NJ DEP Amends Parking Ratio Regs on Hudson Waterfront

TRENTON, NJ-The New Jersey Department of Environmental protection has revised the parking regulations for the urban communities lining the state’s Hudson River waterfront through Hudson and Bergen counties. The major change is to exempt those communities from the 2-to-1 ratio of parking spaces per residential unit previously required of all coastal development, oceanfront and riverfront alike.

The regs are part of DEP’s Coastal Zone Management Rules, and the issues are largely demographic. In the less-urban oceanfront counties, the 2-to-1 ratio makes sense because the car is king. But a byproduct is to put some de facto limits on development along the environmentally fragile oceanfront, because if you don’t have the room to supply the parking, you can’t do the project.

For the urbanized communities along the Hudson River, where land is more at a premium and residents are more dependent upon mass transit, the result can be stifling. “For the past year, we’ve been encouraging the DEP to re-examine its position,” explains Joseph Barry, chairman of the Applied Cos., a development firm based in Hoboken, NJ. He’s also co-chairman of the Hudson River Property Owners and Conservators Association, a local advocacy group. “It’s been our belief that the 2-to-1 requirement was not only unnecessary but also counter-productive. One effect has been to discourage mass transit, which is being developed to service the waterfront area.