They Unpaved a Parking Lot

And Put Up Paradise

It’s time to play the Joni Mitchell song backward so that we know what we’ve got after we get it.

I Didn’t Even Have to Use My AK

StrongHaven’s part-time headquarters is the Co-Creative Center in downtown New Bedford, a short bike ride over the bridge. I work here at most one day a week, but it’s a great place to connect with my New Bedford folks and I like being surrounded by art and creatives.

The Co-Creative backs onto Custom House Square, a small park with rolling hills that sits on about one acre¹. I like the park. It’s a lovely space to walk through. My friends at New Bedfit work out there weekly.

Source: Stoss Landscape Urbanism

Walking through Custom House Square on my way to a meeting the other week, I heard someone call my name. Turns out it was a former rockstar student named Stephanie, who already has a gig in the Wind energy industry even though she’s a year shy of graduating high school. She gave me an expert tutorial about the turbines that will be assembled here. These new turbines will each generate 13X as much energy as one of the turbines at Fairhaven’s waste treatment plant. Exciting!

Running into Stephanie made my day. The future is bright (and windy?) Later that evening, as I crossed Custom House Square on my way back to the Co-Creative, a crowd had gathered to watch a freestyle-rap show, led by New Bedford legend Anghelli, with whom I’d worked running programs for kids back in the day. I hadn’t been looking to attend a freestyle performance that day, but watching gifted performers create rhymes out of thin air was the cherry on top of a delicious day.

What made this a good day was its serendipitous flow— the dance of work, social, and commercial moves all seamlessly connected in a way that only happens in a walkable downtown. And in this case, that flow is facilitated by the existence of the small but mighty Custom House Square. This park’s existence is worth pondering, because, as those readers who live here will likely remember, the park was born not long ago amidst considerable controversy.

Mayor Jon(i) Mitchell

Until 2013, Custom House Square was a free parking lot. As far as I can recall, it was usually half-empty on weekdays. Mayor Mitchell, in an effort to provide more green space and walkability downtown, proposed turning the parking lot into a park.

From the Standard-Times:

NEW BEDFORD — It was parking, not the park, that people wanted to talk about Monday night when the city unveiled the first redesigns of the Custom House Square lot.

The spot is slated to be turned into a park this year thanks to a $300,000 state grant, but the plan has provoked backlash from some store owners, who say it will rob their customers of parking spots, become a magnet for vagrants and could force festivals out of the downtown.

Just as when bike trails were proposed for Fairhaven, Dartmouth, and Westport, a small but vocal number of people (in this case small business owners) opposed an effort to provide beautiful public space for people on the grounds that it would interfere with providing free space for… cars.

Thankfully, in this case, the City prevailed and we now have a beautiful park, where countless interactions like the ones I had with Stephanie and Angelli— interactions that make a city awesome— happen daily. But what about the pahking? Did reducing the number of free places for people to stow their vehicles in the middle of the city's most valuable land destroy local businesses and keep people away from downtown? Since the creation of the park, there have been a number of successful new businesses that have opened downtown. Surely this additional commerce has further exacerbated the parking issue?

How It’s Going

Here’s the view outside my office today, looking down toward the park. It’s midday on a weekday. As you see, there are available metered spaces. Reasonably priced parking is also available a block away at the Elm Street Garage. Plenty of spaces there. The sky didn’t fall. Business is good downtown. As with the creation of the bike path in Fairhaven, the value of surrounding properties has undoubtedly increased due to the presence of the park. That means more revenue for the city, which is good for everyone, including business owners.

Park It

I’m revisiting this now because I think it’s important that, years after the dust settles on some of these scuffles, we look back at the claims opponents and proponents made and see how things actually played out. That’s how we learn! Both the Custom House Square and the bike path episodes should be a lesson that creating spaces for people is generally going to be a better investment than protecting free parking, particularly on our most valuable land.

The next time a land use that benefits people is proposed in your town, don’t give any weight to vocal opponents who use free parking as their battle cry. Remember that people will always come for great restaurants, green spaces, and beautiful places to walk and roll. In the end, no one ever comes for the parking.

1. For our readers in Dartmouth, that’s about half the lot needed for a single-family home in most of your town.