spaces and more.
Do the commuters have an equal right to the spaces as I do? Arguably they do, so the policy is one of restricting one benefit (park anywhere) to further another (park somehwere near your house)
That your taxes pay for something doesn't of course give you the right to park there -- see, for example, Boston Common, or the runways at Logan Airport.
Is there additional pressure
Is there additional pressure because of the "new" apartment building that opened in 2012 on that street?
http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/west_roxbury/2012/10/ribbon-cutting_...
Not part of George Town, and
Not part of George Town, and the parking their is fairly cheap (or, well, in comparison for the rent that is charged for the new building).
Curious about the ownership
Curious about the ownership of this complex. It is privately owned but with restricted rent for restricted-income people? I looked up the website, but there isn't much to be found about the property owner.
Beacon Communities is the owner
Actual owner is Georgetowne Home One & Two, LLC dba Beacon Communities website; http://www.beaconcommunitiesllc.com
Why does a car parked by
Why does a car parked by someone who lives in a different style of house, or a car parked for weeks at a time, block a bus, emergency vehicle, or hearse more than any other car?
If the street is too narrow to allow parking on one or both sides, then ban parking. Otherwise, this is a false argument in an attempt to grab a public resource for selfish gain.
Resident Permit vs. abandoned cars
I used to live in the Fenway neighborhood, which resticts most on-street parking to those who have a resident permit. It was not a magical solution to finding a parking spot, since at that time (approximately 20 years ago) there were something like 400-450 permits issued for only about 50 on-street spots; but it did give people who lived there a fighting chance in the summer ball game season. After all, who wouldn't be willing to walk six blocks to the ball park if they could get free, unlimited on-street parking time? But faced with the reality of being towed for lack of a resident sticker, most people going to the game(s) parked further out and took the "T" the rest of the way, or ponied up for a spot in one of the many overpriced-but-guaranteed-not-to-get-towed private lots around.
After that, I lived on a dead-end street in Brighton's Oak Square, on a street that runs parallell to the Mass Pike for part of the way. This particular end of Brighton is not affected by BC's football games, so resident parking permits were not necessary. Every so often, a car would be abandoned on a short section of the street that had no homes, but still made things difficult for residents to get by (and plows to get through in winter...as well as the trucks serving the one commercial/industrial building on the street.) All of us would call, and call, and call, and call, and constantly call to get the obviously-abandoned and heavily-vandalized-by-now car towed away only to be ignored by the powers-that-be. Often, it wasn't until vandals had set said car on fire, and the fire department ordered the useless hulk towed away that anything was ever done about it.
TL;DR: Resident Parking Only Permits are more likely to solve a congestion problem than calling to report abandoned cars (assuming Georgetowne residents/guests really are leaving their cars abandoned for "days or weeks at a time" in the same parking spot.)
So you propose punishing
So you propose punishing working people who use their cars every day, because the city is too incompetent to remove abandoned hulks?
I highly doubt...
I highly doubt that someone who leaves their car parked in the same exact spot "for days or weeks on end" uses that car every day. If they did, the car(s) would be parked in a different spot every day, and it wouldn't be so obvious that they aren't being moved at all, as some (not all) of those cars clearly are ~not~ being moved.
My comment was meant to illustrate the frustrations of people living in an area where "buses, emergency vehicles, plows and sweepers have trouble" getting down said narrow streets when there are so many people from outside the neighborhood coming in to park.
Since the city tends to respond faster to a non-resident parking in a resident-permit-parking-only spot than it does to a report of an abandoned car; I believe that that would be the perfect solution to removing cars that are obviously *not* being used (at all) by "working people who use their cars every day" or anyone else for that matter.
The rest of the cars being parked in the area, the ones that clearly are being used on a regular basis because they don't sit in the same spot day after day after day..? May or may not belong to people living in another neighborhood, and establishing a resident-permit only system will certainly clear things up, though I'm sure it will also lead to a lot of anger and hard feelings as well.
Having lived in GeorgeTowne
Having lived in GeorgeTowne back in the day, I feel like this is a problem with 'those people' meaning POC/Caribbean folks who have found affordable housing outside the inner city. Westie residents were awful to deal with back then, I imagine this has gotten more tense as more POC have moved next door (GT is on the border of Hyde Park/W Roxbury).
Same arguments new decade. If it wasn't this problem being written about today it would be something else.
The guy who complained about the keying?
Black. So was his wife, who pleaded with the BTD guy to do something - as did one of their neighbors, also black. So it's not quite as simplistic as you posit.
I'm dumb, what's POC?
I'm dumb, what's POC?
Person of color.
Person of color.
That's because we weren't
That's because we weren't told. A lot of you are misinformed. This is a mixed income apartment complex, that means there are families with low to moderate income living here.
The problem came about 5 years ago when management decided to limit space for VISITORS.
Drive thru any given night and you will see plenty of par5spaces.