End the parking wars: Share parking on Cherry Street

An edited version of this column was published in the April 29, 2009, edition of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is no longer available online. Posted July 15, 2021. See the end of this entry for a postscript.

Cityscope
By Michael D. Bates

Parking wars
Will success spoil Tulsa's midtown entertainment districts?

In the '80s and '90s, entrepreneurs discovered the old retail buildings along 15th between Peoria and Utica. They converted the old storefronts into specialty boutiques, cafes, and nightspots. Since then, Cherry Street has become increasingly popular, a place that Tulsans like to show off to out-of-town guests.

That success has brought its share of challenges. One of those challenges: Where do you park if you want to visit more than one establishment?

I've seen the problem firsthand. About once a month, when my wife is at a moms' night out and my oldest son is at his violin lesson downtown, I take my two youngest children over to Cherry Street. They like Subway sandwiches for dinner, and while their palates aren't yet sophisticated enough to appreciate a "Hippie Sandwich" or a Greek salad at Coffee House on Cherry Street (known as CHoCS for short), they love the baked goods there, like the cream-cheese brownies and chocolate chip cookies.

CHoCS is right across the street from Subway, so you'd think it would simple to hit both in one trip. You'd be wrong.

I can't leave the car in the Subway parking lot after we finish our sandwiches and head across the street to CHoCS for dessert, because they have signs saying parking is for customers only, with a 15 minute limit and a $75 towing charge for violators. It's their property, and while I'd be upset if Subway had my car towed right after I bought a meal there, they'd be within their rights.

Neither do I want to take up one of the limited spaces at CHoCS while I'm at Subway. While CHoCS doesn't have any signs posted threatening a tow, their neighbors do. It's a popular place, and when the lot is full, some CHoCS customers have inadvertently parked in a space belonging to a neighboring business, only to find a warning note taped to the car, singling out CHoCS as the source of all the world's troubles. So as not to make a tight parking situation even tighter, I wouldn't think of parking in CHoCS's lot while visiting another Cherry Street merchant.

And I absolutely refuse to do something as stupid and wasteful as parking in one store's lot, getting back in the car, driving 100 feet, and parking in another store's lot. So instead of using either lot, I park in a public spot on a nearby side street, and my children and I walk to both destinations.

CHoCS' relatively easygoing attitude about parking is a rarity on Cherry Street, where signs threatening tow trucks and wheel boots are the rule. The every-merchant-for-himself arrangement discourages patrons from leaving their car parked in one place, strolling the street, window-shopping, and visiting several different retailers on the same trip.

Instead, a customer is more likely to park at the establishment he came to patronize, do his business, then get back in his car. Once he's back in his car, it's as easy (maybe easier) to head to someplace in Brookside or Utica Square as to go to another Cherry Street merchant.

The zeal to protect one's own parking is understandable, given the city zoning code requirement for each merchant to provide, individually, sufficient off-street parking for the worst-case scenario. By worst-case, I'm talking about the Best Buy lot on Christmas Eve.

To meet Tulsa's parking requirements, some merchants have had to purchase and clear entire house lots; they then need approval from the Board of Adjustment to use a detached parking lot. One restaurant has gone so far as to install automatic gates to protect its investment; you need the validation code from your dinner receipt to get out.

Under our current zoning code, approved in 1970, parking requirements are based on business type. Converting a storefront from a clothing store to a café triples the parking requirement. The requirements assume that everyone will be arriving by car and will be visiting only that one establishment before leaving by car.

But Cherry Street was developed before World War II, long before our current zoning code was put in place, to serve as a shopping area for residents within walking distance. Merchants weren't required to provide off-street parking, and for the most part they didn't. Customers could and did walk to do their shopping. Many stores would deliver.

When shopping districts like Cherry Street changed from serving nearby residents to serving customers from all over the city, parking became an issue. Years ago, cars would be lined up on Brookside's residential streets for blocks either side of Peoria. Residents had to deal with late-night traffic, cranked car stereos, and sometimes worse - drunken yelling, fights, and the public exercise of excretory functions.

The houses nearest Peoria were cleared and replaced with parking lots in order to meet the zoning requirements for restaurants and nightclubs. The new lots helped to keep the cars and the corresponding problems out of the residential areas. On a recent Saturday night research visit, I found there were almost no cars parked on the side streets, which were pretty quiet once I was a half-block or so away from Peoria.

