New York City's oldest generation could hold (many of ) the answers to the city's future.
In December of 2023, Time Out New York published heartwarming interviews of New Yorkers in their 90s, sharing their gripes and gushes over how the city had changed during their decades. Elderly New Yorkers have been christened as the city's unsung heroes, supplying us with uncelebrated glimpses into the city's past. These stories, however, hold clues to New Yokers' resilience from years of overcoming the city's inherent challenges.
As the urban doyens saw it, the negatives included a shift in the city's spirit, unbridled congestion, and the impossible price of a theater ticket. On the other hand, the increase in diversity and the emergence of Uber received significant brownie points. I was surprised they had also grieved about the city's parking situation. Not that parking was not worthy of grievance, but that even 98- and 99-year-olds felt the need to complain about parking in New York reaffirmed that the only folks not talking about parking were those with the official capacity to do so.
I recently served as a Community Planning Fellow with the Fund for the City of New York and had the unique opportunity to work on a hyper-local parking study. The assignment paired me with a community board encompassing a highly visited district in downtown Manhattan. Despite my training in public administration — and not something more conducive to the torture of street counting like urban planning — I undertook the challenge to quell my mounting curiosity about the city's massive parking issue.
It soon became evident that the inadequate representation by "officials" could be due to an absence of parking data. Never mind the congestion zeitgeist we find ourselves in; parking data was notably scarce everywhere I searched. The study turned into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to test the mental acuity necessary to amalgamate disparate data points associated with parking your car on the streets of New York. Flying over the district on my Google Earth ship, I became immersed in a universe of sidewalk lengths, parking regulations, bicycle lanes, turning lanes, restaurant sheds, and Citi bike racks. I saw swaths of neighborhoods seized by miles of tyrannical "alternate street parking" or "commercial parking only." From the vantage point of a digital map, the goal appeared to render chaos and congestion rather than reason or even right of way.
An interesting, albeit totally unexpected, discovery came when I reviewed the survey results. Several participants had volunteered in the extra comments section, saying that as residents over the age of 70, they were in staunch favor of keeping their streets available for parking. These participants described their willingness to endure the long search times and long walks home to keep a car in the city. With prices of monthly garage spaces averaging $1200 in this district, most seniors opted for free on-street parking. "Free" is a misnomer, considering the time and energy they spent looking for a spot and the weekly commitment to alternate street parking. These seniors were long-time residents of this community and had planned to stay for as long as possible; cars were their source of freedom and independence.
Aging in place is not a modern phenomenon, but with global increases in the aging population, several experts have written on the subject. Gerontologists, anthropologists, and urban planners are examining how older adults will adjust to longer lives in cities. According to the World Health Organization, by 2030, 87% of people in North America will live in a city; by 2050, 27% of that population will be over 60. That means today's 35-year-old New Yorker can look forward to breaking another record as they comprise the city's largest age group.
New York has long been a haven for seniors who choose to stay and those who have no choice but to stay. Friendly rent legislation facilitates this to such a degree that Forbes magazine recently ranked the Big Apple as the nation's 6th most affordable city for aging in place compared to the costs of assisted living in the area.
Naturally, the nonagenarians were right: New York is not the city of yesteryear. But it is a city where seven generations share street space. The pandemic thrust New York into the 21st century with the help of technology and the opportunity of a pandemic to take advantage of freed curb space.
However, the evolution has not been equitable, as so much of New York still runs — quite necessarily on a 20th-century blueprint and 19th-century infrastructure. But there's a race for street competition, which requires a plan to move forward. Who among the real estate developers, urban planners, e-delivery networks, activists, city officials, local business groups, economists, environmentalists, drivers, non-drivers, community leaders, and residents holds the key to the city's answer to its parking problem? Without the data, the answer is none, though that presents an opportunity to solve the issue collaboratively.
After completing the study, the community board drew inspiration from the idea that other districts undergo similar parking studies — clearing a pathway for communication based on shared data. Because community boards are the ground floor of city government, community boards are best equipped to deliver this data upstream. As the advisory bodies closest to community members, they have the messaging that conveys that issues such as congestion, parking, and aging do not, and cannot, exist in silos if communities are to thrive.
Here's a recent example of what this means: The New York Times recently released a piece to illustrate the impact of lost revenue due to the suspension of congestion pricing. Reporters stationed themselves at different coordinates of the central business district between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. (on a Monday before July 4th weekend) and counted just over 22,000 cars (an admittedly dramatic undercount). All I could count were the parking spots these cars would need when the eventual need to park arrived. Whether it is reducing congestion or supporting aging, the future of urban spaces cannot rest on one solitary solution — ask any nonagenarian walking the streets of New York.
