The Planning Board last week again took the position that if homeowners with longstanding illegal apartments don’t have the parking that is necessary for them, they must remain illegal properties and be brought back to the original status when they were built in order to become legal again.
This view was dominant despite the view of the administration that it is a better idea to make all the illegal apartments legal to bring them up to code and make for better housing stock despite them not having the right number of parking spaces under present zoning ordinances.
The zoning board becomes an echo of the national Republican government that wants illegal immigrants sent packing from the US because they are not citizens – even if they have lived here all their lives and their children have been born here.
Just as we cannot deport all illegal immigrants working and living here for several generations, we cannot return multi-family homes by the hundreds and even the thousands back to single family homes because they don’t have the right number of parking spaces.
Debating whether or not enough parking spaces exist to right the wrong of illegal apartments is to stand against the future safety of the housing stock here.
Making illegal apartments legal as long as building codes are met is the aim of the city – even if parking spots don’t exist.
After all, parking spots don’t exist for illegal apartment occupants and owners.
They don’t exist for legal apartment occupants and owners.
So, what’s the difference?
All the complaining and moaning in the world about needing more parking spaces here does not create more parking spaces in most of the city’s crowded residential streets throughout the city where they don’t exist to begin with.
The city’s housing economy is based partially on illegal apartments being grandfathered.
To attempt anything else would doom such as plan to legal chaos and failure.
The United States economy would be aided in making all illegal immigrants and their children legal and providing for them as the government provides for residents with citizenship.
Just because they aren’t legal doesn’t mean they are not citizens of the United States…or so liberal thinking goes.
The Planning Board’s blind spot – and it is a glaring blind spot – is that new construction here which does not provide for parking as a rule, will not allow those renting such spaces to have cars as they will have nowhere to park them.
The Planning Board claims that is a lie.
Some of those people renting new apartments or illegal ones as well may still own cars, but ticketing practices here will drive those people to the poorhouse and to the suspension of their licenses and they will be forced to get rid of their cars or leave the city.
Planning Board member Jim Tarr had it right when he said: “parking cannot stop every change – as it often does. We have to get away from this idea.”
He is absolutely correct.