The Long Beach Planning Commission’s recent approval of a new seven-story apartment complex has restarted the debate over whether city planners should set aside more space for parking.

Planning commissioners approved the project, to be constructed at 320 Alamitos Ave., Thursday. Its designs call for the construction of a new 77-unit apartment structure, as well as a 105-stall parking structure, on land that has no living spaces but is the site of an existing surface parking lot.

The building’s parking plans are in accord with city regulations that Long Beach developed five years ago in hopes that future residents would be more likely to use public transit or other alternative methods of transportation.

“Keeping the downtown as it is, with all the surface lots, is not creating a great downtown,” said Michael Bohn, senior principal for Studio One Eleven, the Long Beach architecture firm that designed the recently-approved building.

One the other hand, some people who live downtown are questioning whether the recent rush to develop new living spaces around the city’s core will make it even harder to find a parking space.

People who live downtown can spend an hour and a half looking for street parking, downtown resident and parking advocate Debbie Dobias said.

Dobias is a member of a parking advocacy group that recently agreed to refrain from filing lawsuits against project approvals in exchange for new parking studies. The group calls itself Long Beach Transportation and Parking Solutions, or TAPS. Although its members can’t go to court to press their point, they now want a moratorium on new construction pending the completion of the required parking study.

As things stand, Dobias said she is expecting incoming developments to make it harder and harder to park in her part of downtown and nearby neighborhoods.

“There are so many of them in a very close area where we are already hurting for parking,” she said. “There is going to be a ripple effect.”

Parking rules

Long Beach’s development regulations for the downtown area require new apartment complexes in the city’s core to have one parking space per unit, plus an extra space for each four units at a given complex. That would require a bare minimum of 96 spaces for the newly-approved complex on Alamitos Avenue.

Thursday, planning commissioners also approved a condition requiring any unused parking spaces to be made available to neighbors willing to pay for them.

The Long Beach City Council approved the current parking rules, which allowed for a reduction from past standards, in January 2012 when the council adopted part of the current Downtown Plan that governs development in the city’s core. The parking regulations are based on the view that downtown residents’ access to transportation options like Metro Blue Line, bus lines or bicycling will reduce the need for personal autos.

Reducing parking requirements also reduces the cost of new construction, Bohn said. The cost of each individual stall can add $15,000 to a building’s cost when parking exists at ground level. Spaces requiring excavation can add as much as $50,000 to development costs.

Thus, Bohn contended that requiring developers to build more parking would push housing costs in downtown Long Beach even higher.

“Housing will be much more expensive, and there won’t be as much built,” Bohn said.

Bohn predicted residents will eventually need to make the kinds of lifestyle changes contemplated in the downtown plan.

Study in progress

Long Beach’s city government and TAPS reached a settlement in November 2016 to resolve three lawsuits filed over officials’ approvals of downtown construction projects. The accord required City Hall to conduct parking studies for the downtown and Alamitos Beach areas, and to set aside money to pay for future parking enhancements.

The deal also required TAPS to refrain from suing while the studies are being conducted. Those studies may take some two years to complete, and Development Services Department spokesman Kevin Lee work began earlier this month.

Although Dobias and TAPS members are unable to sue over current or near-future disagreements with City Hall, she still thinks agreeing to the settlement was the right call to in order to secure official studies of current parking conditions.

“Every time you have one of these settlement agreements, you’ve got to give to get,” she said.