The meeting began in a tense fashion, as the packed room heaved with emotion every time a question arose about parking. Under the revised zoning code of 2012, there are no parking minimums for projects that repurpose historically protected sites for reuse. Such a regulation could make a project like the proposed conversion of St. Laurentius prohibitively costly, but to many in attendance on Tuesday night it meant an already competitive quest for parking would become even more daunting.

“It’s already impossible to find parking because of those people,” said a goateed man in the crowd, who emphasized that many new residents of Fishtown owned both automobiles and bicycles. “They leave their cars parked and just ride their bikes. Then you have five different people with cars living in one apartment, a lot of them with Jersey tags.”

Voloshin emphasized that the units proposed for St. Laurentius were single-bedroom apartments in part to ensure that only one or two people would live in each unit. He said he’d been in communication with other developers in the area, like the Domani Developers, who only report less than ten cars in use among tenants of their 30 small apartment units in an old baseball factory on Tulip Street.

Later in the meeting preservation activist Oscar Beisert, who helped write the nomination to win St. Laurentius historic protections, asked if the parking question could be solved by targeting the units towards those without drivers’ licenses. Voloshin said that would violate the Fair Housing Act, but Beisert noted he’d heard of such tactics working in similar cases in other cities.

After the Fishtown Neighbors Association cut off questions about parking, most of the questions ranged over issues of signage (none are planned), placement of bike parking (in the basement), and the possibility that there will be dumpsters “billowing with trash” on the sidewalk (there won’t be).