Adding more parking lots as Brookside did would be harder to do for Cherry Street. Land north of 15th is at a premium; most of the land south of 15th is within a historic preservation district.

Even if the land were available, converting tree-lined lots to asphalt parking reduces available housing (and housing nearest the commercial area is often the most affordable), reduces shade, and creates an ugly, pedestrian-friendly moat of asphalt cutting the valuable link between the commercial and residential areas.

You might think that in an area like Cherry Street, with a variety of merchants whose actual parking demand ebbs and flows over the course of a day, that the merchants could pool their parking and reduce the total number of spaces required to make all the customers happy.

The zoning code doesn't make that possible, unless you have at least 100,000 sq. ft. in a single Planned Unit Development, and even then you only get to cut the parking requirement by 10% if the Board of Adjustment gives its permission.

Perhaps because of the extra parking lots, it appears that Brookside merchants are much more easy-going about parking than their Cherry Street counterparts. Most of the lots I mentioned above are available for anyone to use at any time - no signs to indicate who owns the lot or any restrictions on who can park there, no threats that Mater will come to haul your Lightning McQueen off to the impound lot.

For example, one church in the bustling heart of Brookside has a large parking lot, but restaurant and bar customers were parking there, and I didn't notice any signs forbidding it.

Brookside's open-handed approach to parking means that you can have dinner at a restaurant on one block, have drinks on another block, go dancing on yet another block, and cap the night off with coffee on yet a fourth block, all the while leaving your car parked in one spot.

I'm not sure how Brookside has managed this level of cooperation, but the district seems to accommodate the crowds without loading down neighborhood streets and without causing heartburn between merchants.

If Cherry Street merchants would pull together, they could work out a solution that would meet the needs of merchants, customers, and neighbors alike.

The solution I have in mind would respect the property rights of existing parking lot owners and would avoid eroding the neighborhood with more parking lots. My solution would require a minimal amount of government involvement and a willingness on the part of the merchants each to pony up a small amount of money - less than it would cost them individually to acquire more land for parking.

The solution is to create a business improvement district. Collecting the funds to provide shared facilities for a group of adjacent properties is exactly the sort of situation that an improvement district is meant to address.

The improvement district would cover property owners along Cherry Street, each of whom would pay an assessment proportionate to the degree of benefit from the district's improvements. The formula could be based on frontage, square footage, the number of parking spaces required by the zoning code, or some combination of those factors.

Assessment funds would be used to pay the owners of existing parking lots to open their parking spaces for the general use of customers of any merchant on Cherry Street. Lease payments could be based on the number of spaces and how many hours the spaces are available for general parking.

One lot owner might choose to make more money by allowing wide-open parking at any time. Another owner might choose to forgo some lease revenue, reserving her spaces during her peak business hours. Some lot owners would choose not to participate at all and would miss out on using their empty parking lot to generate some extra money. The more spaces you make available, the more hours you allow open parking in your lot, the more lease money you'd receive from the improvement district.

As a purely hypothetical example, a school might allow open parking except when the space is needed during the school day or for special events. The school could use parking revenues to fund special school projects.

Assessment revenue could also be used to pay for a few security guards to walk a beat on busy evenings, deterring vandalism and other kinds of misbehavior in the parking lots.

As a further incentive, the City Council could cut the required number of parking spaces for properties in improvement districts that provide shared parking.

Of course, the simplest and least bureaucratic solution for all concerned would be for the city to reduce off-street parking requirements to a reasonable level and for property owners to be more easy-going and open-handed about who parks where.

Failing that, a business improvement district may be the best way to defuse tensions among Cherry Street merchants and to allow customers to get full enjoyment out of one of Tulsa's finest shopping and dining districts.

POSTSCRIPT 2021/07/13: The problem persists. New construction on Cherry Street has taken more homes to the north to meet the parking requirements; meanwhile Brookside parking lot owners have become stricter about not allowing after-hours use of their lots. (The office building north of Shades of Brown Coffee recently deployed orange cones blocking the south entrance to the parking lot, and some years ago the office park to the west installed an automatic gate to prevent after-hours parking.)

Del Mastro asks, "What if these parking lots were treated as public and open?" You can read more of his work on his Substack newsletter, The Deleted Scenes, in the archive of his New Urbs columns for The American Conservative, and in City Journal, where his first piece has recently appeared, advocating for small towns as a model for denser but humane growth.